The River Wife Page 11

  ‘So he has found his quiet place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She wept then. For a moment she turned away and wept, and then, sweeping her tears away, she looked again at my face. ‘Then all is well.’

  ‘It was a beautiful gift you gave him, for I think he is very content.’

  ‘I gave him no gift.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will. But first you must sleep.’ She reached out and laid her hand in mine. ‘You are tired,’ she said. ‘You have come all this way and there are many questions. Sleep. Sleep now and when you awake it may all be clearer.’

  ‘I cannot believe you are here,’ I said, suddenly so weary that I could not keep my eyes open.

  ‘But I am.’

  And then I was carried away on the song she sang and I slept on the shore while the lake lay silent beside me.

  When I awoke I was alone. ‘Mother?’ I called. ‘Mother?’ But no sound came from the cavern. I felt a cold wind blow on my skin. I turned and there were four creatures, although what they were I could not tell. They were as much from light and shadow as from substance.

  She cannot make your decision for you, one seemed to say, but it was as if the lake was talking. Yours alone, said another.

  Give your life to save this man?

  Never.

  For love.

  All for love.

  Their voices circled around me. I could not wake and yet I was awake.

  He makes a nice fish. Leave him in the ocean.

  Yes, in the ocean. No point in rescuing one human.

  One human. Or the river and all its stories. That is the choice.

  What was your duty, river wife?

  Your duty was to care for the river.

  Not the man. The man is not your duty.

  Not yours to give really. Ours to give. Ours to give or to take away.

  The last of the river wives. No more.

  You know how it is to be alone.

  I slept again and I cannot say how many moons glowed in the river or hid behind clouds, how many birds flew overhead or how many creatures were born and took flight above the river, nor how long Wilson James swam in the ocean while I drifted in the passage of time. When I awoke my mother was beside me again.

  ‘You are here,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, my love. I have been here all these years waiting for you.’

  ‘I do not know what to do.’

  I bowed my head. If Wilson James died as a fish would it really matter to life? Would it really matter to me, as I lived on beside the river? I knew what Wilson James would have done. I knew that if he had the choice to save the fish upon the shore he would save it.

  ‘And will I die?’

  ‘Will you give your eternal life to save this man you love?’

  ‘If I cannot do this then I do not deserve to have loved him.’

  ‘Then you know the answer.’

  I remembered the girl I had been who grew angry at my mother for the making of me. For the making and abandoning of me to the river, to the sun and moon. I remembered that I thought she had freed herself by having me. I saw how I had not forgiven her, for being the woman who had loved my father.

  ‘We could not foresee any of this, your father and me,’ she said, ‘when we entwined the worlds of human and not together in the making of you. Such unions risk the fabric of all that is.’

  ‘I am sure you should be telling me that the river is my duty.’

  For the first time she smiled. ‘Only you and I know what it is to be with the river and always to hear its stories and sing its songs. You did not choose it. You were born to it and so it fell to you.’

  I had imagined over the years that my mother had been fierce and distant. That she had lived so long that nothing would move her and no tenderness would live in her heart. I imagined her without kindness. I imagined that my father had loved her and she had found him interesting and useful. But I had been wrong. This woman who sat beside me was like a sliver of ice on a fern frond. She shimmered with light and yet it felt as if she was melting away.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ she said. ‘One you have not heard. On the shores of a lake was a woman who had sung the river for all time, for this was her duty. She was bound by a story older than time, and the water of the world was full of her songs. The great cycles of water flowed to the sea and were carried to the sky and fell again as rain, and each day the woman sang and tended the river’s stories that were the stories of time. And the mystery of the woman—as you can guess, my love—was that she was a fish by night and a woman by day.

  ‘A man of this earth came to the river. It was a forbidden thing, to join with a human, but the river wife loved this man and could not let him go. They made a child, a daughter that swam in the river by night and played on the earth by day, and though the daughter was bound as her mother was bound to the river and the songs and the passing of the sun and moon across the sky, she was also bound by the laws of time that set the span of a human life. The mother so loved her daughter she thought to find a way that her daughter might live beyond her human cycle, for the mother could not bear the unspeakable pain of her daughter ageing and dying while she herself remained unchanged. And so the mother journeyed to the old people in the Lake of Time. And they who measure the time for all creatures on earth took the mother’s life from her and bestowed it upon her daughter.’

  ‘But you have not died.’

  ‘They allowed me to stay and while ever I remain by the Lake of Time I look as young as I did the day I came here. But if I were to step onto the land again, if I were to breathe the world above, I would die.’

  ‘All these years you have been here?’

  ‘When all was said and done I lacked the courage to give up whatever precious life I still had, even if it was here by this lake. And I knew, for all the stories of time are in the water here, that one day you would come to the lake. I am so sorry, my love. Perhaps you would have preferred your human life? Perhaps the long road of eternity was not for you?’

  ‘My own daughter left the river,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she well, do you ever glimpse her?’

  ‘I have glimpsed her and she is well and strong. She will return a great gift to this land.’

  ‘She will return?’

  ‘Yes, my daughter, but you and I will not see it.’

  ‘I have missed her.’

  ‘A daughter new to the world,’ she said, ‘a daughter growing into a woman, is like mist on the water. She is snow settling upon moss, she is the breeze that ripples an evening lake. She is fleeting and beautiful and filled with a magic that does not settle or linger but passes through. She is not for holding but for letting go; she is like a butterfly that must leave the safety of the chrysalis, a moth that seeks the light, she is a nymph ready to lift herself from the river and fly. She is the gift that carries our songs into the ocean where all stories mingle. Too soon many things will claim her—the man she loves, the children she bears, the tasks and the duties that bind her to life—and so a mother loves a daughter as something more precious than any love, because though we may love her with an infinite tenderness we must teach her to swim, for the river calls to her and her fins and her tail are the courage we send with her and the trust that we have in her to carry for us the care of the world.’

  And for a while we simply sat side by side on the shore. From time to time a single drop of water landed upon the lake’s surface and a single ripple repeated itself, growing larger and larger until it touched the shore with a quiet sigh. ‘What will happen to the river if I am gone?’

  ‘It will go on.’

  ‘But the songs . . .’

  ‘There are those who will hear them.’

  ‘Will it be enough?’

  ‘It will be as it is.’

  ‘I have loved him more, I think, than my own life.’

  ‘I did not see that in giving you eternity I had bound you as your hum
an life could not. I did not understand that for a long time. Not until I watched you alone and alone and alone.’

  ‘All you gave for me, it will be gone.’

  ‘Not gone. Handed on. And perhaps that is as it should be.’

  ‘What will happen to us. Where will we go?’

  ‘The stories say that if a river wife dies she becomes sea foam upon the shore. But who knows what is beyond this world once we shed our forms? Perhaps we cling to this far more strongly than we should. Perhaps it is like the river and we flow on just as we flowed here. There may be places it is time for us to visit.’

  I called to the old ones and they rose from the lake, tall and noble, and I said, ‘This life of endless time, I give it to you. On this earth perhaps it is best to have only a few short years, for in the eternity of time it would be easy to think of all that is here as commonplace. If you will allow me to go in search of my love and return him to the world then my life is yours.’

  They lifted me into the lake and I saw many things. The river was changed beyond recognition. No longer the rushing water and falling rain, the mist in the air shrouding the pathways of water and trees. No longer the vast standing trees from the mountain’s girth to the furthest hills and valleys. Dry grasslands stretched away as far as I could see. Barren was the land and bare the hills. The river was gone and the stories were scattered. The songs were broken. The sky spun heat and storm.

  And then I saw my daughter step back onto the land and she had grown beautiful and fierce. In her arms she bore a child but I could not see if it was a son or a daughter. She summoned the rain from the sky and waited while the earth ran again with water. She watched the trees grow up again and the land turn wet and green. At last, when the riverbed was full, she laid the child in the river and it swam as a fish. And then a terrible pain tore through me, more terrible than any pain I had ever imagined, and I saw back in time to worlds spinning and stars being born and life in darkness beginning its journey into form. At last I came to rest again upon the shore and awoke in my mother’s arms, and it was she who held me and rocked me and sang to me and it was she who wove me back together, a fragile time-destined creature with the heart of a woman and now the life of one too.

  ‘You must go and find your love,’ said my mother, ‘and lead him to the water’s edge. You must lift him into the sunlight so that he might again be a man and never again will he be a fish. But, daughter, I warn you, you must say no word to him. If you utter a single word he will be returned to the ocean and nothing will save him. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My daughter, they have graced you with the span of a human life. From this day you will age a little every day as women do.’

  ‘I do not want to leave you.’

  ‘I am coming with you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘My daughter, it is time for us to go.’

  And so we walked together through the long cavern to the place where a river swept fast and deep away into utter darkness.

  ‘Soon we will find ourselves in the depths of the highest lake. We must swim fast and strong, my daughter, if we are not to be crushed by the weight of the water.’

  It was as my mother said. The river took us and we were fish again and then the river slowed and the weight of water pressed against us and we swam upwards and upwards. As we swam she stayed close beside me as she had when I was a small fish in the river, her body a little ahead of me, her black scales shimmering as the light became stronger, her bright eye watching me. Faster and faster we swam, higher and higher, and brighter and brighter came the light until we soared through the surface of the lake and into the golden blueness. The shining of the sky, the sound of birds, the smell of trees enveloped me and the eye of the sun blinded me as we swam to the shore. I stepped from the water, but when I turned to find her she was gone. A veil of foam lay at the water’s edge.

  I sat all day beside the lake and watched the foam dissolve into the water. At dusk I returned to the river and told my father of all I had seen at the Lake of Time. When night fell I slipped into the river and let it take me towards the sea. I did not know if I would find Wilson James or if I would ever return to the river.

  The ocean was more vast than I had ever imagined. My body was unused to the salt that made of the water a new taste and pattern, with a weight and current so different from the fresh water of my home. My scales grew darker, my breathing slower. By day I walked on shores sometimes white with sand, sometimes dark with rocks, sometimes lined with houses where humans lived. I saw for myself the deep moon that hangs at dusk in the ocean. I saw the swell and roll of waves. I saw the wide eye of the sky as I leapt above the sea. I saw dawn and dusk as if colour was the greatest ocean.

  There is a story of a woman who fashioned a basket and lined it with mud and filled it with water and carried her fish husband home, but I did not carry my love ashore in a water basket. I carried him in my hands though he flipped and twisted and would have swum away.

  I laid Wilson James on the shore as the sun climbed high above the ocean and bright green waves beat the drum of time. The sun warmed him and I watched him come back to the form of a man. He opened his eyes and he looked surprised and sad and he said, ‘I dreamed you had grown old and that you were alone at the river.’

  I watched his face and did not speak.

  He sat up and looked about him.

  ‘How are we here? Where have I been?’ He put his hand to his neck. ‘I had grown scales. I was turning into a fish.’

  I nodded.

  ‘What happened to me?’

  I reached out and kissed him and then I placed my hand upon my mouth.

  ‘What is it? What have I done? No, what have you done?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You cannot speak? You have lost your voice? No,’ he said and he shook his head. ‘You have given your voice to . . . to bring me back?’

  Goodbye is so inadequate for true departure. True loss is a sound that has no words. It touches the instrument of our soul and plays there, the notes changing from time to time, but the sound of it never leaves.

  What might we have said if there had been words? We might have talked of the past and of the future. We might have talked of surrender, of frustration, of pain. We might have talked of children and water and stories and home. Of clouds and words and touch. Instead I fashioned a length of cloth for him from the green of the sea and he wrapped it about him and he laughed at this.

  We walked the length of that wide beach and ours were the only footsteps. We felt the sun on our skin, we listened to the waves that crashed upon the shore, we heard the sound of sand beneath our feet, wind through the grasses on the dunes beyond, the passing of white sea birds, the whispers that waves leave as they run back from the shore. For that one afternoon while time was measured in rolling water, the land and the sky and the wind spoke all the words that mattered.

  ‘I can hear them,’ he said, his face alive with wonder. ‘I can hear fragments. A thread here. And another. I can hear the stories.’

  Wilson James held me to him. ‘Can you not stay?’ he asked. ‘Please stay with me. I will buy a home by the ocean for us and you can walk with me by day and sleep here in the sea at night. Perhaps we might have a daughter of our own, or a son. Please, do not leave me. Tell me you will stay.’

  So startling was this notion of life with him here by the sea, of another child, that for a moment I was enchanted. Here was the man I had chosen to love. We would grow old together. I would come and go from the water and our children might play upon the beach. But how could I resist this urge to speak with him, to tell him all that overflowed in me? To never speak with my children? It would be only a matter of time before my voice slipped from me and Wilson James would slip away. And I did not belong here so far from the river. In the many moons that I had been gone from the river my longing to return to it had grown louder than any song.

  Slowly I shook my head and motioned to the sun falli
ng and the wind dropping. The day was drawing to an end. When he kissed me it was with all the tenderness that any man can find in his heart and I took it into the place in my heart that was breaking and hid it away where sadness could not find it.

  I walked away across the beach to the ocean that would eventually take me home to the mountains. I turned only once, there at the shore, to see the silhouette of him against the sky, and he raised his arm in farewell before I slipped into the sea.

  The moon lit all the upturned places he had been and did not find his shadow. The raindrops leapt as they hit the river rocks and washed his footsteps away. The river retrieved her quiet places on the moss banks where he had slept with his notebook on his lap, the house forgot the scent of him.

  Long has been the quiet now without his voice. No overhanging tree makes his silhouette. No clouds remind the water of his face. No birdsong replaces his laughter. No passing blue of wing matches the colour of his eyes. He filled the morning sky, he was the sound of autumn rain, he was the scent of nightfall coming, the taste of words unsaid. He was my earth, my kind, a life known and unknown, he was old and new, a journey only partly glimpsed. He was my story, and while he was here, his story was mine.

  The quiet of the days went on. I traced his words, his days with me, into the river. I worked slowly, making stories that were soft but deep, and all the while I sang for him and called the world to watch over him.

  He would never come back. He would not walk to the river and scoop me from it though I swam where he knew to find me. He would not come and if he did they would claim him back and so I could not long for him but longed instead to know that he was well in life, that his stories had returned to him, that his words had found him again, that love walked with him and that the hundred pieces of my heart which I had sewn inside him were with him still.

  When Wilson James died years later, some said he had lived far longer than a man ought to. He went swimming in the ocean, as he had done almost every morning since he had settled there. He took his swim at dawn and the sea had been kind and the day warm, but he did not return. His body was washed up further along the coast. It was said that he had a pale line of green scales on his right foot, though some said they had fixed themselves there on his journey through the currents.