The Radiant Road (14 page)

The silence rang around her, and without warning Clare felt empty as a spilled glass.

“I'm sorry,” she said. Seeing the hawthorn-flower massacre at her feet, she knelt on the ground, gathering crushed blossoms. “I'm sorry.” She put a hand to a stripped bough, aware she was apologizing to a tree, not caring. “Really, I'm so sorry. I'm just—I'm new at this. And I don't know your key, and you're the last gate I know. And I don't know where Dad is and I think he's in danger. And so is my tree. And so am I. And I'm scared.”

She pressed the torn flowers to her face. The totem's face rose up in her mind's eye, and she flinched.

In the air just above her was a stirring. Clare looked up.

A flock of birds was descending. They swirled around her, silent as the grass. For a moment they made a circling shape, like a swirl of fabric, wrapping her in a streaming cloak of feather and muscle and claw and air.

Then the wind lifted the bird cloak up into the sky. Silent as the air, the flock turned and wheeled like a single thing, a wide ribbon of living bird. Clare's heart leaped and fell with the flock as the birds leaped and fell, fell and wheeled, a bird-fabric folding and bending, flattening, curving. The rhythm was like a ride at a fair.

Clare had never seen a murmuration of birds before, but she knew, as anyone who sees one knows, that it was something miraculous and Strange.

Now the silent flock rippled out over the meadow ahead of her, like a sheet shaken over a bed. Many people have seen a murmuration, but few do what Clare did now: she followed it, she ran behind it. She trusted the Strange it sailed upon.

She had no idea where she was going. Jo had only said that the next gate was inside the forest. But the Strange was the only way Clare had now, and the only home she knew. She followed the birds as they swept up and fell, carrying her heart upward, dropping it down.

The birds led her into the forest beyond the pasture, down a narrow sheep track of a road, with grass growing down the center. Around them, the trees bent leaf-heavy, sunlight glowing through their many greens. Like the flock that led her, the track curved and swooped down a hill.

Clare saw no houses, no bicycles, no walkers on this road. It was as if everyone in the world had disappeared, and she was entirely alone. The birds were silent, and she was all alone in the silence, following them.

Clare did not know where these Strange birds were taking her. But because she did not know, she had no choice but to trust their rising and falling, so much like the rising and falling of her own heart.

The Heart of the Strange

After almost an hour, the sheep track rose steeply, then widened and spilled her into a stand of birches. Keeping the birds in sight, Clare ran through the trees until she found herself at the top of a silky green hill, overlooking an iron-colored lake, sinuous and many-curved, like a woman lying on her side. Just where the woman's heart would be stood a small island.

Clare's flock flew to the island. There it bent like one thing into a wild ball of birds, a spinning feathered sphere. The bird-sphere exploded like fireworks over the island, sending birds off in all directions. Some flew past her, making the birch leaves turn and tremble in the wind, this way, then that, like thin green coins in a magician's hands.

Clare knew, then, that the island was the end of her fairy road, and her heart jumped high with the knowledge. Then it fell, just as hard. Because it was one thing to know that the island was the end of the fairy road.

But how do you get to an island in the middle of an iron-colored lake?

“Tell me what to do,” she whispered, as if she could command the world.

But the world is not commandable. Nothing happened, except that the sun came out, sudden and bright in her face. She squinted. The sun made jewels on the water, a whole shop-window-full, diamond and silver. She pulled out her commonplace book and wrote:
It's like everything is making, birds and sun and everything. The world is always making and unmaking around us.

As she put the notebook back in her pocket, the clouds passed. It was that kind of sun, going in, coming out, going in again. And with that shift of the slanting light, the lake's color changed for a moment, from dazzling diamond to paler silver, revealing what lay beneath.

Clare said, “Oh!” and began to slip, tumble, and slide down the grassy hill toward what she had just seen: a snaking line of stones that ran just below the surface of the water, like a vein beneath skin, from the shore all the way to the island.

In a story it sounds perfectly easy: if a snaking line of stones arises in a lake—well, a girl in a fairy tale would just run across the water, stone to stone, until she reached the enchanted isle. Easy: just like that.

But this is not a fairy tale, although it has fairies in it. This is a real story in the real world. The water was real water, cold and gray and muttering. Clare was a real girl, with real fears, and short legs. These stones weren't high and dry: they ran just beneath the lapping,
iron-cold water. They were hard to see, and they were far apart. If they had been made as a bridge, it was for someone with legs far longer than Clare's.

She waded a few feet out into the cold water, pebbles grinding and sliding beneath her boots, cold water soaking through her jeans up to her knees. She scrambled unsteadily onto the first stone.

Now what?

She tried to make her leg long, so that she could keep one foot on the first stone and place the other on the next. But the stones were too far apart, and she slipped and fell knee-deep.

Next, holding the commonplace book between her teeth, she tried wading to the slippery second rock. But the water was waist-deep by the time she got there. Even as she pulled herself up to stand uneasily and barely two-footed atop it, she knew that beyond this, the water would be chest deep, then over her head. No more wading. The water was too cold for it, anyway—she was already gasping and numb.

She waded back, half soaked, to stand shivering on the shore, and put the notebook back in her damp pocket. One thing was clear. The only way to cross this bridge would be to run, to leap from stone to stone. It would be like running hurdles in track, she told herself. You just have to get the right rhythm going.

Clare looked at the curving line that would take her to the distant island. She would be out very far on the lake, all alone. She
pushed the memory of many knocked-over hurdles, bruised shins, and skinned knees out of her mind.

Clammy jeans sticking to her legs, she walked a hundred yards back from shore. Then she faced the lake and, for no reason at all, gave an echoing, wordless war cry. She began to run. Her stride lengthened with each step. At the edge of the shore, she aimed her flying foot only at that first stone, not thinking about the others. She caught that stone, and only as she was pushing off did her eyes find the next one.

Sometimes, you can't skitter along like a mouse along a wall. Sometimes you have to run, right out in the open, and trust that your foot will fall in the right place every time. If you doubt yourself, you'll slip, and the cold water will swallow you. But Clare flew, eyes always on the stone ahead of her. All she heard was the up-splash of water when her foot hit wet stone, and the silence as she sailed between.

If you were watching from above, you would have seen a girl flying across the lake, from stone to unseen stone. It would look so easy, just like in a fairy tale.

Breathless, Clare stood on the island shore. Her guess had been right: this was the heart of the lake, and the heart of the Strange. Many Strange currents swirled through this air.

She was cold, she was shivering.
But he can't follow me here.
The lake would never show Balor those stones, she felt sure.

A sudden clamor: lake birds beating the water with their wings and their calls.
Woo-HOW-hoh
-yee-yee,
the vowel-only language of the birds. Then the island returned to a lake-lapped silence. The lake cradled the island, rocked it, lapped its edges, sang to it with water sounds.

A late afternoon sun came out, and the air warmed—it was the warmest she'd felt in Ireland. It might even have been too warm for her, if she hadn't been so damp and cold. Her clothes and hair began to dry. Sometimes the world is cold; and sometimes kind.

She headed deeper in.

In the forest it was cool. In the forest there were many paths. Everything was rounder and softer; even the roots of the trees were rounded and softened by the green, green moss that crept over it all. Sharp slices of gray rock pushed through the earth, only to be wrapped up and softened by moss.
Green grows out of stone here
, Clare thought;
stone and leaf are that friendly.
This was an old place.

The Strange began to weave around her.

First, Clare heard singing off to her right—a high, humming, tuneful song that dissolved back into sounds of wind and birds and water. Then something flashed through the grass, silver on black,
too fast for an animal. But all she caught was a tail or mane of silky white hair, low to the ground, as it flew behind a tree.

Though she felt no drop, rain rattled in the trees, like the ghost of rain.

An entry from the commonplace book came to her:
“‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.' Shakespeare was there.”

Not just Shakespeare.
My mother was here.

She caught a scent, or layers of scents, on the breeze—black tea sweetened with some dark fruit, spiced with pepper and ginger. Her nose lifted and turned to follow the scents as they wafted and wove around her, then faded and were gone.

Oh, it was a magic island, all right, and the heart of the Strange. Strange ran in currents around her, warm and cool, sound and scent, unsettling and enticing. She walked on, eye and ear and nose alive to the changing air and light around her.

Another song rose up out of the water and bird sounds. She felt drunk or drugged. She felt she was in a dream. Her goals and plans, her fears and regrets—what she ran from, and what she ran toward—all of these slipped away. She wanted nothing but to drown in this Strange.

Her mulchy, leaf-shaded path led up, then stopped at the edge of the water. On this high point she knelt in the dirt behind a barbed stand of holly, watching the slow pulse of the lake.

I'll write something
, she thought dreamily, pulling out her notebook, admiring the creamy pages.
I'll make a making.
She thought for a moment, then wrote a title:

Delight and Hurt Not

Afraid to watch my feet, I ran

Here. And then

Muttering birds' wings,

And other voices, sweet and rough

As when in bed you stir

And moan, crushed by sleep,

Struggling from nightmare's grasp—

Clare stopped, frowned at “nightmare.” She hadn't meant
nightmare
—had she? She crossed it out and paused, pencil hesitating.

A wrong sound rose up: an angry buzz. Screened behind the holly, Clare looked up. A motorboat raced along the far bank, digging a deep crease in the lake. The startled water rose up again and again, a series of small mountain ranges, rising and subsiding and rising.

Clare sat frozen, yanked from her dreamlike, Strange-drugged trance, back into the world. The world in which a tall, broad, black-haired man stood in the prow of a boat, searching the banks of the lake with a long telescope.

Clare bent low, leaned forward, watching. Long after the boat passed, the waves against the island shore grew higher and more
agitated. Something behind her reached out a hand; she spun around.

It was only the shadow of a branch. But Clare was already on her feet and running.

Path to path, stumbling along, Clare pushed deeper into the heart of the island. The gate. There was a gate on this island somewhere. But she felt no faith she could sniff it out in a place so thick with Strange, let alone find its key before that buzzing boat arrived.

Just as she was thinking,
And I'm so thirsty
, the sun fell on a spot off the path, a small clearing, where a tall bush like the fairy thorn spread flower-laden arms over a still pool. The pool made a perfect mirror of the trees and sky above: a pattern of black branches, green leaf, white cloud, and robin's-egg sky, rippled at the edge by the bubbles of the spring that fed it.

Breathless, Clare leaned down to sip water from the pool. When she raised her face, the world in the pool distorted, twisted, composed itself again. The face in the water was her own face, but older and fiercer (and to be honest, dirtier) than the face she remembered from the mirror at home.

When you find the mirror, you've found the way.
Who said that? Was it from an old story, or an old song?

The angry buzz grew louder now, a wasp returning for the sting. The motorboat coming closer. Coming back.

Clare was a girl visited by the Strange. She was a girl who followed silver music to an earth rainbow, who saw a monstrous beast through a frame of stones. She was a girl led to a secret lake by a crowd of birds, a girl to whom the lake itself revealed a path of stones. She should have seen what was right in front of her.

But all she could hear was a motorboat that forced itself against the water's wishes.

Clare leaned over again, to look at herself in the water. Her face seemed to fill the sky, as full as a sun, watching the world below. She drank for a second time, dipping her face full in the water, eyes to eyes, nose to nose, lips to lips. The water was cool and sweet, a clean, stony taste on her tongue.