Beguilers (3 page)

The beguilers seemed to be made of light but, strangely, they cast none out around them. The moon was my only torch and I was lucky that it was bright enough for my needs that night. I stayed on the track even when the beguilers veered away and approached the lake from the top end where the side of the mountain slopes steeply down and drops into the hole. That was the most dangerous part, I knew. Even the most courageous youths didn’t venture up there. One slip and you’d had it, rolling down the hill-side and straight into mid-air above the dark water. I stayed on course and stopped at the top of the path near the ox-byre. Then I lay down on my belly and crawled to the edge. Below me the sides of the pool were sheer and the lake was black, as though the water was so dark that it couldn’t reflect the moonlight at all but could go on absorbing it for ever and ever. I had balanced myself so that if I slipped at all it would be backwards, but even so I held tight to a stalk of goat-cabbage with each hand. The beguilers were gathered together at the top end of the lake. They were hovering above the water and moving around in an aimless sort of circular dance the way nippers do, dipping now and then to touch the water as if they were fishing for something. What was strange though, a bit creepy, was that even though they appeared to touch the water, they never made any ripples. The surface of the lake was as still as a slab of gloss-rock.

After a while I realised that they were moving closer, towards my side of the lake. They were still beneath me, and I looked directly down on them as they took up their strange flight pattern again.

There are some creatures called waterpods that we used to play with in the ditches after the rains. They are completely transparent except for their eyes and their digestive systems. It makes me feel sick to think of it now, but we used to aim them at each other and burst the poor things. I remembered them as I watched the beguilers dancing because there was something similar about them. Mostly they were just light, and mostly you felt that you could see straight through them if it wasn’t darker on the other side. That’s true, I think, and that’s the reason that you can’t see them during the day. But there is a suggestion of something more substantial about them, of something not quite seen, and that is what intrigued me about them and made me strain my eyes against the night. They were infuriating, always moving so that I couldn’t quite see, and leaving irritating trails of light to evaporate behind them, insubstantial as steam.

I don’t know to this day whether or not the beguilers were aware of me watching them, but at the time I didn’t think about it at all because I was so fascinated. They moved away a short distance, still dancing, still dropping towards the water now and again so that I wondered if they might possibly be feeding on something in there. I had realised by now that they were making a full circuit of the lake, round the edge from one side to the other. As they moved further away it was even more difficult to see them and I closed my eyes for a while to rest them from the strain of trying to see something that couldn’t be seen. When I opened them again, the beguilers were still there, just about completing their circuit of the drowning pool.

The air was warm on my back. I closed my eyes again, and a blissful sleepy sensation trickled through me. It would have been so easy to go to sleep there, as warm and comfortable as in my bed at home. But something jerked me awake again. Perhaps it was some sound that the beguilers made or perhaps it was the movement of their light outside my lids. They must have gathered in the centre of the lake, for suddenly they were sweeping off in different directions up out of the bowl. And one was coming straight towards me.

I was wide awake now and my eyes were glued to the flying light. It rose swiftly, gracefully, up in front of my eyes and then up above my head and over me. Despite myself I turned on to my back to follow its flight, and when it was directly above my face it stopped and hovered in the air.

Now I could see it, the beauty that hypnotised people. Now that the creature was no longer in motion the light had ceased bleeding out from behind it and seemed to be concentrated at its centre. The substance that I had been straining to see was almost apparent as it looked down upon me with unmistakable curiosity in its eyes. Yes, its eyes; it did have eyes. They were mellow and deep; golden concentrations of pure light or pure heat, fire refined and compacted into two bright globes which looked straight down upon me. Exactly what was in those eyes I will never know, but what I saw was a number of things. There was curiosity as strong as my own, but also pain and longing and a need to be understood. Those were all qualities that were familiar to me, the visual equivalent of the tormented cries that I had heard so many times. That was disturbing, of course, but what was even more disturbing to me was the certainty that the being that hovered above me was familiar. I had encountered it before somewhere. The eyes that looked down on me were not human in origin, but nevertheless they were known to me, in some other form, the way someone might not be themselves in a dream but you know it is them all the same.

There was no point in reaching out with my hands, I knew that. The beguiler was too far above me. But I reached out with my mind, pleading, grasping, imploring it to come down to me. I hadn’t known it before, but somehow I learned at that moment that being human was painful; a thing to be pitied.

And was it scorn that I saw in its eyes as it turned in the air above me and soared away so effortlessly? Perhaps, perhaps not. But its action seemed to me to be scornful, to leave me there helplessly bound to the ground while it defied all the laws that the mountain imposed upon the rest of us.

I lay still long after the beguiler had disappeared. And while I lay there a decision was made. I suppose that I have to say it was I who made the decision, although it seems strange when I recall how hard I tried to persuade myself to change it over the next month. I began to try and change it that very night, even as I got up and started to walk home. I told myself that I was crazy, that no one had ever succeeded in such an undertaking and no one ever would. I told myself that I was lucky to be alive and that if I carried on with this crazy plan I certainly wouldn’t be for very much longer. But it made no difference. My mind was made up.

I
DIDN’T TELL TIGO
about my Great Intention, but from the way he looked at me over the next weeks I’ve a fair suspicion that he guessed. I didn’t tell anyone else, either. One of the rules about Intentions is that they must never be revealed to anyone before they are made public. In the case of a Great Intention, you’re supposed to discuss all the alternatives with your parents or the elders, but there’s nothing anyone can do if you don’t. And once you have offered your Great Intention, there’s no going back. You can change your own mind if you think you could live with yourself, but no one else can change your mind for you and they won’t try. It’s your life; your decision.

The other thing, though, and it was one of the things I kept telling myself when I was trying to change my mind, is that the announcement of the first Great Intention marks the end of your parents’ responsibility for you. All the villagers are totally dependent upon each other; the village wouldn’t survive if they weren’t. But from the time we are nine years old we are encouraged to know our own capabilities and to be as independent as possible. That’s one of the reasons for the Intention sessions every month. When children first go to them they make all kinds of crazy announcements. They think they can do anything and everything. But once they’ve had a few colossal failures they begin to get wise and lower their expectations of themselves. That way, by the time they come to offer their first Great Intention they’re supposed to have a pretty good idea of what they can or can’t do, which is why other people don’t interfere.

Things go wrong, of course. Lenko’s friend Samsy announced that he was going to marry his sweetheart, Diamsa, without consulting her on the matter. All their parents were furious, and he’s still trying to persuade her that she wants him. It has become a bit of a village joke, like old Hemmy announcing every month that her Intention is to prepare for her death. Everyone knows that, sooner or later, Diamsa will marry Samsy. And sooner or later, of course, old Hemmy will die. Those failed Intentions aren’t the end of anyone’s world.

But if things went wrong for me …I thought about it, night after night as I lay in bed. I don’t know why it was that I couldn’t change my mind. It might have been that the beguilers had put me under some kind of spell already. Or it might have been an inner stubbornness, a determination not to be like everyone else even if it meant walking myself into a mess that would last for the rest of my life. Or walking myself into a mess that would bring a short end to it.

The way Tigo looked at me, that’s what he thought, anyway. My allergy meant that we couldn’t have chuffies in the house the way everyone else did, because if I was in an enclosed space with one my watering eyes and sneezes progressed to a full-blown attack of asthma and I had to be taken out on to the mountainside until I could breath again. People had got pretty much used to me, but from time to time, even then, someone would cast aspersions about ours being an unhappy household because of there being no chuffies in it; and then the whole business of me being different from everyone else would rear its ugly head again. They all thought I was suffering desperately, you see, because I couldn’t spend half my life snuggled up with a chuffie the way other people do. And I suppose that in some ways I did suffer more than the others. The thing is, though, I never saw it as a bad thing the way they do. It’s not the end of the world to feel sad or disappointed now and then. It doesn’t feel nice, but it proves that you’re alive and growing and changing in a way that you’re hardly aware of when the chuffies snuff everything out and make you feel good. And if things got intolerable I could always go out and spend a few minutes with Tigo, and that would take care of the worst of it. I liked to sit with him in the yard from time to time in any case. He was my friend, even if he did make me sneeze. When I was really confused about the beguiler thing I liked to go out and lean against him so that he could feel how I was feeling. Chuffies understand everything. But that’s not the same thing as approving. He thought I was nuts, and the way things are in our village and always have been, I had to agree with him.

Because stating that your Great Intention is to catch a beguiler is the equivalent of admitting insanity. I wasn’t the first to try it, not by a long shot. On average there is one in every generation who does it and they are spoken about in hushed, disapproving tones on long, leaf-lantern evenings in the warm fug of winter fires. It’s a sort of an idiom around here; if someone isn’t behaving according to the local ethics, or if someone gets a bit over-wrought about something, what the others say is, ‘He ought to watch out, that one. The next thing is he’ll be off hunting beguilers.’ My mother said it to me, once. ‘You calm down, young lady, or it’s off after beguilers you’ll be.’ Maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Maybe it put the idea into my head.

It didn’t matter, though, where the notion came from. I had no respect for the things that the other people were doing. I would rather have died hunting beguilers than capitulated and entered an unwanted marriage or the dusty old priesthood. After all, what’s the point of being human and having choices in life if everyone just ends up behaving like cattle?

There were two names in my lifetime that were associated with beguilers. The first was Dabbo. He came to the village from time to time, I’m told, but I don’t remember him. He died when I was young. The other name was Shirsha. She wasn’t dead, but lived on her own in the Lepers’ caves beside the were-forest, just below the snow-line. People came across her now and then. They said that she was mad, without a doubt. They shuddered when they mentioned her name. I preferred not to think about her.

Instead I tried to turn my mind to the water problem. Each evening when the household tasks were finished, I sat alone with a few scraps of paper, trying to put my theories into some sort of practical form. I produced all kinds of fascinating sketches, but none of them were close to working designs. On the evenings when we watered the crops I sometimes became immersed in my speculations, and would watch the water pouring from the spout of my can, so absorbed by the possibilities that I forgot why I was there. Eventually my father got so angry that he made me carry the bucket pole across my shoulders for a few trips. I realised then that, although the priests hadn’t called me in after my insolent Intention at the meeting, they had almost certainly spoken to my parents. They would have been advised to try and turn my thoughts away from their rebellious path.

The bucket pole certainly had the effect of focussing my mind. But it set it, even more firmly, on the Great Intention I meant to make.

Despite the tiring work I was sleeping very little, tossing and turning all through the nights, listening to Lenko snoring, arguing with myself. I got so tired that my mind did get a bit blurry round the edges, and that didn’t help matters because I kept catching myself with strange thoughts and wondering if the elders weren’t right; if it wasn’t a kind of madness to attempt what I was going to do. No one else had ever succeeded, after all. They said that very few of those who had gone off beguiler-hunting had ever come back. They, like all kinds of other unfortunates, had been led into caves in the ground or over the edges of precipices or up above the snowline where they perished in the cold. But it was hard for me to imagine the cold when it was blisteringly hot in our village. It was also hard for me to imagine disaster.

The many times that I had neglected to carry out an Intention in the past didn’t feel like failures to me. If I hadn’t done what I had said I would, it was because I couldn’t be bothered, not because I wasn’t equal to it. I knew it was arrogant but I really believed that there was nothing I couldn’t do. I believed it right up until the time that I came to announce my Great Intention at the next meeting.