Work Text:
Once upon a time, in a land that is no longer, a girl gave herself to a river. She kissed her sleeping husband on his brow and got to her feet –
Or was it her brother?
It’s been so long now, and the stories have blurred and changed over the years. Perhaps they’ve been confused. Anyway, there was a girl, and there was a river, and there was a man sleeping on the river-bank with his sword in his hand.
She left him. She didn’t look back. She wasn’t even weeping. She was wearing the set, white look of the wounded, the look people sometimes get when they’ve taken a gut wound or their bones have broken, but their body hasn’t let them feel it yet. Their mind keeps the pain at bay.
She was the kind of woman who was destined to be graceful: tall, strong, a willow-woman, made to sway in the wind and then snap back into shape. But she wasn’t, on the day she gave herself to the river, because of the child. She was heavy with it, like a branch drawn down by the weight of its fruit. It pulled her off-course, shifted her gravity, altered the smoothness of her steps. But she walked steadily to the edge of the Cabed-en-Aras, despite the child, as though it was a weak hand on her ankle that she wouldn’t let pull her down -
But that wasn’t the order of things. She was close to her time. Her child was curled inside her, almost ready to be born. It knew her voice. It was soothed to sleep by the sound of her heart. She went into the water. She took it down with her.
Was she graceful, as she fell? I don’t think so. She didn’t alter her body into the shape of a knife or a diving bird. No one saved her. No great hands rose from the green of the river to catch her, or to break her fall –
Well, there was no one there to see. They never found her body. It never came ashore. She went into the water in her clothes, but she is remembered in her skin, running bare through the woods or curled up on a green grave. She went into the water, and her yellow hair spread out like willow-leaves trailing in the water. Her shift and her dress were dyed green and yellow, carefully mended in spots, and she’d let out the seams as her belly grew. There was hopeful embroidery around the neck-line.
She fell from a great height. Did her body go down into the reeds and catch there? Did the heavy clothes she had spun and woven with her own hands keep her down there, among the smooth river-stones and the curious brown and silver fish, and bury her in the silt under the green water?
Or was she carried on, instead, by the current, by a kind hand moving invisibly in the water? Was she washed to sea, into the cold and clear bosom of the ocean, swept on into the unknown?
-
The man asleep on the river bank-woke up. He’d been having the strangest dream. He’d been having it for a long time.
Strange things happen in dreams. People and events get muddled together: causality inverts. He’d once found himself with a sword in his hand and its deadly point already thrust into the breast of his dearest friend. He didn’t know how, or why: it was already happening, nightmarishly out of order. There was blood on his friend’s mouth. He kissed him.
Another dream. The man on the river-bank found himself in a city, the kind that could only exist in dreams. It was a little like where he’d grown up, that strange kingdom of caves with its tall king and fair queen, but it was changed, the way dreams moved things around. This king was weak. This queen was only a girl. She looked and looked at him. The dream city was less bright, less glorious. The city was burning. There were orcs everywhere. There was a dragon.
Don’t worry, it’s only a dream, its cool voice said.
The girl cried, and her voice reached him like he was underwater, half-asleep. It was only a dream.
The better dream, the best dream, was the dream he’d just been having: that had a girl in it, too. She was his wife. They were happy. There was a house. Soon there would be a child in the cradle he’d built with hands more used to making death.
When he woke up, alone on the river-bank, his sword was in his hand. There was a dragon. The girl was gone. She was his wife, and she was also his sister, in the strange way that dreams blended things.
The house was still there, but the cradle would stay empty. His sword tasted blood again, action coming before reason, all out of order. His sword was going to taste blood again, he decided. He had tasted blood on that friend’s mouth.
Kill me, the man told the sword, and the sword said, yes.
This time he didn’t wake up.
-
They found his body. They buried him. His life had been less of a dream than a tragic play performed on a stage for an audience. His father had watched it. So had a woman, dark-haired, fair beyond radiant dreams, with the face of a queen. Yes, she said, and she took what couldn’t be buried and she set them in the sky, the man and the sword, or the dream of them.
Look on my works, the dark god had whispered in his father’s ear. Look on your ruin.
I could tell you that she thought it would be nice to reverse the favour, but she was the queen of heaven. Nice was below her, beyond her.
She merely thought it was just.
-
A long time later, in a land far away, there was a new river. It moved swiftly under the sun, green and golden. It had a tributary, a streamlet: a rushing little thing, they said, which sounded like the gurgle of a child.