The Well of the North Wind Read online

  Kenneth Steven lives in Highland Scotland. He is a poet, children’s author, novelist and translator: some thirty of his books have been published to date. He travels widely to undertake readings and give lectures and creative writing workshops, and he has made many programmes for BBC Radio. Much of his writing is available on Kindle.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016

  Marylebone House

  36 Causton Street

  London SW1P 4ST

  www.marylebonehousebooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Kenneth Steven 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Marylebone House does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–910674–25–3

  eBook ISBN 978–1–910674–26–0

  Typeset and eBook by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

  For Barbara McDougall of Lismore

  The boy liked to draw in the sand. He liked to take his finger and drag it in whorls and arcs so a dark pattern was left behind. He crouched above the grey sand that shone with the memory of water. He was five summers old now and whenever his mother did not need him this was where he came. It was a beach held between the claws of the rocks; he had learned the little path that snaked down from the upper ground – it was a place protected on all sides by rocks. Well, on three sides – the fourth was open to the sea, the blue-green play of water in constant shift with light and shadow. Sometimes, when his forefinger was sore with drawing, he sat on a red rock with his feet tucked up close under him, to watch the sea come in about him. But that was only on days when the sea was soft; at other times he stood on the shore as the waves drove in, the sky beyond a slate-grey, serpents clustering in the whites of the waves, breaking on the shore in a bright silver. Then he felt small; he hid his hands from the cold and he felt smaller than his brothers and sister – strange and a little frightened. He was excited and frightened at one and the same time, and he did not know what to do.

  But this was his place nonetheless, and he did not want his brothers to find it. The beach was in his mind all the time; it lay at anchor in his consciousness and he went to it in his imagination when he could not go there in reality. For there was fresh water to bring from the well, there was the fire to tend, there was his sister to comfort, there were sticks to bring . . .

  It was a long time since his father had not come home. He had gone for birds’ eggs on the stack with two of the other men because they were so hungry in winter. A child had died and storm had rattled the headland for endless days. So his father had gone but had not come back. The two other men returned with eggs but they were silent, their eyes scattered and strange. One of them had bent to him and taken a soft finger over his cheek and looked away. He had gone to his mother but his mother had not wanted him; she had bundled him away and hidden in the darkness of the earth house. He had felt her shaking. He had wandered with hunger and he had not known the place he came to, but someone held him and put something that tasted sweet and slippery in his mouth. He had fallen asleep warm and wakened to skies torn between blue and grey. He was frightened to go back home and he hovered outside, a salt stinging in his eyes – but suddenly his mother saw him and ran to him and held him.

  That was a long time ago. He only remembered fragments of his father now; they were like the tiny pieces of kindling he found between rocks, the dry sprigs that were best for lighting fires. He remembered him singing early in the morning; he remembered the colour of his eyes; he remembered the shape of his back. But he could not remember his voice. He went searching through the caves of his head in search of his father’s voice, but he could not find it. He cried at night for it and could not understand where it had gone. He wanted to tell his mother but instead he just huddled in to her, right in to the darkness of her and the smell of her skin, and cried.

  *

  One morning he was drawing in the sand. He had not been allowed to go to the beach so he had run there all the same; he had shouted defiant words to his mother that were caught like twigs in the wind and blown away. He had come down to the beach and crouched there as always, but he felt a knot somewhere inside him that would not go away. He felt it when he swallowed. There was a pool of water in front of him, a pool that ruffled when the wind came, that was driven from a still mirror to a grey flickering. But suddenly he saw it had grown dark with shadow, with a brown shape. He looked up into the face of a man.

  He did not think to be angry, though this was his place and he had not wanted to share it, not with anyone. There was no time to think of anger; he was just taken aback, amazed. The man had a wide face and small, bright eyes that glittered. The skin of his face was very white; it was drawn tight over its frame.

  ‘What is your name?’

  The voice was kind, not like the voice of the man who shouted sometimes for him to go and get water or tend the fire. That voice hurt the inside of the heart; it made the soles of the boy’s feet somehow feel raw. This voice was gentle, and though it was not his father’s, it made him think of the ghost of his father’s voice, the voice he had searched for and lost a long time ago.

  ‘Fian.’

  ‘How would you like to learn to write, Fian?’

  The boy did not understand the question. A breeze came over the beach and ruffled the dark hair over the forehead of the man with the white face. He looked down and saw the things he had drawn in the sand, the shapes and pictures. He looked out to sea as a white edge of water broke over rocks. Then the man leaned forwards and took his right hand softly in his own; he extended the forefinger, brought it down to the sand and made it draw one long straight line. Then at the top he made the boy’s finger curl a circle. He brought another line down beside the first, but this one went longer and then came backwards, curling at the end also. Then hidden in one of the curls he made Fian’s finger draw a face; a forehead and a face and a beard. Then he let Fian’s finger go.

  ‘How would you like to learn to write?’ he asked again, and now his voice was even softer than before. Fian looked up and he thought of his father again, though he did not know why. He heard the patter of his heart under his woollen cloak and he nodded.

  *

  The monks had chosen that place because of the water: not one well, but seven. There in that gnarled place of limestone; that old porous bone of a headland with its caves and its crumbling. They had come there and the people thought them strange, but not strange enough to drive them out. Strange enough to ignore; strange enough to leave alone. Their chapel was at the very edge of the land, at the land’s end – a place that no one in all their madness might want. The wind blew there from all the corners of the world, and the bare pavement of limestone was treeless, bush-less, useless. The people called it the place of ghosts; there were stories of white horses, of sea creatures, of white beings from the sky. It was a place where time was torn, but it was no good place. For that reason they did not grudge the monks their chapel, their bare dwellings – they thought them mad and left them to their madness.

  But the water was sweet. There, in the middle of that giants’ chessboard of wrecked slabs of stone, a fist of pure, good water sang upwards, glistening. It was as though it had waited for them, known of their coming. It was a gift. But the monks had other water too: they had the sea. They understood wood and they knew the waves; th
ey shaped boats and they learned every cave and headland, brought home spillings of silver fish and gave names to the skerries, the whirlpools, the beaches.

  They had brought with them one fire, one cradled handful of fire that must never go out. It was set among the stones of the chapel, and though it was torn this way and that in the winds, it never went out. It flickered beside the cross of quartz. One spring, word came to them that the people of the settlement had lost their fire. Ten days there had been storm and the coast was bruised and dazed; at last the sea breathed in and out, and light seeped from a low sky. They wasted no time; the moment they heard they began carrying light, sheltering it and watching it until it had been delivered. It was brought into the earth house without a word. The sore, white faces had looked up, wondering and dumb. It had been Marua who had thought of the gift.

  *

  And in the springtime that followed, Marua went back to them, to the people to whom he had brought light and fire. The blue sky broke above, and in the limestone land pink and yellow sprigs grew and fluttered in the breeze. There were birds, tiny nothings of things that came in waves through the spring air. Marua came back to the people and he crouched in the earth house, the same place to which he had carried the fire, and he told them about the light that had come to earth. He told wonderful stories of the light and they listened, amazed and silent. He visited the earth house when the moon had floated up from below the sea and the stars crystalled the night sky, for then his path was clear along the limestone tableland. Then, too, the men had come back from their edges of field; the children slept and they had time to listen. They said nothing, but the story of the light stayed with them; they carried fragments of Marua’s words and could not forget them. And one day three of the men came like shy, unbroken horses to the chapel out at the place of ghosts; they waited until Marua had come to them and then nodded, and he brought them to the spring and put a hand of water over their foreheads, and one of them cried.

  All that had been many years before, but it was how the bridge was built. There was a path now between the earth houses and the chapel. So that morning when Fian saw the brown shadow in the pool of brine and looked up into the strange, wide face – he knew at once where the man came from. Marua himself was old and wandered and grey; his days of carrying the light were done, but his eyes were no less generous. The young monk who found Fian was called Innis; he was only two years gone from his own family and he missed his little brother.

  *

  At first Fian did not talk about Innis. So much of his world was shared: the place where he laid his head, the place where he ate and went to wash, the place where he dressed. When he buried his head in the soft place close under his mother’s arm it was likely a younger brother had done the same on the other side. On the day he first met Innis he came home and had a burning hand to remind him of the words he had spoken when he left. He went to bed in a curled ball, his cheeks salty and angry and defiant. Innis was his. He did not understand what he wanted to give him, but to all the children the monks were strange and alluring. Often they went in flocks along the path to the limestone tableland; they crouched in the chapel, out of the wind and the spit of the rain, to watch the fire burn beside the quartz cross or listen to the singing of the monks. One of them, by the name of Lua, would take the children to see the boat beached high up in a creek of red rocks. He let them clamber down into the boat and pretend they were rowing against a great storm or pulling up fish from the waves. So whatever the children understood, they knew the monks were generous, that they were kind and rarely scolded. Fian went to bed that first night knowing that somehow he had one of them all to himself. He wanted neither the grown-up world nor the world of his friends to know. He would much rather keep this thing in a box, a box to which he alone had the key.

  The trouble was that often when he raced down the path to the edge of the sea and came to the place with the rock stairs that led to the beach, there was no Innis there to meet him. He crouched high up at the top of the beach, rocking on his heels and hiding his hands from the wind’s chill, hoping and hoping. For he did not want Innis to think he had not remembered, that he did not care. That was an awful thought to Fian. And at night he was restless with worry over it; he did not know how to solve this first dilemma in his life. He worried at the knot in his heart until sleep washed him away, but even then he struggled and flung out in his dreams, for he did not want to lose this gift – this precious thing that was his and his alone.

  That winter he was sick. Perhaps it was because of the strange thing he had eaten at the edge of the field, the thing with the stalk and the brown roof the others had dared him to eat. It had tasted sweet and good; he had not spat it out. He had forgotten all about it and had run with them to explore a new rock, to climb into a hidden cave, to come back by the edge of the sea where they were not supposed to go. Then all at once he had felt heavy and sick. He went to his mother but it was like walking through deep water, and the words he spoke sounded far away and someone else’s. She carried him to the edge of the earth house and he closed his eyes; the cool of the place was good. When he blinked a strange orange colour came, and all he wanted was to lie there, still in the darkness, not talking or moving or thinking.

  He never knew if it was that day or a day later or longer that he heard their voices. He cared about nothing but he was rocked endlessly on an orange sea and the sickness rose in him over and over. The voices came and went; they were muffled, and at first he did not even care about them – he wished they would go away.

  I wanted the boy to learn. I can teach him.

  His mother said something he could not hear. And he could not think of the other voice, or work out to whom it belonged. It was familiar but he could not think and he did not want to think. The orange wave rose again.

  If you would allow me then I would. Please.

  It was closer now, closer in all ways. Fian wanted to sit up and look but he could not; even the thought brought the waves back. And then he remembered; it was Innis! Innis had come to find him and his heart sang with joy. He had come to find him!

  You can take him if you look after him.

  The words washed him into a new sleep and when he woke again he knew at once he was not in the earth house. He was being carried out and he felt the wind about him; he was chattering with cold and he felt thin and sore. He was jolted this way and that, and he closed his eyes again, moaning because the sickness was so bad. It twisted in him, deep inside; like a snake it coiled deep in the darkness of him, thick and black. Then at last he was still. There was something warm around him and there were soft voices he could not quite hear. And then he drank water, the purest and coldest water that reached to the very edges of the darkness, and he sank into real sleep, good sleep, and the orange was gone at last.

  *

  ‘Come down with me to the beach. I want you to come with me.’

  There was no wind, not the slightest breath. Yet still the low clouds were like torn shreds of wool over a blue sky. The light came and went, so full it was almost too much for the eyes to bear.

  It felt as though the world was new, as though all of it had been reborn. It was as if he saw living things for the first time, smelled the roughness of peat smoke and had never done so before. His head was light and Innis went too fast for him in his eagerness; he almost tripped on a shard of limestone and had to stop, breathe, remember. The faraway hills were touched with snow. The winter remained, though he did not feel the cold. When the sun came, behind him, it was ice bright and cast clear brilliance on everything in its path. The monk turned, watching and waiting for him, eyes kind in that wide face. And the boy remembered that first moment he had seen him, his shadow reflected in the water.

  He crept down the path to the shore like an old man, terrified of falling. Great trunks of wood had been brought in by the storms; every piece would be used by the springtime – not a fragment wasted. He tottered on in the end to the sand; Innis was waiting for him, carving let
ters in the sand with a stick. He crouched down and now he felt the wind; gnarled edges that ate the hands and feet with raw soreness. He could not endure this long.

  ‘You nearly died, Fian,’ the other said, and still did not look at him, still went on writing in the sand. ‘But there was a plant we found, and maybe that healed you. Or perhaps it was our prayers.’ There was the very edge of the sound of a smile in his voice. He put the stick down and looked at the boy. His eyes glittered over him before he spoke again and Fian met his gaze, waited.

  ‘You will stay with us,’ he said. ‘You will stay with us and learn to write. All that time ago I saw what you drew in the sand and I knew you had a gift, Fian. I wanted you to learn. We will give you what we can and you will stay with us. If you are content with that.’

  Fian kept looking at him, wondering. The words made a kind of sense, but they were too old for him and he was still dizzy and half-awake. Everything was new and strange.

  ‘When do I have to go back?’ he asked, searching.

  ‘You don’t, Fian,’ Innis said, leaning forward and wanting to take hold of his hand. ‘You can stay with us, for as long as you want.’

  The thought stretched into the distance. A kind of sense seeped into his head, but it would take a long time.

  ‘And I will teach you to write, Fian. To draw beautiful things.’

  *

  So he became one of them. His days were woven out of song; he wakened to song and went to sleep to song. He grew up fast, his head filled with stories of bread and fish, of miracles. Until then his small world had been a fight for space, for food, for attention. It had been a confusion of smells and dogs and voices. In the place of ghosts all was so much clearer, each day had the same rhythm. Yet more was expected of him, not less. In the earth house he had been a pair of hands to send out to the well for water; he had been a pair of feet to go and get kindling. Here he was the youngest of men; he was treated as one of them. And kindness lay at the heart of every command. There was no privilege in being the smallest; he was expected to stay awake as late as all the rest. But it was the kindness that ran like a fine thread through everything, spoken or unspoken, and slowly he learned what it meant and how to give it back.