The Spellcoats

“You mean, the Undying told him we must go?” I said. Early though it was, my back pricked all the way down with awe. Usually I only get that in the evenings.

“Gull must have heard us talking,” said Hern. “That explains it just as well. But I’m glad something made up your stupid minds for you. Let’s get the boat loaded.”

Then I did not want to go at all. Shelling was the place I knew. Everywhere beyond was an emptiness. People came out of the emptiness and said things about Heathens with spells, the King and war, but I did not believe in anywhere but Shelling really. I did not want to go into the nowhere beyond it. I think Hern felt the same at heart. We went slowly into the woodshed with the lamp, to push the boat out ready to load.

Water rolled in from the woodshed as soon as we opened the door. It came round our ankles like yellow silk, lazy and strong and smooth, and made ripples in the living room. Inside the shed the boat was floating level with the step. The lamp shone up from our startled reflections underneath it.

“You know,” said Hern, “we can load it in here and just row out through the door.”

I looked towards the door, dazzled by the lamp. I looked too low, where the land usually slopes towards the River, and I had one of those times when you do not know what you see. There was a long, bright streak, and in that streak, a smooth sliding. I thought I had been taken out of my head and put somewhere in a racing emptiness. There I was, upside down under my own feet – a bush of hair and staring eyes, wild and peculiar. I wonder if this is how Gull feels, I thought.

Duck did not like it either. “There’s water high up, where the air usually is!” he said, and he waded over and tried to shut the door.

Hern was the only one of us who could shut the door against the force of the water. I always forget how strong Hern is. You would not think he was, to look at him. He is long and thin, with a stoop to his shoulders, very like the heron he was named for.

We argued a great deal over loading the boat and trailed up and down the ladder to the loft a great deal too often at first. Robin said we should take the apples. Hern said he hated last year’s fruit. It was because none of us wanted to leave. Gradually, though, we grew excited, and the loading went quicker and quicker. Hern packed things in the lockers, shouting orders, and the rest of us ran to and fro remembering things. We packed so many pots and pans that there was nothing to cook breakfast in and almost nothing left to eat. We had to have bread and cheese.

Robin got Gull up and dressed him in warm clothes. The rest of us were in our thick old waterproof rugcoats, which I only make when they are truly needed, because it is double weave and takes weeks. My everyday skirt was soaked, and I did not want to spoil my good one. Besides, I had had enough of splashing about in a skirt in the night. I wore Hern’s old clothes. I tried to persuade Robin to wear some of Gull’s. A year ago she would have agreed. But now she insisted on being ladylike and wearing her awful old blue skirt – the one I made a mistake in, so that the pattern does not match.

The only warm rugcoat we could find which fitted Gull was my father’s that my mother had woven him before they were married. My mother was mistress of weaving. The coat tells the story of Halian Tan Haleth, Lord of Mountain Rivers, and it is so beautiful that I had to look away when Robin led Gull to the table. The contrast between Mother’s weaving and Robin’s blue skirt was too painful.

It occurred to me while we were dressing Gull that there was not so much wrong with him as I had thought. He smiled once or twice and asked, quite reasonably, whether we had remembered fishing tackle and spare pegs for the mast. It was just that he stared so at nothing and did not seem to be able to dress himself. I wonder if he’s blind, I thought. It did seem so.

I tested it at breakfast by pushing a slice of bread at Gull’s face. Gull blinked and moved his head back from it. He did not tell me not to or ask what I thought I was doing, as Hern or Duck would have done, but he must have seen the bread. I put it in his hand, and he ate it, still staring.

“I tried that last night,” Duck whispered. “He can see all right. It’s not that.”

We were sitting round the table with our feet hooked on the chair rungs because water was coming in from all the doors, even the front door, and most of the floor was a pool. There was a hill in the corner where my loom and spinning wheel stood, so that was dry, and so was the scullery, except for a dip in the middle. We laughed about it, but I did wish I could have taken my loom. The boat was so loaded by then that there was no point even suggesting it.

As I put the last slice of bread in Gull’s hand, there was an explosion of sizzling steam from the hearth.

“Oh, good gracious!” Robin shouted. She soaked us all by racing to the hearth. Water was spilling gently across the hearthstones and running in among the embers. Amid cloud upon cloud of steam, Robin snatched up the shovel and scooped up what was still alight. She turned round, coughing, waving one hand and holding up the red-hot shovelful. “The pot, the firepot, quickly! Oh, why do none of you ever help me?”

That fire has never been out in my lifetime. I could not think how we were to light it again if it did go out. At Robin’s shriek, even Gull made a small bewildered movement. Hern splashed away for the big firepot we use in the boat, and I fetched the small one we take to the field. Duck took a breakfast cup and tried to scoop up more embers in that. He had only rescued half a cupful before the water swilled to the back of the fireplace and made it simply a black, steaming puddle.

“I think we’ve got just enough,” Robin said hopefully, putting the lids on the pots.

Everything was telling us to leave, I thought as I waded with Hern to the woodshed to put the pots in the boat. The River had swung the outer door open again. It was light out there. Outside was nothing but yellow-brown River, streaming past so full and quiet that it seemed stealthy. There was no bank on the other side. The brown water ran between the tree trunks as strongly as it ran past the woodshed door. It was all so smooth and quiet that I did not realise at first how fast the River was flowing. Then a torn branch came past the door. And was gone. Just like that. I have never been so near thinking the River a god as then.

“I wonder if there’s water all round the house,” said Hern. We put the pots in the boat and waded back to see.

This was very foolish. It was as if, among all the other things, we had forgotten what Uncle Kestrel had told us. We climbed the slope beside my loom and took the plank off the shutters there. Luckily we only opened the shutter a crack. Outside was a tract of yellow, rushing water as wide as our garden, and not deep. On the further edge of it, in a grim line, stood most of the men of Shelling. Zwitt was there, leaning on his sword, which looked new and clean because he had not been to the war. The swords of the others were notched and brown, and more frightening for that. I remember noticing, all the same, that behind them the yellow water had almost reached Aunt Zara’s house. Where they were standing was a point of higher ground between the two houses.

“Look!” we called out, and Duck and Robin crowded to the open crack.

“Thank the Undying!” said Robin. “The River’s saved our lives!”

“They’re making up their minds to cross over,” said Duck.

They were calling to one another up and down the line. Zwitt kept pointing to our house. We did not realise why until Korib, the miller’s son, came past the line with his longbow and knelt to take aim. Korib is a good shot. Hern banged the shutter to just in time. The arrow met it thock a fraction after, and burst it open. Hern banged it shut again and heaved the plank across. “Phew!” he said. “Let’s go.”

“But they’ll see us. They’ll shoot!” I said. I hardly knew what to do. I nearly wrung my hands like Robin.

“Come along,” Hern said. He and Robin took hold of Gull and guided him to the woodshed.

“Just a minute,” Duck said. He splashed over to the black pool of the hearth and gathered the Undying down out of their niches. It shocks me even now when I think of Duck picking them up by their heads and bundling them into his arms as if they were dolls.

“No, Duck,” said Robin. “Their place is by this hearth. You heard your father say so.”

“That,” said Duck, “is quite ridiculous nonsense, Robin. The hearth’s in the firepots, and the firepots are in the boat. Here.” He pushed the Young One into Hern’s hands. I noticed Hern did not object. Because Robin was busy with Gull, Duck pushed the One at me. He kept the Lady himself. She has always been his favourite. The One felt heavy in my hands, cold and grainy. I was afraid of him and even more afraid of slipping in the water and losing him. I took him so carefully to the boat that they were all calling out to me to hurry and trying not to call too loud. I could hear Zwitt talking outside. He sounded near. They had a heavy blanket over the boat, hanging over the mast. Robin was holding it down on one side, Duck on the other. Hern had the boat untied and was standing ready to push it out of the shed.

“Get in, Tanaqui. You can be religious in the boat,” he said. I climbed in carefully and found Gull lying in the bottom where Robin had put him. As soon as I was in, Hern started to push the boat. It was so loaded that he could hardly move it. I pushed up the blanket and offered to help. “Get down!” he snapped, red in the face, with his teeth showing.

As he said it, the boat was through the door, and the current took her sideways along the end of the house, all in seconds. I am not sure whether Hern meant to get in straight away and did not have time or whether he meant to stay out and push us into deep water. At all events he was still surging through the edge of the floods with his hands on the stern when the boat came out beyond our house, in front of Aunt Zara’s, and the Shelling people saw us.

They shouted. I had not seen how they hated us till I heard them shout. It was terrible. Some of them were wading in the water towards our house, and they ran through it towards us. Zwitt slipped over. I hoped he drowned. The others on dry land yelled and pointed at us and cursed. And Korib, on one knee, bent his bow to an arrow again.

“Hern! He’s shooting!” I screamed.

Hern was trying to push us sideways into the deep River. He tried to get round to hide behind the boat at the same time. That pushed us the other way. We wove about. Korib shot. It was as good a shot as the first. Hern would be dead, but at that instant we reached the real Riverbank at last, and the ground went from under Hern. He disappeared up to his neck, and the arrow hit the rudder instead. Korib took another and bent his bow again.

Hern had the sense to hang on to the boat. If he had let go then, he would have drowned, for he lost his head completely. “My clothes are heavy!” he screamed. “The River’s pulling me down!”

Duck and I climbed about over poor Gull, trying to heave Hern up, and Hern went hand over hand along the boat to keep out of Korib’s aim. The boat tipped frighteningly, and Hern’s caution was undone, because it spun round and let Korib see him again. The boat was spinning all the time after that. Every time I saw the bank, it was in a different place. Korib kept shooting, at Duck and me as well as at Hern, but we were too busy trying to get Hern aboard to be frightened. Afterwards we counted six arrows stuck in the blanket, besides the one in the rudder.

We got Hern up in the end. Robin, by that time, had hooked the tiller in place and was trying to steer, but the boat still went round and round. Hern sat streaming beside Gull, very much ashamed and trying to laugh it off. “When your clothes are full of water, you can’t swim, you know,” he said. “They weigh a ton.” We made him get into dry things.

By this time we were almost at the end of the part of the River we knew, right down to the thick forest. We had gone that fast. I took the steering from Robin and tried to stop us spinning so. It was not easy. The current ran so strong that if you pushed the boat at all sideways, you were spinning again before you could count five. It took all my skill, but in spite of what my brothers say, I am as good a waterman as they.

“This is dangerous,” said Duck, watching me. “We can only go where the River wants. How can we get to the bank?”

Before I could say to Duck what I felt like saying, Gull said suddenly, “We can go where the River wants.” He sat up with his back against a thwart. He seemed happy and dreamy, as he used to be when we went fishing on a summer day, and we were sure he was better.

This made us realise – as if we had not known till then – that we had left Shelling far behind, and we were glad. I do not think one of us has ever regretted it. We laughed. We talked over all the lucky things that led to our escape, which is a time none of us will forget, I think, and all the while we were going, fast as a swallow skims, straight down the centre of the River, and the trees on the bank seemed to spin about with our speed.

We must have gone leagues that day, and in all those leagues there was nothing on either bank but flooded forest. All there was to see was tall bare trees, with the green just coming to the upper boughs and water winding among their trunks. They had a chilly, slaty look. I confess I was disappointed. It is often the way when you dream of doing something new; it is not so new after all.

When night came on, I tried to work the boat across the current to the eastern bank. Shelling is on the west bank. We did not think Zwitt had sent anyone after us, but we kept to the other side of the River for a number of nights all the same. This caution nearly drowned us that night. The River whirled; the boat whirled and went on whirling, despite all Hern, Robin and I could do, pulling together at the tiller. Only Gull sat calmly. Duck picked up the Lady and hugged her to his chest. Then the River rushed beneath one side of the boat, and we tipped. I put out my hand and took hold of the One. But he felt so cold and hard that I put him down and picked up the Young One instead. It surprises me still that we came among the trees without sinking. I am sure it was because of our Undying.

We poled and pushed on the trees until we came to higher ground, where we landed and let some of the fire out of our firepots. We cooked pickled trout for supper, and very good it was. Gull seemed so far recovered that he was able to eat for himself.

“I think being back with the River is curing him,” Hern said.

That night, after a long quarrel, we decided to sleep in the boat. Hern and Duck were for sleeping on land. Robin, with sound sense, said that if the Shelling men found us, we need only untie the boat to escape. Duck said we could just as easily run away into the forest. In the end Robin said, “Gull’s head of the family. Let’s ask him. Gull, shall we sleep on the land or in the boat?”

“In the boat,” Gull said.

In the middle of the night Gull woke us up shouting and talking. Robin says he talked of disaster and Heathens at first, but when I woke up, he was saying, “All those people! So many people, all rushing. I don’t want to go with them. Help!” Then he shouted for my father, and I could hear he was crying.

We all sat up, and Hern got the little lamp lit. Gull seemed to be lying asleep in the boat, but he was talking, and tears were running down his face. Robin bent over him and said, “It’s all right, Gull. You’re with us. You’re safe.”

“Where’s Uncle Kestrel?” Gull said.

“He brought you to us because that was safest,” Robin said.

“I’m not safe from the rushing people,” said Gull. “Don’t tell me to pull myself together and be a man. They want to take me with them.”

We wondered who had told Gull to pull himself together. Probably my father. He was not called the Clam for nothing. He did not like people to talk about their troubles.

“Of course we won’t tell you that,” said Robin. “We’ll keep you safe from everything.”

“I want Uncle Kestrel,” said Gull. “The people are rushing.”

It went on like this for a long time. Each time it seemed that Gull was listening to Robin and she was getting him calmer, he would ask for Uncle Kestrel and talk about these rushing people of his. Robin began to look desperate. Hern and I suggested all sorts of things for her to say to Gull, and she said them, but after another hour it did not seem as if Gull was listening at all.

“What shall we do?” said Robin.

Duck had sat all this while cross-legged and half asleep, hugging the Lady. “Try giving him this,” he said, and held out the Lady – by her head, of course.

It worked. Gull put both hands to the Lady and held her to his face. “Thank you,” he said. Then he rolled over and went to sleep, with his cheek pressed against the hard wood. I could see Duck looking woeful at losing the Lady, but he did not say anything.

FROM THAT TIME ON, Gull was worse and worse.

When we woke next morning, we found the floods had risen to cover the place where our fire had been. The tree we had tied the boat to was twenty yards from dry land; after that we always slept in the boat. Gull was awake too, lying with the print of the Lady on his cheek, but he did not move until Hern started poling us to the higher ground. Then he sat up and called out, “Where are you going? We must get on.”

“Why must we get on?” Hern said. He was angry with lack of sleep.

“We must get down to the sea. Quickly,” said Gull, and tears ran down his cheeks across the mark of the Lady.

“Of course we will,” said Robin. “Be quiet, Hern.”

“Why should I? This is the first I’ve heard about having to get to the sea,” Hern said. “What’s got into him now?”

“I don’t know,” Robin said helplessly.

This new idea of Gull’s gave him no peace, nor us either. Whenever we stopped to eat, he wept and urged us to hurry on to the sea. When we stopped for the night, he was worse still. He kept us all awake talking of Heathens and people rushing and, above all, calling out that we must get on, down to the sea. I grew almost too tired to look at the Riverbanks, which was a pity because the land grew new and interesting after that day. On the day following, the sides of the River were steep hills, covered with a forest, budding all colours from powdery green to bright red, so full of circling birds that they strewed the sky like chaff. Among the trees and birds we saw once a great stone house with a tower like a windmill and a few small windows.

Hern was very interested. He said it looked easy to defend, and if it was empty, it would make a good place for us to live.

“We can’t stop here!” Gull cried out.

“It was only an idea, you fool!” Hern said.

Altogether Hern became more and more impatient with Gull. It was hard to blame him, for Gull was very tedious. As the hills held the River in, we floated at a furious pace on a narrow, rushing stream, but we still did not go fast enough for Gull.

“I’d get to the sea tomorrow, if I could, just to shut you up!” Hern said to him.

Duck became as bad as Hern that day. He sighed sarcastically whenever Gull said we must hurry. He and Hern laughed and fooled about instead of helping us look after Gull. I smacked Duck several times, and I would have smacked Hern too, if I could. I smacked Duck again that night, in spite of Robin shouting at me, when Duck would not let Gull have the Lady.

Duck jumped out on land, hugging the Lady. He was lucky not to fall in the water. We were tied among little brown bushes, with a slope of slimy earth above, where the bank was no bank at all and the River kept slopping our boat into the bushes and away. “She’s mine!” Duck shouted, sliding and scrambling above me. “I need her! Give Gull the One. He’s strongest.”

I was so angry that I tried to climb out after him. But the boat slopped away from the bushes, and Robin caught the back of my rugcoat and hauled me back. “Leave him be, Tanaqui,” she said. “Don’t you be as bad as he is. Let’s try Gull with the One.”

We put the dark glistering One in Gull’s hand, but he cried out and shuddered. “He’s cold. He pulls. Can’t we get on now?”

“Some of us have to sleep, Gull,” I said. I was nearly as cross as Hern. I gave him the Young One instead, but Gull would not have him either. We had a dreadful night.

In the morning, Duck gave Gull the Lady, looking a little ashamed. But by that time Gull was not having the Lady either. Robin could hardly get him to eat. All he wanted was for us to untie the boat and go on.

“Fun and games all the way to the sea,” said Hern. “Then what will he want?”

“I don’t think he should go to the sea,” said Duck.

“Oh, not you now!” said Hern. “Why not?”

“The Lady doesn’t want him to go,” said Duck.

“When did she tell you that?” Hern asked jeeringly.

“She didn’t,” said Duck. “I just had a feeling and knew.”

Most of that morning Hern was jeering at Duck for his feeling. Robin snapped at Hern, and I yelled at Duck. We were very tired.

That was the day we came to the lake. The hills on either side of the River seemed to retire away backwards, and before we were aware, we were out at one end of a long, winding lake. They tell me it is usually a smaller lake than we saw, but because of the floods, it filled a whole valley. We could see it ahead, white with distance, stretching from mountain to mountain. I think they were real mountains. Their tops went so high that grey clouds sat on them, and they were blue and grey and purple as Uncle Kestrel described mountains. We had never seen such a great stretch of water in our lives as that lake. In the ordinary way we would have been interested. Water in such quantity is restless. It is grey and goes in waves, chop, chop, chop, and lines of foam stretch like ribbons back from the way the waves are going. There was a keen wind blowing.

“What a horrible wind!” Duck said. He crouched down in the boat, hugging his precious Lady.

Hern said disgustedly, “There’s miles of it! I hate seeing how far I have to go.”

Maybe I said that, when I think. Hern and I both found the place too large. As for Gull, he struggled up and stared about. “Why have we stopped?” he said.

We had not stopped, but the current ran weaker in such a mass of water, and I think our boat had turned sideways from it as we came out into the lake. I could see beyond us a wrinkling and a lumping in the lake, more yellow than grey, where the River flood rushed through the larger waters.

“Get the sail up,” I said.

“Don’t order me about,” said Hern. “Get up, Duck, and help.”

“Shan’t,” said Duck. You see how angry we all were.

Hern was stepping the mast when Gull said, “What are you doing? Why can’t we get on?”

“I am getting on, you mindless idiot!” said Hern. “I’m putting the sail up. Now shut up!”

I do not think Gull listened, but Robin said, “Hern, can’t you show poor Gull a bit more sympathy?”

“I am sympathetic!” snarled Hern. “But I wouldn’t be honest if I pretended I liked him this way. Tell him to keep his mouth shut, if I worry you.”

Robin did not answer. We got the mast and the sail up, and Duck condescended to let the keel down. The keel is a thought of my father’s, to make a flat riverboat sail well, and it is the best thought he ever had. We raced through the grey waters, leaning. Gull lay quiet in the bottom. Duck sang. When he sings, you know why we call him Duck. Hern told him so. And through their new argument, I noticed Robin still said never a word. She was white and wringing her hands.

“Are you all right?” I said. She annoys me.