Beguilers (7 page)

But it didn’t last long. An hour or so later, the sun was reaching its highest point and even among the bushes where I sat down to rest it was too hot for comfort. Down in the village the smaller children would be swimming in the pond while the adults slept or gathered in the cool tea-shops to chat away the worst of the afternoon heat. The leaves around me were wilting slightly, as they did every afternoon, and I was wilting, too.

Because of the way our ‘lap’ juts out of the steep mountainside, the streams that run down from the melting snows pass to either side of our hill. The village was built there because when the spring floods are at their worst, the streams and rivers swell so much that they sweep away any terraces that are built closer to them. But it means also that if it weren’t for the drowning pool we would have famished from drought during the recent long spell of hot, dry summers.

Further up the mountain and further down it there are streams where I could have dangled my feet and refreshed myself. But here, above the village, they were all dry. Even the birds were quiet; even the insects were idling in the heat. The best I could do was to fold the yellow shawl beneath my head and try to rest.

As I drowsed, the sun disappeared behind the peaks. Strictly speaking it had gone down, but the horizon is so high here that there is still another two or three hours of daylight after the sun has vanished. I spent the first hour putting more distance between myself and the village, knowing that the further I got from it the more chance I would have of finding wild food. When I thought I had walked far enough I settled down to some foraging, finding eazle first to clean my teeth and then, by following a young wing-tail, two fistfuls of ground-plums, as rich and nutritious as good cheese. Food never tasted so good and I didn’t regret at all that I had no brew to wash them down. A few minutes later I came across a wild whisker-tree and I picked about two dozen of the spidery fruit, even though I wasn’t hungry at all by then. I found a clearing in the bushes and laid out my shawl on top of the crisp grass. Then I spread out the whisker-fruit to begin drying. They would make a useful reserve if fresh food became scarce.

As the light reddened in the west and began to depart, the birds and insects became suddenly frantic, as though they too had been drowsing in the sun and now had to make up for a wasted day. I wrapped my fruit in my shawl and quietly followed a pair of tracker-birds who were fetching orange bramberries for their raucous children. It’s always a difficult decision, whether or not to bother with bramberries. Their leaves are covered with a kind of hair which has barbs on the end. If you catch your clothes on them it can take half an hour to disentangle yourself, and they can, if you are very unfortunate, even grab your bare skin. And after all that trouble, they’re not that nice; not as nice as puffberries or yellowpips.

I rolled up my sleeves and gathered a few mouthfuls. The way things were, I decided that I couldn’t really afford to waste any opportunity to eat even if I wasn’t hungry. By the time I had finished it was nearly dark, so I went back the way I had come and began to descend from the forest towards the drowning-pool.

I was so sure that they would be there, the same beguilers that I had seen the last time. I followed the route that they had led me on before and settled myself on the northern lip of the high bank, far from the byre where the men and oxen were already shut away from the coming night. Feeling slightly foolish, even though there was no one around to see me, I followed mad Dabbo’s instructions and tied one end of the gut coil to a young flossy oak tree and the other end to my ankle. The heat showed no sign of diminishing even though it was dark, so I sat on the cotton shawl instead of wrapping it round me. Cross-legged, hugging my knees in anticipation, I waited.

Behind me, at the edge of the forest, a nightangel was singing. It went through an extraordinary repertoire of sounds, from plaintive sobbing to sparkling chickering to melodic passages that stunned me with their simple beauty. I sank deep into its changing moods and came to the realisation that if I was that bird, or the mate that it was wooing, I would truly understand what love was. Not like the chuffie-coloured love that bore the name among the people of my village, but the real thing; so much more mysterious and profound. I didn’t know if it was possible for humans to experience it. It seemed doubtful, somehow, especially for someone as isolated and detached as I was.

In the end I nodded off, still sitting there with my cheek resting on my scrunched-up knees, still listening to the nightangel. When I woke it was cold and I felt as stiff as old Hemmy. It took me ten minutes to unfold my legs and get the circulation going in them again, but after that I felt better and quite enjoyed the freshness of the pre-dawn air.

I was surprised and pleased to find that I had no fear of the darkness. On the contrary, I delighted in it as though it was something that I had been unjustly denied throughout the whole of my life. The moon was only just past full, of course, and I knew that there would be much darker nights to come, but I felt, nonetheless, as I kept my watch that I had passed some kind of test.

There were still no beguilers, though, and the morning came without bringing them to me. I remembered the night that they had danced before my eyes and wished that I had taken the opportunity then to try and catch one. Could I have done it? And if so, how?

I remembered Hemmy saying that it had been done. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I would have to follow in the footsteps of those who had gone before me, if only to avoid making the same mistakes as they had. I got up and made my way up the mountainside before the men emerged from the byre to get the oxen ready for drawing water.

But I didn’t enjoy the spectacular dawn. The prospect of meeting with the legendary Shirsha filled me with apprehension. I would have to find out for myself whether she was mad or not. If she was, then I would learn what madness was and know if I suffered from it myself. If she wasn’t, if she was just a searcher like myself, then she might, as Hemmy had suggested, have something to teach me.

W
ITH THE SUN CAME
the heat, and the whisker-fruit that I had wrapped in my shawl were surprisingly heavy. Walking up the steep hill-sides was nothing new to me; I often came up here, collecting firewood or wild food. Even so I found the morning’s walk hard going.

It would have been easier if I could have stayed on the main porters’ tracks, or even on the smaller paths made by foresters and herders, but I was too wary about being seen to risk them. I had no desire to encounter my mother again, or any of the other villagers. So I kept close to the tracks but not on them, and every few minutes I stopped to rest and listen carefully to the sounds of the forest all around.

They gave me clues to what was going on. Quite often when the birds and beasts were silent it was only because of my presence, but I came to learn that if I stayed still for a certain length of time they would forget me and carry on about their business. But if that time elapsed and they were still silent it meant there was something or someone else around apart from me; when that happened I found myself a quiet corner and waited until I heard the intruder pass or until the forest sounds returned and told me that all was well.

It happened rarely, though, and I made quite good progress that morning. When the heat reached its worst I began to look around for a cool place to rest. There was no sign of a stream, but when I was about ready to drop I found a marshy spot where an underground spring trickled to the surface, and I lay at its edge and dozed with the cool dampness seeping through my clothes.

I didn’t move again until I heard the life of the forest winding down towards the end of the day. I filled up my water-skin and set out in search of food, but although I spent quite some time digging for ground-plums, all I got for my pains was dirty hands and I had to fall back on my dried rations.

I ate as I walked, eager to get some distance behind me before nightfall. What I planned was to find an open patch of ground where I could watch for beguilers in the dark, so I left the path and headed directly up-hill through the trees. But as dusk began to fall, and then more solid darkness, I had still not found a way out into the open and when it became too dark to see any further I had to make my bed where I found myself, among the trees.

It wasn’t pleasant in there. It was quite different from the hill-side above the drowning-pool which was open to the moon and the stars. Here the trees and bushes closed over me; I could see almost nothing, and since I had arrived in total darkness I had no clear idea of where I was or what my surroundings looked like. The rustlings of the nocturnal creatures seemed ominously loud and close and I rolled my bundle of provisions up into a ball and put them beneath my head as a pillow. It seemed to me that I stayed awake for all eternity, listening to my surroundings and trying not to let my imagination run away with me again, but I may have slept. Either that or my thoughts ran into dreams without my noticing. In any case I woke, or became alert, not knowing whether the sound I heard came from outside my head or inside it.

It was a long, terrible shriek, full of longing and pain. I opened my eyes wide and stared at the darkness, waiting. It didn’t come again. With only the memory, the dream memory of it, I couldn’t judge accurately which direction the sound had come from or whether it was near or distant. At times my recollection was that it was enormously loud and clear. At other times I thought that it had been distant and faint. But every time I tried to sleep again it returned to my mind, a long, hollow moan, which made my heart pound and my eyes snap open to search the darkness.

There was no doubt that the sound was the cry of a beguiler, but there was something different about it that made it far more alarming than any I had heard before. It evoked no desire in me to get up and pursue it. Instead it made me fearful; it made me want to hide from it in the way the villagers hid from the beguilers who called in the streets. As I lay there in utter loneliness, I began to believe that I hadn’t heard the sound at all but that it had come from deep within my own soul, the proof of a madness which might not have emerged yet but was beginning to awaken and give itself expression. I was no longer so enamoured of the darkness. It seemed to live and breathe all around me as though it had a will and substance of its own. At home in my parents’ house, where I never had the need to reach for them, were leaf-lanterns and butter lamps. Here there was no way to find light. None at all. There was nothing for me to do except wait.

By the time morning came I was close to hopelessness. My body was stiff and sore from the tense and restless night and my mind was exhausted, numbed by the continual passage of fearful thoughts which had flowed like hot fluid through my brain. But nocturnal terrors lose their force when daylight comes. Just as it is impossible to imagine the cold of winter while the sun is roasting your skin, so it is impossible to remember the fear of nightmares when the morning comes and the world appears before you in the same form that it always has.

I was quite high on the mountain by now, about halfway between the village and the snow-line. The altitude I had gained the previous day made a difference to the temperature and it was not uncomfortable. The woods were full of chattering and fluttering life, and I was so engrossed by the behaviour of the birds and beasts that I covered miles without realising it.

A yellow-pip grove brought me to a halt. The berries were smaller at the higher altitude, but they were firmer, too, and tasted more substantial. When I had eaten as much as I could and wrapped another meal of them in a free corner of the shawl, I carried on up the hill-side. As I got higher the vegetation began to change. The trees there were smaller and clearly had to struggle harder for existence than their cousins further down. There were no planks to be made from these crooked and stunted trunks, and if it wasn’t for the rare delicacies that were sometimes to be found at such heights, no members of our community would ever venture up so high.

As the day progressed the hard-wood trees gave way to rhododendron, not flowering yet but showing the first signs of making buds. In past years I had been up there during the season when their blossoms covered the whole mountain with pinks and purples and whites, but now the trees were dreary and dark. I kept a close look-out for snow-apples, which are quite common up there, but I didn’t find any.

I found something better, though. Pushing its perpendicular branches out strongly, so that the rhododendrons on either side had to lean away to find light, was one of the finest jub trees that I had ever seen. I was perplexed at first because the branches were laden with ripe nuts as big as my fist, and I couldn’t understand how it was that they hadn’t been harvested yet. I was debating with my conscience about whether or not I could steal a few when it began to dawn on me that the tree had no name inscribed upon it. Three times I circled round it, inspecting the trunk from top to bottom. I was right; there was no name.

It was an extraordinary discovery. Finding an unowned jub tree is about as likely as finding a gold mine, and nearly as valuable. I shinned up the tree and knocked down a dozen of them. Most of them I added to the weighty load in my shawl, but I kept out a couple of small ones to eat before I moved on. I had never tasted one before, but I had heard that there’s nothing like a jub-nut if you’re hungry. They have a wonderful invigorating quality, like eating condensed sunshine, which is why they’re so valuable. People buy them for sickly children or convalescents. Apothecaries grind them up and add them to tonics or aphrodisiac potions for the wealthy. The two that I ate sent my spirits soaring and filled me with energy for the next leg of the journey, so that despite the considerable extra weight I covered a lot of ground during the next couple of hours.

In the cool of the early evening I came to a small clearing which caught the yellow light of the setting sun. Looking back later, I realised that I should have stayed in that pleasant spot and made an early camp for the night, but I was not adept at following life’s orders and I soon got up and pushed on. I pushed on so hard that I came out of the rhododendron belt and into the druze bushes just as it was growing dark, and as I searched for a place to sleep I wished that I had been in less of a hurry.