The River Wife (16 page)

As light touched the sky I stepped from the shallow bed of the river and took my woman’s form, breathing in the pale air, my feet deep in the powder of snow. But it was not from my father I sought guidance as I looked to the far peaks above me that morning.

‘Mother,’ I said, ‘you made this journey of love between a river wife and a human. Did you survive it? Or did you give your life so my father might live on? I would do anything to save this man. Help me. Please help me. I do not know the way.’

Perhaps it was the moment of dawn that women know, or perhaps my mother had waited all this time to hear my voice, for it seemed that a pathway became clear to me through the snow and I began to climb. I felt my body ache as I went further and further from the river. The snow hid many deep holes and gaps, and the rocks were harsh beneath. By halfway through the day I was tired beyond imagination. My mouth had dried, my skin burned for water and my ears called for the river. The path became steeper but still I climbed. I was dizzy at the view across mountains crumpled by age and laden with snow. Far away below me in one valley I could see the deep green of the forest.

Had Wilson James remembered himself and stepped from the lake? Was he right now returning to the river? If I did not find the unknown lake, if it did not take me to the Lake of Time, would I die here tonight so far from water? And if I died, what would become of him?

My arms shook as I pulled myself up and my legs trembled as I demanded of them another step and another and another. The wind worked at my skin, chilling my hands until it was hard to open them to grasp another ledge, another surface that might lead me further up and up. Louder became my body’s fear at leaving the river. I began to imagine the sound of water trickling, running in behind the rockface, but I saw no glimpse of it. I heard water rushing as if nearby a waterfall was flowing. But when I scrambled to find it there was nothing but a great chasm that fell down, so far down, to the valley floor. I had never known the world was so high, and cold. No matter how I tried to summon the clothing I needed to protect me, nothing kept the ice from forming on my skin, crusting my eyelashes and cracking my lips. Night was slipping over the world in a purple blanket and still I had no idea how far I must climb, nor if the path I followed would lead me to the lake that had no river flowing from it.

I pulled myself over a long sharp ridge as sunset slipped off the peak, carrying from the land the last of the colour, and there below me, cradled in a deep bowl of carved stone, was a great expanse of ice. I slipped down the rocky slope and found myself on a flat grey edge that rimmed the ice. I could smell the water beneath it. I tried to pull and stamp at the edges so that the ice would break and I might slip into the water but it was thick and strong and did not move. I grasped a sharp sliver of rock and beat at the ice with it but it merely grazed the frozen surface.

I stepped onto the ice feeling for movement, for a section thin enough for me to crack open and slip through. My legs were so weary they could hardly lift my feet. Further and further across the ice I walked until I was surely in the centre of the lake, but the ice held fast. And there I lay down. I lay down and did not have the energy even for tears. The stars were emerging larger than I had ever seen them. No trees shaped the sky or brushed against their light. They were so close I might have reached out and balanced each one upon my fingertip.

‘I am a river wife,’ I said to the stars. ‘You know me. You know my journey. I must find the way to the oldest ones but I have no key. I have nothing. Nothing.’

My breath was leaving me now. I felt strangely light. I anguished that I had not thought to bring any of the tools Wilson James had packed. The knife he wore at his belt. The small axe. Turning onto my side, still holding the shard of grey stone I had used on the frozen edge, I drew in the ice a flowing line. A line of water. And beside it I drew another. The symbol of a river wife. The symbol all river wives knew, that I had drawn on the skin of Wilson James in red jam, the flow of water that has no end.

‘I am a river wife,’ I said, though I had little voice to speak. ‘I am a river wife,’ I said again, and I dropped the stone and laid my hand upon the symbol. ‘I am a river wife.’ And the ice disappeared. My hand touched water. The hole widened, the ice collapsed around me, and I slipped into the darkness of the lake and the stars went out.

D
own I fell. So intense was the blackness I could not see my limbs. Sometimes I felt as a stone must feel falling fast through water, and other times I was sure I was urging myself deeper and deeper into darkness.

When does love become more than love? When does it go beyond a simple explanation of someone familiar and beloved to something wondrous? When does it become something worth dying for? I had watched as we wove our lives together and then I had stopped watching and lived in the threads of our existence and it was more than I had expected. There was a song singing but I did not sing it. There was a season but it had no name. There was a sense of knowing that surprised me, as if he was someone familiar who I had somehow forgotten and was now rediscovering. I do not know when I slipped out of being myself entirely and took up occupying some place where we both were. Longing was fulfilled, sadness relinquished, joy claimed. There is something that lives beyond the shores of love and it is its own lake. As I fell I considered that perhaps the lake that love can lead us to and the Lake of Time were not so different.

Still I fell, until at last I found I was no longer falling and the great force that had swept me downwards no longer held me. I broke the surface and breathed in darkness. I swam towards a luminous shore and stepped from the water. Somewhere above me I was sure it was nightfall, though here I was a woman.

A sound came to me of voices singing. I walked towards the sound along the shore of that strange lake and passed glowing rocks that had grown up out of the ground and others that had grown down from far above and these stones were white and luminous against a deep blackness.

I entered a cavern more vast than the tallest tree and wider than the great lake. Spirals and cones of stone twisted and dripped, and every surface sparkled as if moonlight glowed here, so far underground. All about was the dripping and running of water. I knew I was looking at the Lake of Time and I wondered how old I had grown on my journey here. My hands looked no different, nor did my skin, but I knew Time would visit me at any moment and I was not without fear.

Standing at the edge of the lake, dressed in a gown of silver that moved and shimmered, was a woman. The singing ceased and it was her voice, not the voice of many, that had echoed down the passageways that led here. She said without turning to face me, ‘Human love has visited you and that is the strangest visitor of all. So full of wonder and hope, and then so binding with all its demands.’

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

‘Would you take it back, any of it?’

‘No, but I would not have him lost forever.’

‘And what would you give to save him?’

‘I do not know—everything, I think.’

‘What is yours and yours alone to give?’

Still she had not turned her face to me.

‘I could give my voice. I heard that another of us . . .’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you could give the voice that sings the songs of the river, but they will expect far more than that.’

‘They?’

‘Do you know me even a little bit?’ she asked as she turned her face to mine, and the face that looked at me, the translucent skin, the green eyes, the dark falling hair, it was my face.

‘Come, my daughter, sit with me.’

The world moved so slowly that I could not lift my feet to walk to her, but still I found myself beside her.

‘Do not be afraid,’ she said. ‘I am your mother. I am not one of them. Like you, I am a visitor here.’

‘How can you be here?’

Her face was grave but her eyes were warm and filled with tears. ‘I am saddened to see you here in this place where none but those with everything to lose must come, yet now that you are here, now that you have found your way as I found my way before you, it brings me more joy than you can know to gaze upon you. So long have I waited for this moment.’

‘You have been here all this time? Why did you not come home?’

‘I could not.’

My mother stood before me. The woman whose songs and stories lived on in me. The woman who had cared for the river and lived by the river, the woman who had taken my father for a husband and started this whole cycle of human and not that had bound me as sure as the sun and moon bound me. I wanted to turn away from her and I wanted to curl up with my head on her lap and cry. Why was she here? What had made her stay here and not come home? I saw Father beside me on the riverbank. Father, who lived so much longer than any man had lived. Father, who had never left the river because he waited all that time for her to return.

‘For Father? Did you do this so he might not die?’

‘Does he live still?’

‘Yes, he is standing by the river above the moonpool and he wears the long robes of a myrtle beech and many birds live in his branches.’

‘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.

W
hen 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.