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Tales from Rainring (1-9)
PROLOGUE
They say that somewhere, in a far-off place, a dark girl stands in a broad, brown river. She wears two garlands and a turtle pendant at her neck. She has two familiars: the grey elephant of time, and the blue swan of coincidence. With their aid, and tracing patterns in the water with her fingers, she makes stories. Her stories flow out and make the worlds, and this is one of them…
PART ONE
He emerged from the trees abruptly, to find himself on a small bluff of grey rock. He stood blinking for a moment, the afternoon glare of LATE August sharp after the twilight of the woods. From his vantage point he could see the golden-brown of new stubble, folds of pasture and beyond, the swell of soft blue hills. Immediately below, close enough to distinguish clearly, a small wattle and daub cottage with a couple of ramshackle barns adjacent, and a pile of sawn logs. Chickens scratched in the yard and a small boy and girl ran laughing along the bouncing branches of a nearby tree, prostrated in the recent gale and obviously not yet cleared away by the husbandman. His eyes were drawn to the mass of golden hair which haloed the broad, strong face of the big woman who sat resting beneath the old shade tree, suckling an infant.
The rough, tawny-haired dog who had been panting softly beside her, catching wind of the stranger, leapt to its feet and began to bark with a note of self-righteous indignation: ‘This is my place. What the hell do you mean by sneaking up like that? Watch your step!’
He went forward and down, she quieting the dog with a word and greeting him as he approached. There was a candour and warmth in her blue eyes; no trace either of unease or of coquetry. The infant, still at her ample breast, seemed to have collapsed into a milk-sated stupor of sleep. ‘Welcome, Stranger,’ she smiled, ‘you will stay and sup with us – it is a long road to the next habitation.’
‘Gladly, Maam. In the meantime, let me be of use. I would not take your bread without return.’
Out of politeness, he did not question that they ate without the man of the house. There was a quietness over the little homestead, in her, among the children and animals, on the fields and the little stream that went chuckling through them. So that he felt nurtured in his soul, not to mention the good country fare in his belly, and gladly accepted her offer of a night in the barn on clean, new straw.
He was a taciturn man. At her first sight of him, a heavy grey cloak enveloped his powerful frame. She soon felt how, in a manner corresponding, he shrouded all intimate thoughts and feelings from the eyes of another. And, in his self-absorption, saw no more than the surface quiet of her. He spent several days at the homestead. As a countryman, he quickly saw that a man’s hand was needed here. For himself, it was good to rest awhile and recuperate.
Once, returning from the forest with kindling wood, he saw her standing on the bluff gazing out over the blue hills. The baby, naked in the summer sun, gurgled and kicked on the blanket beside her. In her hand she held a sunflower. He sensed then the contained power of her, the maternal flame of her earth. This was her brightness, her resilience of self which, though he could not name, he yet felt. Uncomfortable, he thought that he should move on.
After the evening soup, he took leave of them all, regretfully. ‘Let there be a blessing on your house, Mother, for you have been good to a travelling fellow such as I am, but the evening is clear, and I feel the call of the forest.’ Touching hands briefly, he took his leave of them. With the children she stood watching until the trees claimed him once more. There came on her the sight of the promise and pain along his future road. But her own she could not see, only imagine.
As night came on, the strange transformation was upon him again, as he had known it would be. He was in a deep blue world, violet with shadows and silver with light as though of the full moon but yet brighter and tinged with blue. Whether he changed or the world, or whether something took them both into its otherness, he would wonder but never know. He journeyed now in a world substantial, but in his feeling totally other.
Guided perhaps without even knowing it, he came to a lake – deep blue and silver, still as glass. There on the shore in the moonlight, profiled against the water, sat an ancient medicine woman: for a moment he wondered if it was only his feeling that made her appear thus to him as a figure out of the antique Westland; then he no longer cared.
A few embers glowed at her feet. Almost on top of her a great rock jutted out into the lake, upon whose summit stood, heraldic in the blue-white light, a magnificent stallion unicorn. He passed through some dim remembrance of her casting stones upon the ground – how the great wheel of his life lay before him among the wood-ash. Then a veil was drawn across his mind, and he knew no more.
He must have slept briefly in the trunk of some hoary forest giant, for awakening at dawn he could no longer remember the transactions of otherness, save for the scene by the lake. Yet when he emerged as from the trunk, the transformation was complete. Around him, as far as the eye could see, stretched the tawny orange sand, pink and grey rock of the desert at sunrise. The night had crossed him over from world to world as it always did, as though to force him to accept that the dreams and visions were without, not within him.
So he set off through the orange haze of quickening light; before long heard ringing sounds and came upon a sinewy nomad lustily felling a dried-up thorn tree. Behind him, half hidden in a fold of the ground, he could see goat-hair tents and the faintly bluish spiral of a breakfast fire. ‘Welcome, stranger. Come eat with us.’ Such invitations may not be refused.
They rode all day over dry plains and barren hills, through stretches of burning dunes and up onto the sharp rocks of the plateau, where in places they were obliged to dismount and lead the camels.
Thus through the cauldron of afternoon until the sun sank towards the horizon like a pumpkin and again the thick air was turned an incandescent orange. Then they reached a tiny pool at the edge of high, jagged hills, where the little caravan slumped to a halt. The dark men promptly went to sleep whilst he lay bone-weary, propped against a saddle bag, listening to the soft keening of the wind in crannies of the rock and the periodic muted grunts of the squatting beasts. In that exhausted state, he had the sensation that time had stopped; as if he and everything around stood poised, waiting for the flow of existence to resume. And then he slept.
He was woken by the smell of meat roasting on the coals and the trickle of saliva from his mouth. The night was quickly chill; not long after eating he wrapped himself in his cloak, rolled over and plunged into oblivion.
He came out of sleep in the deep night, the stars chittering faintly overhead in the great vault of sky. He rose softly, distanced himself a little and climbed to a vantage point. The wind had died away, so that the great silence crouched like some portentous presence in the star-dim earthscape, palpably alive. Then the implacable summons. Through a narrow cleft in the hills he followed it, finding a deep, hidden watercourse. As he climbed there came again that strange folding and pressing of the air, as if he were being squeezed and then pulled through some invisible barrier.
The desert night had gone and he was back in the deep blue twilight with the violet velvet shadows and the silver glow. He froze, on an instant. Directly before him, not ten paces away, a form had appeared noiselessly between two boulders. It was a huge royal blue tiger with black and white markings and bristling white whiskers. Its amber eyes glowed in the surrounding dimness. He was not afraid. So close was it that he somehow knew the tiger was soothing him, the power of its reassurance obliterating all normal reaction. Then it turned and in one swift bound gained the top of the boulder to its right. One more flash of white and it was gone – leaving him, as his body at once recognised, compelled to follow. Soon there were trees among the boulders and lush vegetation appeared, with here and there the sound of falling water.
Quite suddenly, a clear pale-violet light erupted to his left; turning, he saw the tiger silhouetted, between two fernlike growths against the skyline. In a thoughtless instant he knew that it was teaching him. Clarity: the word was clear in him, though he had no means of attaching it anywhere in his life.
Once more, the tiger turned and he followed it over the hump on which it had paused and down a steep, densely-forested slope towards the deep places of the jungle. He came out abruptly onto a rocky ledge and in the stealthy dawn light made out a mysterious river, overhung with luxuriant growth. Then he experienced a pain, a hollowness through his whole being and he knew that the tiger had gone.
Now a new transformation seemed to take place. The whole was suffused with a light and feeling as of no world he knew. There came squeals of high-pitched laughter. Approaching the water, he could see children clambering into the trees on the farther bank and, grabbing onto climbing vines, come swinging out over the river to drop, or be pushed off shrieking with laughter into the water. But as to their race or language, age or origin he seemed unable to draw conclusions. For the children sailed like ghost ships in and out of the mountebank mist. ‘The mist is in your feelings’ a soft voice purred within or without him. So his eyes closed unrecognising upon this vision of the world to come, and he slept.
He awoke to find himself apparently in the same position. The scene was much the same, except that the tropical jungle had been replaced by the familiar forest trees of the Northland, silent of all human presence. With the bizarre exception of the unworldly scene with the children, he seemed to have accomplished the usual transition back to the north. The encounter with the blue tiger continued however to affect him strongly. Somehow it no longer sufficed to take up his familiar routines as if nothing had occurred. His body knew that the accumulated weight of those two encounters in the blue land – the first of real importance – had taken him across some inner divide. Yet when he tried to think about them, his mind refused to go near those experiences.
