Chapter 4 #13
And Tómas? What is he thinking as, through the wall, Liam inks the translated names of the fields and hills and villages and forests and valleys?
Tómas is scarcely thinking at all. He has pulled himself back from the contours and boundaries of his body; he has folded himself into a small space, a wintering plant hiding in the merciful dark earth.
There is himself, Tomás, and he is tied to a table, and there is the being near him, a dark and breathing shape that looms over him, murmuring and muttering.
Tomás has no trouble keeping this person at bay.
He has strong defences; nothing can breach his moat or scale his ramparts.
“Accept God’s grace,” this black-clad form tells him, “cast out the canker. Ask for His divine forgiveness.”
Burning candles are held over him and they weep scalding tears onto his skin and clothes, and Tomás does not flinch.
Incense, acrid and choking, is burned beside him, and he coughs but will not speak.
The sign of the cross is inscribed in the air, and Tomás merely shuts his eyes.
Prayers, long and circular, are incanted, fervently, near his ear.
Do what you will, Tomás would say to the man, if the gag wasn’t stopping his mouth, nothing you do can touch me.
“Repent,” the priest urges him, with increasing agitation, spittle spraying from his lips. “Repent.”
Tomás will not repent. He has nothing to repent for: he is as certain of this as he is of his own name, as he is of the orientation of magnetic north.
So when this priest comes near him, with candle or book or bell or beads or incense or cross, all the tools of his trade, Tomás gives an insolent grin, his lips curving up above the gag.
“What did you see?” the priest demands of him, over and over again. “You went up the hill, didn’t you? You went to the well. What did you see there? Tell me, my child. Confess.”
Tomás swivels his eyes towards the man so that they are gazing at each other, inches apart.
“Did the Devil appear to you? Did he? Tell me all. I can help you. Did he clothe himself in human form or did he come to you as an animal? Did you call to him, did you summon him? Did you? Did he sing, did he speak to you, did he offer you something, did you make a bargain? Did you perhaps make him some kind of promise?”
Tomás lets out a muffled guffaw. He shakes his head, and an answering anger, smothered but there all the same, flares in the face of the priest.
“That well,” he hisses, through clenched teeth, “is a heathen place, pagan and godless. If you struck any manner of bargain there, I must tell you that your soul is in danger, grave danger, and if you fail to confess, you are condemned to burn for ever in the fires of—”
Tomás closes his mind to the man’s ranting: he slams the door, he throws the bolts.
The well, he thinks, the well. Not the term he would use for it.
“Spring,” perhaps. “Pool.” “Source.” Cartography doesn’t contain a term for what it is, which strikes Tomás at this particular moment as a mark in the well’s favour.
The place eludes definition, something this priest will never comprehend.
Beside his ear, the man is still gabbing about hellfire and damnation, and Tomás wishes he would hold his tongue so that he can think, find his way back in his mind to the copse, the streams, the wellspring or source or font, or whatever it might be.
Why had he gone in there? Tomás ponders this. Why had he left the drumlin and gone down the slope?
And then across his mind comes the flash of a small, damp figure, trailing a surveying pole, disappearing into the mist.
Of course! It had been to find Liam, for hadn’t he heard the boy cry out?
That was it. Tomás had been standing at the base of the escarpment, noting the striated nature of the rockface, indicating a slow but dramatic battle of ice versus igneous rock, when that peculiar noise razored the air.
A sharp scream, like that of a seabird, had driven away all thoughts of glacial battles and made him swivel around.
A second cry. Tomás had frowned and peered into the mist.
Whatever was up with the boy now? Sighing, Tomás had placed the instruments on the ground, covering them fastidiously with his knapsack, and made his way down the slope to the child, who was carrying on about a lost boot or some such nonsense.
Tomás had left him there and had gone to retrieve the boot.
He had entered the copse from a west-north-westerly direction, pushing his way through the trees, slashing at the branches and undergrowth with his stick, and around him he registered nothing but an interplay of terrain and irrigation, the subterranean spring having carved, over millennia, its own place in the rock, in the hillside.
He saw only water moving through a landscape, and untended woodland; he was thinking of how he would map it, in blues and greens, on a page, decorated with the minute insignia to denote both deciduous and evergreen trees.
Then he had reached the tobar or the spring or the source.
Even then, when he was still in the mindset of civilian assistant, it struck him as a peculiar, arresting sight.
The rock smooth, the branches curving over and around, the waters deep and clear, with a mineral-green tinge to them, the rushing streams. So arresting was it that he had paused, his boots on the pool’s lip.
He was still thinking along his habitual tracks: how surprising it was to find a pool like this, so circular, of such a depth, and so hidden.
How deep was it? It must be several yards down, perhaps even—
A different notion had entered him then.
So concealed was this place that it didn’t exist on the map, had failed to be recorded.
Tomás could picture the sappers who had surveyed the area for the initial map sheets, slapdash creatures, who had not bothered to walk up any further than the boreen, completely failing to record this pocket of woodland, hidden in the cleft of two hills.
The copse was old, even he could see that, the trunk of that oak so wide it couldn’t be spanned by the arms of two or three men, the boughs of those ashes gnarled and twisted together to form one many-limbed giant.
No one, he might venture, had been in this place for a very long time: the moss underfoot was lush and springy, the stones and fallen trees covered with its thick, bright blanket.
Ancient stumps cradled the supple growth of saplings, their decaying matter feeding the newer life, the next generation of their particular species.
All around him was the sense of growth and renewal and the teeming circularity of life; he fancied he could almost hear the roots drawing up moisture and nutrients from the soil, the dissolved leaf-fall, the decaying fallen trunks, the many streams. Absently, as he leaned over to retrieve a small leather boot wedged between two stones, he was wondering to himself, with a certain element of glee, whether even the viscount of the manor knew about this place.
Wouldn’t he have ordered these trees to be felled, the wood to be cleared, the timber to be sold or utilised?
Because that is what landowners do: they squeeze every last shilling to be made out of the land; they drive away anyone who might—
Tomás had busied himself wiping Liam’s boot against a mossy trunk to remove the mud, turning to take a last look at the pool.
He would have to come back, he decided, as he bent over the water to cup and lift a mouthful to his lips.
The taste was startling, in its way, with a sharp, peaty coolness.
He swallowed it down, then wiped his chin.
He would return tomorrow, with his instruments, for the whole place must be surveyed from scratch, in better light than this, if he was to include it on the new map sheets.
What if he didn’t, though, what if he let it be?
The notion was shocking to him. As Tomás stood in the copse, his fingers still wet from the pool, his mouth and teeth cold from its water, he was overcome by a powerful dilemma.
Accuracy was his skill and his vocation: he was paid to rigorously record and set down every feature of the land, yet he found himself suddenly seized by an urge to break the rules, just for once.
Tomás knew that if he were to survey this copse, to record it upon the map, within weeks, perhaps even days, the viscount would send up a party of men to fell all these trees for timber, to divert the water for use in the manor house, and that would be that.
This woodland, which had been here since the beginning of time, would be gone, claimed, erased.
It could exist on the map, or it could exist on the land.
Tomás felt the insolubility of this predicament behind his eyes, in his temples, like a headache.
The trees around him seemed to seethe and shake, pressing their branches closer; the silver streams ran towards him and away from him; the air was at once abundant and scant.
The choice, he saw, was his. His life’s work was to map but he did not want to be the one to condemn this place.
Tomás crammed Liam’s boot into his pocket, anguished. He was a man of habit and principle. Impossible for him not to record this copse for the map, surely.
He would do the surveying, of course he would.