‘The end of real is false, while the greatest false is real.’ – Ruskin of Rowan Hill
Nothing stirred the air, not even a bird scaled the cliffs, as if nature held its breath. I had emptied all three chests in my tree house, hauled their contents down the ladder, sack by heavy sack. Once my heartbeat calmed, only the distant drone of cascading waters broke the stillness, and the lone yelp of a dog from my father’s court further down the mountain. I stole a glance at the treasures scattered near the area of flat rocks I had chosen for the deed and felt my fingers itch to reach out and sift the objects that held facets of fond memories.
Instead, I laid strips of cord soaked in hemp-oil into a star formation around a heap of cloth and tinder. A grid of dry branches completed the base. On top I arranged layer upon layer of books and stacked them like bricks to form a conical heap that grew shoulder-high.
Next were my drawings of plants – patterned shade in rock and bark, weathered bones of birds, sketches of fossils, crystals, flowers on frosted glass and cloud-shapes. Captured moments of happy absorption, bound to mould away if left. And whoever thought to search for me here would be disappointed – my private reflections were nobody’s business.
One by one I folded the drawings into flute-like shapes and tucked these between book spines until the formation resembled a giant hedgehog. As additional fuel I kept a box of candle-ends and a flask of strong spirit at my side.
Last, my arabesques. No time to unroll each linen sheet to its full rectangular size and wander barefoot into its maze, merging with the weaving patterns turning under me like fluid gossamer. I stood contemplating one sheet, my first; a design sent by my spirit friend, in a dream. My steps followed the meandering lines of the labyrinth to its centre, a ritual that tended to connect me with Cara. I sat and closed my eyes, hoping for a sign of assurance even so I knew she applauded my decision. I drifted into reverie.
Not today. The trance would not serve me now. I gathered the sheets into wave-like ripples, set them round the cone as if decorating a festive cake and stepped back. All ready – poised at the brink of destruction.
Unbidden the image of my father intruded, the familiar frown, questioning my sanity. His displeasure made me wince. The moment passed and was countered by a gentle – remember – in my head, Sat’s voice, the luminous one who had risen from waters under the bridge to show me another world.
With sudden force, I struck the back of my knife against a sharp edge of flint until the dry lichen and rabbit-droppings in my tinderbox began to smoulder. A candle end set to the trembling flame caught, and with it I ignited the exposed hemp cords around the pyre.
Wisps of smoke curled from the periphery of the mound. Tiny flames leapt from gap to dark gap between books. I expected a sudden flare but was pleased when the flickers settled into a slow burning. Simmering heat encircled the drawings and crinkled their edges. My arabesque sheets trapped the smoke, clinging and undulating, feathering up and down the pyre like wings.
My memory held a different blaze, not of pyres burning waste in the servant-yards, but of those built by soldiers to dispose of plague-victims just outside the walls of father’s court – fires that hissed and roared skywards with hungry flames, grasping for more. My mound burned idly, radiating gentle warmth while consuming itself.
Drawings dropped like wilted leaves. The linen sheets dissolved while their ink-patterns endured like a floating geometry. From its cradle of heat the tower burned from within while book spines and covers held their shape – ghostly shells. Letterings turned negative with titles visible: Humming Spheres, Lies of Time, Layla and Majnun, Benedictions and Perils of Faith . . . .
As the sun dropped and gilded the western sky, the chorus from within the pyre became a cabal of whispers. Each book was plump with air in its hollow, each single page defined in silvery grey. What sweet mystery held these forms in place – was it my hesitation? I gently blew at a single spine. The whole skeletal mound collapsed to dust under my breath. A flurry of embers – and nothing left to gaze at but ash.
Stars emerged as I lay on my back and thought of Gran. The precious books, read over and over again, had been her gifts to me. Deep down I knew she would forgive my reckless ritual of separation from a home that suffocated, was based on a lie I could not fathom. My parents’ conflict had cut a wedge into my heart. Fire gleamed there too, mourning what had not been, but its flames were hungry for truth, and excitement as to what lay ahead. Secretly, before sunrise, I would descend the mountain from my mother’s mansion into Nimrich and follow the river west. Tonight would be my last visit to Gran. We might never meet again.
The moon rose as I wandered down the cliffs through father’s royal gardens towards Gran’s quarters. She kept long hours. Age made her dwell on the past, forgetful of day-to-day things like my name. ‘It’s Ana,’ I said.
‘Ananda,’ she recalled and pinched my cheek. ‘Your smile’s a treasure and that scent,’ she buried her nose in my tousled honey hair, ‘ah, wood ash, lovely.’ No queries, fires were plenty at Katun Court, feeding a longing for her past adventures with nomads in the Eastern Provinces.
Although it was nearly midnight Gran took pride in preparing spiced tea. I carried the tray to an alcove. She sank into a love-worn armchair and sighed, contented, clasping her hands around the warmth of her cup. We ate dates filled with almonds and sat until calm settled between us. I saw spirited life written in the broad strokes of her face, the high brows and my father’s prominent nose, a family defect, she called it, which I had been spared. Tonight I longed for the sound of her voice. ‘Tell me one of your stories,’ I said. ‘One you’ve never told before.’
Leaning back, she searched the heart of her memory. ‘This tale deserves a bit of dream weed,’ she said, reaching for the tin whose painted camels were tarnished from usage. She stuffed crumpled leaves into her stone pipe, struck a sulphur stick and lit up, sucking vigorously while holding in the smoke. ‘Want some?’
I refused as usual, though I was enchanted by the far-away look in Gran’s eyes, the shape shifting, the different voices from her lips, the vast worlds beyond mine.
‘You know best, dear. If you ever do take the smoke don’t let it go to your head only. Put a little in your heels.’
I nodded to assure her I would remember.
A smile through the potent aromatic haze and she began:
There was once a cormorant that caught sight of a star’s reflection in a gentle sea. Thinking this slowly wavering patch of light was a fish he dove and tried to catch it. Of course, the cormorant failed, yet stubbornly he continued to dive again and again, believing that by effort alone he must eventually succeed. In the end, he grew so angry and frustrated that he swore never again to dive after a fish. From then onward, although he suffered extreme hunger on a meagre diet of small crabs, shrimps and shells found along the shore, he refused to dive after any fish, for he assumed it was as impossible to catch as the star on the water.
‘Not all birds are that easily fooled by reflections,’ I teased.
Gran gazed right through me with a solemn air. ‘We must never give up our search for the real.’
‘What is the real?’
‘You’ll taste it.’ She laughed and handed me the bowl with dates. Her riddles posed questions she never answered. Questions are buoyant with life, she would say.
How to tell her of my leaving? She guessed. Her eyes were moist. Without comment she shuffled to her writing desk, opened a slim drawer and took out a crumpled note. ‘Have patience, dear, there’s something you must have.’ Bent over her desk she jotted down a few words on her best paper, then frowned, scrunched up the sheet and began again. I moved to the window.
A full moon hung above the river valley and sparkled like hammered silver. Its bluish tint mingled with the warm glow of oil lamps in the room. Gran looked up at the painting of a woman with eyes as still and green as a mountain lake – her godchild, Portia, the late Queen of Itaka. Wiping her eyes Gran placed a time-worn note with her letter into an envelope and hastily scrawled her emblem. She melted generous amounts of sealing wax and pressed her signet ring across the seam of the document. Returning from a remote place, she said, ‘Deliver this personally to Aknar when you see him.’
‘But, Gran, I’ve never met Aknar. And Itaka is ….’
As if this was irrelevant she waved me close and pressed the envelope into my hands. ‘No matter, you’re the only one I trust. This message must get to Rusk Palace.’ Her fingers trembled.
My mouth must have dropped open. West spelled freedom because of the ocean I imagined behind the Pellin Mountains. Itaka as destination had never crossed my mind. The letter added purpose to my escape. I was intrigued though, having learned not to ask Gran about Itaka, a sore subject. She last travelled there twenty years ago, before my time, to support Aknar’s wife during labour. Portia died and her son was stillborn. Gran had adored Portia. Only my birth a year after the tragedy reconciled her to living. We embraced, she winked, but her thoughts were already elsewhere.
The deserted yard was ghosted with blue shadows as I hurried to my room in one of the towers. Gran’s observations, her humorous stories and her unquestioning acceptance of me had made up for my parents’ brittle attempts at love. I would sorely miss her.
However, I had Cara, my invisible companion since childhood, who had sustained me during the isolated years of The Great Dying. Back in my room I unpacked my diary. When I stored the envelope for Aknar in its binding, I recalled Gran’s dear hands, trembling like aspen. To blank out the heavy portents of the letter I flicked aimlessly through my diary-entries, my dreams and visions of Cara, randomly shared stories of her existence. She is of another world, a time centuries ahead, though the pattern of our conflict is alike. The page fell open at an account of Cara’s childhood:
I am a love child, born in the wake of World War II, and a welcome ray of hope in a barren landscape. My parents’ material goods are destroyed by bombs –tools of technical warfare, dropped from flying machines high in the sky onto densely populated towns. Bombs kill unimaginable numbers of people from a distance.
My parents have to create a new life from rubble. They are moving to the south of their country to start a business. We have the attic flat of an alpine house. The owner’s family lives in the floors below us. I love the aroma of cooking in the halls. Spices linger longest, like the cinnamon my mother adds to sweets. Our balcony overlooks the lake, which is often ringed by snow-capped mountains.
In high summer the lake attracts storms like a magnet. I sense the drama while the sky is still blue. My skin prickles. I might be playing among the meadows surrounding the house. The bell-grass stops swaying and stands to attention. The horizon wobbles. I sniff the air and ignore mother’s calls from the balcony, ‘Cara, come home!’ And, with raised pitch, ‘Cara, I know you’re there. Get in, at once!’
The balcony is where I stand and admire the clouds gathering in swathes of slate-black piling in above the water. Sheets of lightning drop into the silence. A string of rumblings is cut by a deep roll of thunder that makes me jump. Rain and hail pelt down beyond the awning of the balcony and drench the garden. I am entranced by the spectacle. My mother hides under her quilt.
Here is why mother cannot abide thunderstorms. While living in a war-torn city, pregnant with me, she fetches from a neighbour a pot of soup filled to the brim, hoping to make it home before the rain. A flash of lightning hits a tree close by. Her flaxen hair stands upright, while her hands hold on to the pot, soup being more precious than gold. This is why I am thrilled by thunderstorms, having been charged with light in the womb. The impression on mother was obviously different.
I love the elements, and animals. People are complex. The first such inkling comes when my father has a row with the landlord. His shouts scare me. Mother had put washing out to dry and finds her white linen soiled by soot. Father concludes the black stuff was flung out of a first-floor window, deliberately. He is a draftsman and knows about angles. He says the landlord wants to be rid of us so he can raise the rent with new tenants.
Mother cannot conceive of people being that devious. She prefers to call the incident a mishap, believing that any humiliation is worth accepting as long as peace prevails.
This naivety, more than the event, fires my father to confront the landlord. The atmosphere in the house grows tense after that day. I spend more time with Arielle, the widow who lives in a vine-smothered cottage down the track from our home. Arielle is a storyteller and, I feel, the first person who understands me. With my parents’ business, and disagreements, demanding most of their attention, Arielle is like a grandmother.
The resonance was striking. Her parents’ disagreements, and Arielle, like Gran.
Father scoffed at hearing voices, whether in dreams or bright daylight – he called it ‘raving nonsense’ – so I concealed Cara’s existence.
Only days ago, her dream of flying as eagle – the epiphany compelling her to leave home – returned in a flash when I encountered the majestic birds on a sheer cliff during the fated climb with my cousins.
Cara’s spirit sparked courage in me, yet also trepidation, until the wondrous light at the bridge dispelled my fear. I took Sat’s gift from my pocket. The tiny black stone tingled warm in my hand. A reminder there was more, much more beyond what I could imagine. The river called. My desire soared – like an arrow unleashed.