Fantastical Ramblings (23 page)

A breathless drop into the plunge pool. A ceaseless tumult
follows me, pushing and shoving, until I lap at the mossy banks. But I am
restless and relentless. I bully my path away, back to the center, catch on a
submerged boulder and log jam, and force a whirlpool to spin into the current,
and then off down the twisted creek that all too soon joins the big river.

That grand old lady churns slowly toward a turbulent
assignation with the sea. She is so used to battling rivers and streams much
bigger than me for territory and dominance, she barely notices as I slide into
her. I must merge and blend with her, insinuating one drop at a time into the mud
and silt of Madame’s waters.

Then back to the top of the cliff, and repeat. The joy of my
existence sends me plunging over the edge. Ever constant, ever changing, ever
picking at the rock behind and underneath me, molding it to fit my will.

People come to my banks around the plunge pool when the days
warm, when the sun creeps past the Equinox and warms the soil, inviting blades
of grass to turn deep green and flowers to shyly poke through the leaf litter. They
are hesitant, plants and people alike —and rightly so. A late frost causes all
living things to hunker down, seeking shelter where they may. But then… the sun
breaks through the cloud cover, and warmth returns.

Children play in my shallows. Their elders bathe in my pool.
They dance toward each other and back in an endless courtship. Then they trip
off to a hidden bower.

I delight in the wonder of watching them hunt and gather. Their
numbers increase with new babes—more babes appear than elders go off into the
wilderness to breathe their last and merge with the land, some of their essence
slipping into my depths. I cherish those that come to me like this , cradle
them, return them to their maker. Their souls blend with mine as we tumble and
fall over that wondrous cliff, each of us adding our own ideas to the sculpting
and etching of the rock—like the time when a great block of stone gives in to
our constant irritation and its own weight. There is a sigh, a mighty groan,
and then it relinquishes the fight to stay bound to the cliff and plunges and
shatters and bounces and rolls toward the shallows.

People scream and dive away. When our droplets settle into
the pool and the land stops groaning in pain at the sudden bruising blow, the
people creep back. They marvel at the change in their landscape. They touch and
explore and eventually laugh at their escape from the crushing power of that
rock.

I laugh with them, swirling new currents around the boulder,
inviting them to once more swim and play with me.

The seasons progress toward heat and dry. I am diminished in
size, power, and wonder. The glacier far away on the mountain top, the source
that feeds and sustains me, offers cooling relief to my people as they stand
within the shower of my fall or bask in the playful spray I still manage to
squirt into odd places. The cliff gets a respite, a reprieve from my constant
etching and sculpting.

Eventually the rains return, as they always do. Sometimes
early, sometimes late. My people reap the bounty of the fruit and game that the
hot days have ripened. A flurry of activity surrounds the drying and smoking of
their harvest. I watch and rejoice with them.

Then, when frost covers the ground every morning and I swell
within my banks, widening my spray and working at my great artistic achievement
on the cliff face, my people pack up and leave. They take their shelters, their
baskets, their tools, and themselves, leaving no trace of their long stay here.

I go back to tumbling and laughing over the lip and taking
the plunge. Time and time again. Always falling; ever constant, ever changing.

Ice and snow fill the land, freezing my spray across the
cliff face. I laugh at the assistance it grants me in my carving. My pool
glimmers with a gloss of ice on its surface. I am still powerful enough to
crash through this minor barrier and swirl beneath to follow the creek bed down
to my reunion with Madame, the grand old river. The frigid days pile on top of
each other. The ice thickens and hardens. My spray becomes frozen pellets that
mound up into a frothy cone at my base.

Still, underneath and behind a little bit of me continues
the cycle.

The seasons turn. The days lengthen, the sun brightens, my
ice gives way in a gush and I once more renew the land. New plants bravely poke
forth from the depths of their cold hiding places, trees send out tentative
tendrils of green, and my people return, bringing children to me. We rejoice
together at the reunion.

Children are special. Each babe is unique and I cherish them
all. If one falls into my pool before it is ready to swim free, I push them
into the shallows, turn them over so they can breathe until someone comes to
rescue them.

<<>>

There comes a year when there is one special child, one
girl child I always look for. She walks painfully. Her feet do not match. I
ignore this breaking of symmetry; while swimming in my pool, she is the equal of
all my people. Better than any of them. Her smile is enough to make all those
around her glow with new lightness. From her earliest days she sings songs,
tunes that bring out my hidden glories and make people laugh.

Her entire life is filled with love. She comes back with my
people, year after year, a babe, a toddler, a child. A young woman. As she
grows, young men vie for her attention despite her twisted foot. She flirts
with them all, coyly, giving me as much of her love as she withholds from them.

When my people return to the bounty surrounding my glade,
she is the first to jump into the pool and join her spirit with mine.

<<>>

But there comes a different year. A hard, dry year. The
rains do not linger. I shrink within my banks far earlier. The sun blasts out
more and more heat. The glacier that gives me life dwindles. A strange miasma
hovers over the land.

I have vague memories of it being here before. Long ago. None
of my people recognize it for the malice it carries.

The heat grows, unabated by rain or wind. I shrink further. Only
the miasma grows; that vicious, slinking, sneaky fog of sickness.

A youngling spikes a fever. I have little coolness to ease
the alien fire within him—and it is not enough. A day passes when he takes no
nourishment and flames eat away at his will to live. On the following day, he
dies.

I want to cry with my people. They loved him so much. I
played with him and knew his joy and zest.

Then another child weakens and burns. And another. The
oldest of the old is taken next.

My people walk about with fear haunting their eyes. They
spend more and more of the day absorbing what cool they can find in my sluggish
waters. Five bodies are taken into the woods for death rituals I am not privy
to. Another five and the remaining people no longer have the strength or the
will to take the bodies far enough away. I cannot cleanse the air or the land
of their passing.

I see new shadows in gaunt cheeks.

Still there is some joy in this land. This is the summer
that my special girl child, she of the twisted foot, has fallen in love. He is
the bravest and strongest of the hunters. She graces him with her smile and her
songs. He gives her a belt of the softest leather covered in tiny shells traded
for with other wanderers from far away and bits of shiny rock burned to glass
when the great mountain poured fire down on the land.

They kiss in the shadows behind my fall. I laugh with them,
and rejoice, pushing myself to grow, to make my sparse spray fuller and more
impenetrable and give them a tiny bit of privacy.

They will be joined in a great ceremony; a ritual clouded by
sadness at all those who will not attend.

But before the sacred rites can be arranged and their union
sanctified, more people take ill. They no longer have the strength to hunt and
gather enough food for their immediate needs, let alone to preserve the barest
minimum of supplies for the coming winter. The fruit and flowers, roots and
berries, shrivel in the sere season, never fleshing out to give food to people
and animals alike. The cold times are still far in the future, yet they will
come as they always come, and when it comes to those who are not prepared it
will bring more death.

I grieve that I can do nothing to help them. Without rain to
fill the creeks and runnels and replenish the underground springs I shrivel to
a mere trickle. I have little left to drop over the cliff and barely reach the
pool before evaporating into the thirsty air.

I wait with my people, hoping that the pledge of union
between the hunter and my special girl with the twisted foot and their promise
of fertility will appease whatever angry god holds the rains hostage.

Alas, before the two young people can be united, the miasma
strikes. The young hunter is one of those who do not make it. His fever blinds
him within hours, he has not enough moisture in his skin to sweat and break the
fever.

I have nothing left to give.

The miasma laughs in triumph.

My favorite young woman cannot let it win. So great is her
grief, her love, for her hunter that she climbs the winding trail to the top of
the cliff, ignoring the great pain in her twisted foot. Her strength wanes. She
has barely enough moisture left in her for tears, but those that come, when
they fall, moisten the grass and shriveled shrubs as she climbs. Higher, ever
higher. I watch and wait, helpless, knowing what she is about to do. Her love
she gives to all her people. Her life she gives for his life.

At the cliff top she falls to her knees and prays to the
creator of all. I echo her prayers. A little rain, a little cold, anything to
save her people. Then she stands atop the cliff and watches her people, my
people, drag themselves through their day. They work just before dawn when the
air is at its coolest, resting during the grinding heat. I hold my breath,
pooling at the lip. Waiting, praying that something will break and not her, not
this wonderful child, this irreplaceable girl.

Nothing happens. There is no reprieve. The sun climbs
wearily toward the horizon, a harsh blaze at the edge of the world. The birds
pause in their weary song. No sound. Nothing. But in this breathless moment of
waiting, even the great river pauses. Madame is not as proud and unfeeling as
she pretends.

The miasma waits. It will not retreat until it has claimed
the lives of all my people.

And so my special girl child spreads her arms and closes her
eyes and leans forward until the pull of the land below is too great and she
and I plunge down together.

Someone down below sees, points. A great cry goes up from my
people. Her people. I scream and roar my grief along with them.

I plead and whisper, rant and pray.

And then a darkness gathers from the west, streaking toward
the sunrise.

The skies crack open with fire and thunder. The miasma
cringes in fear. A bolt of pure, elemental fire streaks down, stabbing the
miasma at the heart. It escapes and races across the dry meadows and into the
withering forest. The fire follows close on its cowardly back, cleansing as it
goes.

My people rush into what is left of the plunge pool, where
the body of their sacrifice drifts, her long hair streaking out in tendrils
trying to merge with the weakened current. We all hunker down, as afraid of the
fire as they are the illness it removes.

Thunder ripples and grinds across the land, echoing back and
forth, forth and back from one side of the great river to the other. I catch
the sound in the half bowl of cliffs I have carved over the millennia, adding
it to the storm of my grief.

And then, blessedly, our prayers are answered. Sweet rain
descends. A few fat drops here and there. The land sucks it up greedily. More
drops come, faster and faster, until they become sheets, and then a wall of
water.

It comes too furiously for the land to absorb it all. It
runs down into the creeks, reviving me, pushing me.

The sacrifice has been accepted. The miasma is banished. My
people will live. The young hunter who loved the girl who gave her life heals,
and with his own tears waters the place where they have buried her.

I cannot weep—but there are other things I can do in
remembrance of her. I let the new wind push aside the veil of water once more
plunging down the cliff face, where I mark the path of my beloved child, my
sacrifice. The etching and sculpting of centuries hastens, solidifies, becomes
a true likeness of her face and glorious long hair etched forever into the
basalt. She will live forever in heart and memory, a constant reminder of the
high price for the miracle of life.

For the miasma will return . Not this year or the next, but
some day.

<<>>

Until then: Joy! I slide around rocks and under low
hanging branches. I tumble and somersault. Then I pause, gathering my nerve,
and dive over the cliff, spraying outward. My droplets catch the tail of an
unwary blue jay. He squawks and flits upward, scolding me. I laugh with him and
continue my free fall. As I pass the cliff face I pick at a crack, etching my
signature a little deeper, sculpting timeless designs into basalt hardened by
fire and time.

A breathless drop into the plunge pool. A ceaseless tumult
follows me, pushing and shoving, until I lap at the mossy banks. But I am
restless and relentless. I bully my path away, back to the center, catch on a
submerged boulder and log jam, force a whirlpool to spin into the current, and
then off down the twisted creek that all too soon joins the big river.

And the spirit of the child who gave her life that we all
might live, and of all our people, join with me.

~THE END~

Fantastical Ramblings

A Collection of Short Fantasy Fiction