Chapter 37
The wizard that wasn’t and the wolves that were
From what I can remember, at least the first time you see it, the sea creeps up on you.
One minute I was looking around, before turning to try and keep the westerly wind out of my ear, and saw a horizon miles away, where the green met the sky, and then the next time I looked, that horizon had slipped a bit, and now it wasn’t quite so flat, and then I realised that the green didn’t end where the sky began any more, not quite.
The light beyond the green was now water, bouncing the brightness of the day back up on itself, and the actual flat horizon was now lost at the undetermined point where the sky meets the water.
The map had warned we’d be coming close to the sea as we got to the point where old England bordered old Scotland but knowing we might see this dagger of water didn’t prepare me for it.
It was just odd, seeing a place where land ended and water stood between me and the horizon.
I didn’t feel unmoored, but I did feel a little looser somehow, as if the horse might slip sideways on a tilt in the world that I’d only just noticed.
The sea, I said to Cat. That must be it. Like on the map. The Solway Firth.
It’s just water, she said.
I could tell she was trying to be unimpressed.
Nevertheless, I stared for a long while, wondering if I’d see a boat, but I didn’t.
The sea looked, if possible, even emptier than the landscape.
And then a squall of rain must have blown in, because the view disappeared as we passed a slope that rose and obscured our view, and we didn’t see it again until Glasgow.
We were half a day or so north of where I’d first seen the sea when it happened.
I know that because I thought at the time that maybe Cat was right, maybe the sea was bad luck for us.
Also I was still having parts of the day where I would get light-headed and woozy, which was an after effect of the fever and my recovery from it.
Though maybe I hadn’t really recovered at all.
It’s possible I was walking with a low fever all the time.
What I am sure of is that danger came calling and then reality got weird.
The landscape had changed again. The road climbed gently but relentlessly upwards as it shifted from flatter country that had once been fertile farmland into wilder terrain.
All around us the hills rose up and began to hem in the road with ranks of dark trees marching along the high ridgelines on either side, like giant versions of the Miserable Wood, watching us as we passed.
A low grey cloud seemed to have been hammered in above us like a lead ceiling that hid the treetops, while a thinner mist clung to a river that twisted along the road beside us for a while before crossing it at a sharp angle across which had once been a bridge.
It wasn’t a bridge any more. Time and weather had dropped the other end of it into the far riverbank, making a shallow four-lane ramp that dipped alarmingly away from us.
I stopped Red at the angle and looked downwards, working on making my first good choice of the day, trying to figure out whether it was safe to use it or if we should detour.
It was early, but the babies were grizzling a little, and the goats were acting a little spooked.
I sensed Cat over my right shoulder.
What do you think? I said.
It looks safe, she said.
We’d come to the point where the road, which had been slightly above the early morning mist until then, was now levelling down into it.
You could feel the wetness of it on your skin.
It didn’t completely obscure the view down to the river, but it made it blurry and indistinct, like you couldn’t quite trust your eyes without trying to squint them through it.
Close to, I could see the surface of the slope angling down into the thicker mist was cracked and mossy.
I thought it was probably not going to fall down if we used it as a way to get to the other side of the river, but I also thought of hooves slipping on the incline and the horse tumbling, legs flailing, bones snapping.
It was probably a safe enough thing to try and would certainly have been quicker, but something told me to come off the road on to the scrubland beside it and approach the river that way.
The water wasn’t deep. I could see that from where I was standing.
It was a slow curve of shallows running over and through a wide tumble of small grey boulders.
The crossing would be easy. It wasn’t deep enough to drown in.
The horse and goats seemed to resent being made to leave the road, but they did so without too much resistance, and we found a place where it had gently crumbled into a shallow slope that led down to the moorland beside it.
Animals, maybe rabbits or hares or something larger had made a straightish path heading parallel with the road, towards the crossing.
I led the horse through thigh-high tussocks of cotton-grass towards the low bank of mist hugging the surface of the river ahead.
I took my long stick from where I always kept it, strapped to the outside of the pannier on Red, and had a last check on the babies.
They were awake but not grizzling any more.
Two pairs of eyes looked up at me from their pannier-cot, and I did think about how it might be safer if I took them in my carrier and walked them across strapped to my chest and back.
Somehow the idea of a horse falling during the crossing seemed much less likely than me taking a tumble and squashing one or other of them, so I didn’t.
But I definitely had the thought. I looked round for Digger, but she’d loped off on some errand of her own, so I took Red’s reins in one hand and gingerly dropped down off the lip of turf on to the gravel strand along the river’s edge.
The morning sun was beginning to thin out the river mist, but there was still enough to make the far bank indistinct, like looking at something through thin smoke.
I could see there were low scrubby bushes set back from the rocky beach, and behind them a dark strip of earth marked a much higher drop-off than the one I’d just stepped down – almost a low cliff of maybe five or six feet – topped by more clumps of cotton grass.
To my left was the underside of the roadway.
I could see it had been elevated on a series of squat concrete pillars that spanned the low boggy ground on both sides of the water making it more of a long strip of elevated road than just a bridge.
The fallen section was maybe a fifth of the whole span, the rest was a dank and shadowy space that had probably been untravelled and unloved even when the world was full, and cars and lorries had thundered overhead on the north/south road.
And then something moved and for an instant I froze, the tail of my eye catching sight of a thin man with a white beard standing in the water, framed in the triangle of light made by the tilted slab of fallen roadway.
He was like a wizard in a picture book. And then he must have felt my eyes on him, or maybe it was my head turning to make more sense of what I’d glimpsed and he shook out his wings and I realised my brain had leaped ahead of itself in shock and made the white chest of a huge bird into a beard and then had gone on to fool me by creating a whole imaginary figure around it, the way the mind sometimes does, and I watched the bird flap away, slow and majestic and not a person at all.
I thought that was a wizard, I said to Cat. Scared the life out of me.
Just a heron, she said.
It was just a heron of course, but my mind had thought it was something less friendly, and strong thoughts leave an aftertaste, so as I slowly felt my way across the shallows burbling through the smooth tumbled rocks, I felt the roadway looming above my right shoulder like an ominous bank of storm clouds.
The noise of the river was amplified as it bounced off the concrete stretched over it, and I think the sound made the horse a little jittery.
Certainly the goats were unusually skittish as they were tugged along, straining against their lead-ropes and bleating in protest. I just kept my head down and continued testing the depth with my stick as I tried to plot the most hoof-friendly path across the river, avoiding the bigger boulders as I did so,
Flat and shallow curves of river are often deceptive; there’s usually a deeper channel someplace where the faster water has cut a groove, and this was no exception.
I felt my way forwards using the stick to gauge the depth ahead of me.
The current was strong and the water bracingly cold, coming straight down off the high land to my right, but it only came up to mid-thigh, so I decided it was safe enough to leave the babies in the panniers.
Red whinnied and bucked her head a couple of times in protest as I led her across, but I kept a tight grip on the reins and within three metres of thigh-high water we were climbing back up out of the channel and into the ankle-deep shallows on the other side.
I turned for a moment to watch the goats, who were being tugged along behind the horse, swim the last few feet back into their depth and start picking their way through the rocks towards me.
I had my hand gripping the side of the pannier the babies were in as I did so.