Chapter 6 #2
She thinks again of the word the other women had used for her father: meanderer.
Brith had folded it into her mind as soon as she heard it and, unbeknown to her mother, had taken it to the fort’s teller.
He lived in a hut at the edge of their fort, all by himself (although Brith had heard people say, often with a sidelong look, that he was far from lonely), and it was said that he held in his head all the verses and histories of their people.
Brith liked the teller’s long beard, which was woven with beads and shells, the curved knife he carried tucked into his belt; most of all she liked his hut, which was decorated with feathers and whittled animals and switches of hazel and figures fashioned from the heads of corn.
Her father had been a particular friend of the teller’s, and the two of them had spent much time working alongside each other in the fields or walking out together, to the woods and the shore, their heads bent in conversation.
The teller had once told Brith that her father had taught him tales he had never heard, from the times before, when the land was new-made and the streams had just begun their flow.
So when Brith asked the teller about the word, “meanderer,” the teller had regarded her thoughtfully, his head on one side.
He had been squatting in front of a dying fire in the long-hut of the elders, casting for them, to see what the future might hold, scattering seedpods into its bright embers, watching them explode in the heat.
Your father, he had replied, after a long silence, did someone say this about him? Brith had nodded.
It means, he had said, one who wanders, one who settles not in a single place.
But he settled here, she had cried, stabbing the ground with a finger, he did.
I know, the teller said, and he put a hand to her shoulder.
I know he did. What this person meant was that your father was—and here he corrected his utterance, not unnoticed by Brith—your father is special, marked out.
He belongs to a tribe who were here long ago, before us, before any of this.
The teller’s arm swept around the long-hut, the circular walls of the fortress that enclosed them in its embrace.
As you know, our people came to this land from far away, over seas and over mountains; we came and built forts and ploughed fields and grew crops and kept animals.
But we were not the first: your father’s people were already here.
They did not farm the land but instead walked among its valleys and hills, its shores and lakes, always moving, never settling.
Meanderers? Brith asked.
The teller nodded and gave her a smile. He reached out and stirred the embers in the firepit. In the shadows of the long-hut, the elders muttered among themselves—of portents and crops and weather and the storage of grain. Brith paid them no attention.
Nobody, the teller continued, knows where they all went, what happened to them.
All we know is that they are not here now.
Some say they left or sailed elsewhere in boats or died out; others believe that your father’s people disappeared into the ground, by some mysterious magic.
That their roaming became harder, with so many of their places suddenly farmed and fenced, so they merged themselves with the very land itself, passing into the trees and the rivers and the stones and the bushes and the briars, never to be seen again.
Never? Brith had swallowed, forcing down something hard in her throat. Never to be seen again?
Perhaps never. The teller had taken her hand and filled it from his pouch with dry seedpods, closing her fingers over them.
I believe, he said, that your father may be the last of his kind.
He indicated that Brith should do a casting, should throw the pods onto the collapsing structure of the fire, and she did so, sending sparks up into the air.
Unless, of course, we consider you, he had said, and your brother.
For you might have his ways in you. You are half him, are you not?
Brith had shut her eyes, finding that the sparks were still living on the inside of the lids, vivid in their dangerous dark. I am, she’d whispered. I am.
To distract herself from this recollection—and where is her father, where did he go that night, he would never leave them, as some insinuate, but did perhaps something bad happen to him, did he meet an enemy or a person from his old tribe, someone he had wronged or deserted to be with them, for he cannot have magically dissolved into the land, as the teller suggested, he would never leave them—Brith buries her hand in the dog’s pelt, gripping the leather collar adorned with shells, and begins to push her legs against the swift-running current. Wavelets crest over her shins.
She swishes forward, along the bed of the stream, up the hillside, her sealskin shoes—made by her father, who slew the beast and carried it home on one shoulder, throwing it down at their doorway and kissing her mother, and saying, Now, shoes for all of us, and gloves for the cold season—slipping easily over the stones.
She wades upstream, keeping one eye on her mother, still reclined against the tree, head resting on its bark, the baby at her breast, and the dog of course moves with her.
The stream widens, narrows, turns a sharp corner.
From branches above her is released a sudden shower of ash keys, which flutter downwards, whirring in circles, until their wild flight is put to a stop by meeting the water’s surface, where they are apprehended and whisked away downstream.
She is surrounded by dense greenery now, and the ground is covered with small, mossy humps, and she is just about to turn around and go back to her mother, who will worry if she finishes feeding and can’t see Brith, when she sees something so surprising it stops her in her tracks.
A deep and startling pool, contained and protected on all sides by smooth and pale rock, its blue-green waters so utterly still that they hold a replica of the branches above.
Brith stares, dazed, nonplussed. She has never seen anything like it, on all her wanderings around the place, either with her mother or her father.
The land here is lush, marshy, wooded, running with rivers and streams, every hollow filled by a lake, covered with thick swags of greenery, fringed by wide beaches with fretted waves, but never has she come across the like of this.
There is, she now notices, one area of the pool that purls and quivers, as if something live lurks just below, sending out concentric ripples, which trap the sunlight in shards that hurt Brith’s eyes.
As young as she is, Brith knows that this is the place the stream begins: a spring, her father taught her, or the source.
A willow bends over it, protectively, its outstretched tips disappearing into it.
A single oak leaf wanders and skitters on its surface.
Brith gazes at it, mesmerised. She is assailed by contradictory impulses: to turn and slosh back downstream, to run, to return to her mother’s side, to stay, to keep looking, and also to move forward, to investigate, to perhaps immerse herself in those depths.
She does what she will at all moments of uncertainty and indecision: she strokes the fur of the wolfhound and inserts a thumb into her mouth, sucking it meditatively, the pad notched into the arch of her palate.
It takes her a moment to realise that it carries the taste of the stream water—that tang, that purity—and she quickly pulls it out again.
Go or stay? Retreat or investigate the pool?
She looks down at the dog, which raises its head to meet her gaze.
She knows the right thing to do would be to go back to her mother, perhaps to tell her about it, and then they might look at it together.
But part of her knows that her mother might well sigh and say the baby is tired, they should get back to the fort, they can come another day.
Can Brith risk that her mother might say they should leave, that she might never get to return here?
She cannot: she takes a step forward, then another, her legs heavy now because the stream is getting deeper, the nearer she gets. The dog comes too.
Only when she reaches the lip of the rock does it become clear just how deep the pool is.
Crossed spears of sunlight fall into it but only so far, and beneath their yellow illuminations Brith can see depths and more depths of water, darkening to obscurity.
She peers downwards, her eyes straining for signs of the bottom, a rock, a shelf, anything, but there is nothing.
It appears to be a watery shaft that falls from her feet, down, down, into the earth.
The pool is endless. And she is pervaded by the strange sense that her father is near, that he is here, that she might turn her head and see him standing beside her, spear in his hand, hair held back from his eyes with a strip of leather.
She turns her head, of course she does, but he isn’t there, and somehow the feeling shifts to the suspicion that her father is here but is somehow unable to make himself visible or audible to her, that he is held apart from her, shouting, calling her name, but try as she might she cannot see him, cannot hear him.
She is about to call to him, to say, I am here, where are you, when she sees, with a jolt, something in the depths of the pool.
Carving slow half-turns in the blue is a lithe and indistinct shape, with fins and a sinuous flicking tail: a lone fish is stirring the pool’s secret depths.
Staring at it, she has the peculiar sensation that she is tipping forward, falling, drawn down by some strong and irrepressible force; she has to tighten her hold on the familiar, rough-haired neck of the dog, not to be lured into its watery snare.