Beguilers (2 page)

If there had been a convenient hole, I would have bolted down it. But there was nowhere to hide. I was punished by the hard glare of public disapproval until I squirmed in my seat, and it wasn’t until I hung my head in shame that I was released and the Intentions moved on. The boys took up from where the girls had left off. There were a lot of promises of ditch clearance, as well as more water-bearing; more conformity.

It all washed over me. My face burned with humiliation. It was highly likely that the priests would take me to one side when the meeting was over and give me a lecture; perhaps even a punishment of some kind. I tried to imagine what form it might take. A meditational penance, perhaps? Or some arduous educational task, like learning one of the ancient Epic Poems by heart?

The boys’ intentions were over. Beside me, one of the younger women was promising to go up and stay with the men, to cook for them while they worked. Afterwards a series of men offered to take the oxen up to the drowning pool and spend their nights in the byre that had been built up there, and to draw water from first light until midday. It was gruelling for the men and many times worse for the beasts. We usually lost at least one ox during the drought, and sometimes more.

The voices droned slavishly on, and my shame began to turn to anger. Why shouldn’t someone suggest that there might be an easier way? Even if I failed, wasn’t my intention honourable?

Without a word to anyone, I slipped quietly from my seat and made my way around the back of the hall to one of the side doors. There was a pause in the Intentions, and I knew that everyone was watching me. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to wait around to be castigated.

Outside the streets were empty and bright with moonlight. Above the village the mountainside looked oddly enticing and I scanned the shining darkness for signs of beguilers. The nights of the village meetings were the only times we ever went out after dark. The beguilers never came around the village when there was a full moon. No one knew why. But occasionally we would see them up among the hills as we were making our way home, dancing above the trees like huge sparks from a bonfire. It was safe to watch them then, but never at any other time of the month.

I could hear the drone of voices emerging from the hall, and it filled me with misery to think of the same old routine, the same small fulfilments and failures going round and round and round. The sound, and the thoughts that came with it, began to draw me back towards the old conundrum of what to do with my life. In an effort to shrug it all off I found myself taking the track that led out of the village and up towards the forest.

I’m still not sure whether fate is something that happens to a person or something we create for ourselves as we go along. But that night, with the full moon hanging in a cloudless sky, it seemed to me that there was nothing else in the world that I could do or that I would want to do. Despite the endless warnings that had filled my childhood nights with dread, I had no fear as I wandered up the track. It’s almost as though there was something calling me and I certainly had no desire to try and resist it. I suppose that’s what people mean when they talk about being summoned by fate.

T
HAT NIGHT, WHEN I
walked up the mountain on my own, I saw three beguilers gathering on the deep lake that lies about a mile above the village. I had no warning of their presence before I saw them; they weren’t keening the way they do when they come around the houses at night. They made no sound at all. One minute I was alone in the moonlight and the next minute they were there, shining out like torches in the sky.

The local wisdom is that the beguilers lose their power under the full moon. Even so, people never come out of the village at night, and the presence of the three creatures made me anxious. I turned my face away from them and walked on along the path. I wasn’t far from the beginning of the forest, and my first thought was to keep going until I was safely within the trees. Then I wouldn’t be tempted to look and they would forget about me. But they flew across the path in front of me and wheeled around above my head for a while before they turned again and headed back towards the lake.

There are puffberry bushes between the village and the forest, hundreds of them. When they’re in fruit all the children come up at dawn every morning to pick as many as they can before the birds get to them. It’s one of the best times of the year as far as I’m concerned. I’d eat puffberries until they came out of my ears. One of the best Intentions I ever thought of was to go up to that patch of hill-side every day for a month to weed out the creeping spinescutch which was growing between the bushes, choking them and making it difficult to pick the fruit. The following month several other people joined me and we had a great time working together up there. We brought all the cut creepers down to the village and made a central pile for people to use as kindling. My parents almost thought I was normal when I did that. They used to remind me of it from time to time, especially when they were particularly worried about my mood or the way I was behaving, but I think it was as much to reassure themselves as me. I had come to terms with my allergy and the way it had separated me from the other members of the community. It was they that hadn’t.

But that night, when I was out walking on my own, I had no thoughts of sameness or difference, and I had no thought of puffberries, either. All I knew was that I had to take cover and refuse to see those beings that were dancing around in my path.

Beguilers. No one really knows exactly what they are because no one has ever caught one. They are around during the day but you can’t see them because they have the same quality as the daylight. Occasionally, if you’re up on the mountain slopes, you might see a shadow pass through the air like a wafer of ice floating on water; not quite substantial enough to be sure that it’s really there. But at dusk they become visible, and at night they are as bright and vivid as huge fireflies.

Some people say that they are demons drawn down from the cloud mountain to feed on human souls. Others say that they are the earth-bound spirits of wayfarers who lost their lives in the mountains and who need to lead another soul to a similar death before they can be freed from their torment. Because tormented they certainly are. The sound of their moaning, howling voices floating through the village streets in the darkness would freeze the blood in your heart. However hot the night might be, we close our shutters when we hear them coming and wrap our shawls around our ears.

We are warned never to peep out at them from the first day we can understand the words. We are told that they are beautiful, so beautiful that people become mesmerised by them and get led astray. There are endless stories about them; of people who succumbed to the lure of their haunted voices and walked out into the night, never to be seen again; or got caught in the darkness between one place and another and didn’t return home. Every accident that happens on the mountain is blamed on the beguilers. Every time a traveller is lost on the road or falls down a precipice, the elders tell us that it was because they were following a beguiler. Our people live in terror of darkness; after nightfall we are prisoners in our own homes, waiting for the haunting voices to draw us from our sleep. It is one of the reasons that we are so isolated. Apart from the porters who have to pass through our village, carrying goods across the mountains to the coastal communities on the other side, we have no regular visitors at all.

I suppose I never really believed the stories. The beguilers are eerie all right; they’re eerie to look at and eerie to hear, but aside from that I had never heard any real evidence that they interacted with people at all. They were a convenient excuse, though, for the fears that people have of the darkness. I always thought that if it wasn’t beguilers it’d be something else, another kind of spook designed to keep children at home in bed. There hadn’t been an accident in all the time that I was alive, or at least not one that could realistically be attributed to a beguiler. I had always had a secret fascination for the night and chafed against the customs of the village. But now, alone on the mountain with those strange and silent creatures, I wasn’t so sure.

I lay down on my stomach among the puffberry bushes and put my hands over my eyes. I couldn’t hear them, but I could sense them some other way, still flitting about above my head. At least, I believed I could. There was no question of my being in any danger unless I looked at them; of that I was sure. The legends say that it is only when you look into the eyes of a beguiler they become a danger to you. Even so, I was afraid. There’s no sense in pretending that I wasn’t.

I kept my eyes covered for as long as I could. With my head there close to the ground I thought at first that the world was filled with some enormous noise, appropriate to the fear that I was experiencing. But before long I realised that the sound I was hearing was the sound of fear itself. My heart was pounding, causing the blood to roar in my ears, and my rapid breathing was amplified because my face was pressed against the ground. When I relaxed for a moment and held my breath, I found that the world was almost silent.

I became aware of the night insects in the grass among the bushes, and a stray creeper of spinescutch was pricking into my stomach. I moved a hand to pull it away and saw only darkness all around. Carefully I looked up. The beguilers were gone. Slowly, cautiously, I got to my feet and looked out. Far below, the soft lights of the village were visible but that was all.

The moonlight was cool and distant, comfortless. As my fear subsided and my circulation returned to normal and was forgotten, I realised that my knees were trembling. What had happened to me there on the mountain was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, but it was also one of the most exhilarating. Even as I stood there with the sweat of fear cooling beneath my shirt, I was aware of an authenticity within, a correspondence of circumstance with my own nature.

If I had assumed anything while I lay among the puffberry bushes it was that if I survived the ordeal I would return straight home. But now I had no desire to do so. The faint, twinkling lights of the village were not suggestive of comfort but of suffocation and retribution. Whatever had brought me up on to the hill-side in the darkness had not been weakened by my encounter with the beguilers, but strengthened instead. With little sense of purpose but with a great sense of freedom, I turned away from the village.

The particular formation of land where our village is built is called Ambarka, which means ‘The lap of the Great Mother’ in the old language. It’s like a bulge; a lap is a fairly good description if you think of the flat part at the top of the hill where the village stands as the ‘Mother’s’ thighs. Above the village and below it, the mountainside is steep, almost sheer in some places. The path has been made to zig-zag across the steepest parts but even so it is a stiff climb. I had gone about half a mile and was just passing a pile of rough planks that my father and Lenko had been cutting together at the edge of the forest when the beguilers returned.

They took me by surprise, sweeping across my vision again in a triangular formation, their long, translucent tails fanned out behind them like comets. Involuntarily I followed them with my eyes and then, before I knew it, I was following them with my feet as well towards the lake.

The drowning pool we call it. It is a dark and dangerous place, a hole made by a meteorite in the side of the mountain which forms a natural reservoir. It is fed by an underground stream that comes straight down from the melting end of one of the glaciers, and it is never empty. When it has been dry for a while, the sides of the pool are sheer, more frightening than when the pool is full because they go down for such a long way before they reach the water. And a long way afterwards as well, people say. Huge leather buckets on thick ropes are lowered down the sides. The ropes are slung over a frame made of stout timber, which is designed so that when the buckets are pulled by the oxen to the top, they tilt and pour their contents into the series of ditches and aqueducts that run down towards the village pond.

From there, in the cool of evening, the water has to be carried by yak or donkey or bucket-pole to the fields, some of which are nearly a mile from the houses. The whole village is involved in that part of the operation. Even the smallest child is busy, watering the crops with a small jug, until every plant that we own has been given enough to keep it alive. And the whole process goes on, every second or third day, for as long as the drought lasts. In a bad year, that could be weeks.

But the strange thing is that no matter how much water we draw from the drowning pool it is never empty. My father says that you wouldn’t empty it in a hundred years. He says it is bottomless.

And now the beguilers were leading me towards it.

I
KNEW THAT I
was being lured but I wasn’t mesmerised, or at least I believed that I wasn’t. I was sure that I could stop as soon as I wanted to and turn back. But at least one of the things we had been told about the beguilers was true; they were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Even as I followed them I was beginning to get whisperings of what was to become the first Great Intention of my life.

They were quite some distance ahead of me and I couldn’t see them clearly, just their shapes in the night sky, their oval bodies and long, flowing tails. I was careful, as careful as I’ve ever been, keeping my eyes more often on the ground than on the strange activity in the sky. I knew the area well. There was a sort of rough track that led out of the puffberry bushes and on to the scrubby hill that sloped up towards where the lake was. Sometimes the older boys and girls gave Intentions to bring the herd there to graze the razor grass and goat-cabbage. It was a long time since man or beast had been lost to the lake, but I knew that parents were worried all the same, and in the loneliness up there that night I had more understanding of why. Taking my eyes from the moving lights that were guiding me, I cut across the steep and bumpy scrubland until I found the herders’ path, and once I had reached it I resolved not to leave it.