Duh, why did I let her publish that when I could have done it here?
Heart Voyage
She had lived by the river for what seemed a lifetime. Not always this river; but a river. Always close by, the water seemed to her a sister at times, a protector at others, always someone she could talk with as she sat on the bank picking grass-blades or daisies. She would hold the stems lovingly, stroking them as though they might be cats, sleek and fat with soft, downy fur. Every day she walked the hundred yards to the river-bank to watch the water. In winter there were ice-floes meandering south toward a sea more warm than she could imagine.
The ferry-man, during breaks in his passages back and forth, would sometimes see her and come and ask if she were ready, that day, to take passage. She'd look at him and smile, shake her head and whisper, "Not yet, Giles. Not yet." He'd nod and return to his boat, perhaps eat bread and cheese and sip the cheap wine he'd bring daily in his worn, gray wineskin.
She'd notice at whiles his gaze full on her, studying and shaking his touseled, grizzled hair slowly, as though he wondered if she were truly of this world, or some spirit or image cast adrift to wander and settle here, close to the river. She thought he'd never quite understand her: her comings and goings in the early mornings through snow and sunshine, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Summer. Always stroking some plant and occasionally bringing travelers to the shore, watching while they boarded his ferry and he poled them to the far bank.
Her thoughts always seemed her own, no matter how deftly he'd offer her the chance to release them into his care. Over the years he'd come, in his simple fashion to think of her as his daughter. She suspected that the parcels tied roughly and left on her doorstep in the dark were from him, or his wife. She imagined he'd talk about her to his wife. Possibly his descriptions had given Martha (for his wife was named so) over the years had left Martha with a sense of knowing the woman who lived by the river and came walking there in the early mornings.
The old woman would sometimes come with her husband to the ferry, walking the mile or so and carrying his lunch for him. She was grey as he and grizzled as well, had a slight limp and her clothing was a drab brown shift that appeared to be as old and as mended as both the ferryman and his wife.
Martha would also, sometimes, try her hand at a conversation that always drifted toward the weather, or the flights of the birds in the Spring and the Autumn. North to south, south to north, like the river itself the conversation meandered. Then as though they had reached some transparent wall neither could cross, the conversation would end. The old woman would wrap her shawl tightly about her shoulders, wave to Giles, speak a farewell to the woman on the bank, and walk back toward home, shuffling.
It was not as if Ornala, for so the woman on the bank was called, could not talk. She held conversations almost nightly with the travelers who'd come to her door to await the ferry opening the next morning. The travelers would speak of the countries they'd passed through. The country they were traveling toward: how fields were poor, or the rulership, no doubt, better where they were going than from whence they'd come. They'd talk about family they'd left behind, or ways of living that they no longer found useful to their comfort. They'd chat with her about the skills they hoped would avail them much better in the place they were going than had been so in the place they'd left.
The travelers would sip her apple-wine, eat her simple meals she'd prepared, and sit by her fire, talking. She would answer, agreeing mostly with whatever they'd said, for her steps had taken her through many of the places the travelers had left. She knew much of the territories to the west and south. She'd also opinions of rulers and customs and the fireside chats never had long empty places interspersed with short conversation. She'd smile and talk, give the occasional shoulder-pat or lean into their words as though the words themselves attracted her like a bee drawn to a sweet scent, irresistibly.
Giles and Martha would speak with the travelers and they would tell the couple of the cheerful and talkative woman in the cottage just past the ferry with whom they'd spent a night, high-up in the loft she kept for travelers who required a bed. The travelers thought, thought Giles and Martha, that their silent, withdrawn neighbor was a veritable mistress of welcome conversation. Yet, when she came to the riverbank, alone, she would simply sit and stare off to the east as though she were examining every blade of grass, every bush and tree, every fold and twist of the landscape a mile away across the water. She'd appear to be memorizing every color, every shadow and splash of light in the east. Then she'd walk back home.
They'd talk together as darkness wrapped their cabin of the woman who only spoke with strangers. Odd, she, not truly of this world they'd decided long ago.They'd shrug together and wander toward notions that she was aloof because she must look down on a simple ferryman and his wife. For, they knew from the travelers, she'd been to many places, seen many rivers. Perhaps she was an exiled noble-woman who'd been too haughty in the past to a duke or prince, or rejected the plea of some lordling to marry him. She must still have within her the sense that she was better, speaking to the travelers simply to gather news from a distant place she could no longer go., but never deigning to grant her neighbors a fleeting glimpse of her heart.
Orlana, for so you recall, she was named, had her own thoughts as she stared east. She'd almost decided often, but she hadn't told the couple, to take Giles' ferry across the river, to watch the small whirlpools and eddies made by the ferry-man's staff as it pushed the barge through the water and then to make her way to a city in the east where she'd live out her days. Yet, the time was not come, she'd thought, to go. Not yet, she'd wait longer, wait for the moment when she'd walk to the shore in her hooded cape and the flowing gown she had hung on the western wall of her cottage. It was a scintillating gown, one whose fabric caught light and refracted it across the fabric's weave like sunlight through a prism, webbing all the colors through the midnight blue of its dye as if the very night-sky itself had been woven, stars and planets, moon and cloud, into every panel.
And so, at dusk, as the whipperwills called out the day's end and the coming night, she sat alone on the doorstep of her cottage. She watched the fingernail moon rise from the east, casting deep moonshadow across the trees, oaks and maples, elm and birch, that grew between cottage and river. She watched the small-hours stars burn in their velvet beds of sky and space, winking. She watched the deer browsing at the edge of her yard, shyly close to the cover of the trees.
She heard the wind coax tree branches with its delicate sussurrus voice to begin the chorus of an ancient melody. Two owls hooted in the nearby trees and she heard, a few moments later, the quiet, soprano squeal of some unfortunate furred-animal caught in the talons of an owl. She watched the moon rise higher into the late Spring-sky halved and quartered by the branches of trees.
Somewhere within her she heard her mother speaking, Go now, love. You must leave this room. Go play in the sunlight before it's gone. Put aside your harp and go now, before the dark deepens and you miss the joy of the day. She sighed, carefully and softly rose, and walked into the cottage to the western wall where the dress hung, a patch of darkness against the dark. She drew off her dress and kirtle laying them carefully across the table by the sleeping hearth. She pulled the blue velvet across her head, lit a candle and fixed her hair which had been scattered by the velvet gown. She drew on her velvet slippers that, like the dress were a vivid midnight blue and, like the dress, caught the light and sheened through many colors and shadows across their fabric.
She blew away the candle-flame. She walked back to the door amid a snore and a moan from the mouths of the four travelers sleeping in her loft. She laid out cheese and bread, a pitcher of spring-water for their breakfast. In the dark she allowed herself to gaze about the room, imagining as she turned the five upholstered chairs, the worn oaken table and the faded colors of the tapestry: the maiden luring the soft and enchanted head of a unicorn into her lap while among beeches and brambles men with spears and strung bows waited, caught in time, for the unicorn's head to reach the woman's lap and so, provide them with the pause of eternity in which they'd loose their arrows and stab their spears into the immobile, enchanted flanks of blue-white flesh.
Then she opened the door, stepped out into her silent yard. She noted again the moon, now fixed above the trees, above the wind which was holding its breath as the moonlight caught, like some enchanted beast, in the folds and waves of the shimmering velvet dress. She walked, unhurriedly through the trees, hearing as she did the slight crinkle of sere and dessicated leaves crushed by her feet. Her hands held out the length of her arms touched faint cool twigs and leaves of plants and bushes among the trees as she walked.
She came to the riverbank, stared for a moment at the moon, so slight, Mother. She stared hard across the river's rippling water into the darkness of the far shore.
She bent when she came to Giles' barge, removed her shoes and set them precisely on the deck. She rose and pulled the shimmering dress over her head, holding it when she'd done so in the gaze of her green eyes. Then she laid it neatly beside the shimmering shoes, caressing away the wrinkles. She sighed.
Naked with her silvery blonde hair falling across shoulders and down her back she walked into the river. Walked until the bottom dropped away. She glided into the rippling, eddying current, water streaming away from her arms as they rose and fell, her hair floating behind her, the moonlight limning her shoulders and back. She swam, pulling east toward the further shore, vanishing in the water, the dark.
(c) 2008
