The Belonging, page 36
‘It’s so big,’ Stephan was saying. ‘When it comes down to it, the cycle of seasons, of lifetimes, it’s so big.’ He was thinking as he spoke, as they trekked up towards and past the stone circle, making for the cave.
‘Big?’ Erin asked.
‘Yeah. That’s what I reckon. Think about it for a moment…‘ He cast around for a way to explain the vague idea forming in his head. ‘Like, when we do that exercise, you know the one?’
‘Which one?’ Erin asked, head down, watching her feet as she walked.
‘You know, we really gotta come up with names for all this stuff,’ Stephan mused. ‘The one where you sort of expand and spread until you can see really far, until you’re really part of everything around you.’
‘That one,’ Erin replied. ‘That’s actually my favourite.’ It always made her feel better. Peaceful and exhilarated at the same time. Connected, she guessed. She wished Kria had been able to do it.
But Kria had been angry, and hurt, and lonely. She’d believed the stories about the glen, hadn’t trusted the truth of her training to show her the way.
Erin swallowed and her throat clicked dryly.
Stephan waved the lantern in his hand and it clanged and rattled. ‘Well, you know what I think?’ he said. ‘I think that the biggest part of that exercise is being present, you know?’
‘Present?’ Erin nodded. Yes. He was right. Relaxing into being where you were like that, there was no room for worrying about the future or brooding on the past. You just had to be exactly where and when you were.
‘Well, when you do that – when you’re really present like that – this is what I find anyway, then the present stretches, you know? It’s actually really spacious.’
‘Spacious?’
‘Yeah. Big enough to live your whole life in when it comes to it. Like…’ He frowned, losing track of how to say what he was thinking. ‘I don’t know,’ he finished. ‘It’s just like the present moment is much bigger than we really think, and when we’re inside it, really inside it, like we are when we’re being super mindful, it just seems like it encompasses almost everything.’ Stephan closed his mouth.
‘This stuff is so hard to express,’ he sighed. ‘It’s like you have to do it, and then you know it, when usually we try things the other way around.’
Erin agreed with that.
42
Erin didn’t want to go inside the cave. She stopped dead outside it, looking in and feeling a deep unease spread down into her bones. She shook her head.
‘I don’t think I can,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a bad time in caves just recently.’ But then, she’d had a bad time outside caves too.
Stephan reached out to touch her shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘There will be a fire going inside, and it’ll be quite cosy, I promise.’
She raised her eyebrows at him. Cosy was the last way she’d describe any cave, even one big enough for five of them to sit in together. Erin shook her head again, looking up at the way the hill hung its stone eyebrow over the entrance. She could feel the weight of the hill already, and she wasn’t even inside.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to go in there. It’s like I’ll be swallowed whole if I go inside there. It’s just wrong.’ She turned slightly away and shivered. ‘What if the roof collapses or something?’
‘This cave has been here for thousands of years,’ Stephan replied, astonished. ‘It’s not going to collapse.’
‘What if there’s an earthquake?’ Erin said.
The bearskin on Stephan’s back was growing heavy, as if it wanted out of the bag and onto his back properly. The cave called to him. He wanted to crawl into the womb of the hill.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We have to go in.’
Erin pushed her hood back and looked at him. The light was dying around them, her face in shadows. ‘It’s too heavy,’ she said.
‘What’s too heavy?’
She cast a glance at the mouth of the cave. ‘The hill. The stone.’
Stephan looked helplessly at her, not knowing what to do. ‘I’m going to go get Morghan,’ he said, and ducked into the cave before Erin could respond.
She turned all the way away and stared back down the track into the trees. They stood silently, black limbs on white snow. It was stark, and somehow glorious. Something shifted, nosed up against her and she stepped back, startled. There was nothing there.
A hand touched her shoulder briefly then withdrew. ‘Stephan tells me you won’t come inside.’
‘I can’t,’ Erin said.
Morghan stood beside her and gazed out over the fast-fading day. ‘I never liked going inside caves either, to be truthful,’ Morghan said. ‘Or any dark, tight space, really. I still don’t like tight spaces, but I’ve made my peace with caves.’
Erin glanced at her, taking in the long dress, tied at her waist as Ravenna had worn it, the loose hair, the spiralling designs drawn on Morghan’s cheeks. She shivered again, remembering Macha.
Macha, who stepped from the trees to join them, her red hair gleaming in Erin’s mind.
‘How did you make your peace with them?’ Erin asked.
Morghan’s calm face gazed out over the dimming view. The Shining Ones were abroad tonight, she thought, seeing them wend their ways through the trees. They would keep vigil too, the faerie, and wait for the rebirth of the sun.
‘I asked the earth to welcome me inside her,’ Morghan said. ‘I asked for her protection.’
Erin looked at her.
Morghan watched Maxen climb onto a rock and perch there, drawing his flute from a pocket. When he set to playing, his tune wound in and out of the wind and spread out like the last fingers of dying light, low and mournful.
‘What’s that sound?’ Erin asked, looking around and seeing only shadows.
‘It is a faerie whistle,’ Morghan said, smiling over at Maxen. ‘Played by a master. He is singing the light from the world.’
‘Singing,’ Erin said, but her voice was low, private.
‘Yes,’ Morghan agreed anyway. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘You have been in one womb of the world, and now you must enter another. We are always being reborn.’
A frown. Then Erin remembered her tumble down into the well. ‘I’ve become less brave along the way,’ she said suddenly.
Morghan looked at her kindly. ‘There’s a saying,’ she told her. ‘No less true, metaphorically, for being something of a cliché – that the darkest hour is just before the dawn.’
‘Is this my darkest hour?’ Erin said.
‘Today it is.’
Erin had turned and was looking at the cave. There was a wobble of light from within it. Someone had lit the fire Stephan had said would be there. She took a deep breath, sighed.
‘Do I have a choice?’ she asked.
‘There is always a choice,’ Morghan said.
Erin’s lips twitched. ‘But?’
‘But one choice means slipping into the flow of a meaningful life, and the other will have you fighting the current the whole way.’
‘I guess we go with flow, then,’ Erin said.
‘We follow the path,’ Morghan agreed.
‘Yes,’ Macha whispered. ‘We follow the ancient way, for it is our soul’s path.’
Erin’s scalp prickled and under her cloak, she rubbed her arms. She looked at the wide, low mouth of the cave.
It is a womb, she thought. Something pressed again against her skirts and she looked down, seeing – sensing – Fox there, and that helped. Fox at her side. Morghan at her side.
Another glance, as the faerie music whooped and floated on the breeze.
Macha at her side.
The only one missing was Kria.
The womb of the world, she thought. Where you go to be held, nurtured, reborn.
Morghan spoke softly. ‘Mother Earth, we beg of you to hold us in the warmth and safety of your belly.’
Erin closed her eyes, aware of Macha watching her. Uncommonly slow, Macha had called her.
‘Mother Earth,’ she whispered. ‘Hold me in the depths and safety of your body. I am small and slow, but inside you I will grow stronger.’
Morghan nodded and touched Erin gently between the shoulder blades. On a deep breath, Erin ducked her head and stepped inside the hill.
The only light was from the fire, and it was small, sending miniature shadows dancing around the rough walls of the cave. Stephan looked up at her as she stood in the entrance and he smiled at her.
He had his bearskin wrapped around him, and Erin gazed back, looking at the sharp claws on the ends of his bear paws. The mask was on the top of his head, the muzzle tipped toward the roof of the cave.
To his right was Ambrose, but not the Ambrose of the books and pens and notes and stories. Erin’s lips curled into a smile at him, the heavy fur he wore around his shoulder, the feathers woven in his hair, the tattoos drawn on his face. She glanced back at Morghan, who nodded her forward and then took her own place in the circle.
‘We are well met, Erin,’ Charlie whispered, reaching out a hand to grasp Erin’s as she sank down on the ground in her position in the circle.
‘Charlie,’ Erin said, then drew breath. Charlie was resplendent in a fur cloak of her own, and Erin reached out a tentative hand to touch it. Not real fur, of course, but in the low light of the fire, Charlie looked half…
‘What sort of skin?’ she asked.
Charlie smiled. ‘Beaver,’ she said. ‘And who is your kin here with you tonight?’ she asked.
Erin did not have a fur to wear. She licked her lips and knew she could answer anyway. ‘Fox,’ she said. She touched a hand to the strand of her hair where she had tied a feather. ‘And Raven.’
Charlie’s smile widened.
Ambrose began beating softly upon his drum, the rhythm soft and haunting. Erin could still hear the flute’s haunting song outside, sounding far away, like a dream.
Stephen threw a handful of herbs onto the fire and sat back as they burned, letting loose a cloud of fragrant smoke. He curled his paws around his bear snout and drew it down over his face.
Morghan hummed for a moment, then lifted her voice in a wordless, chanting song that swelled inside Erin’s chest as though filling up all the space beneath her ribs and soaking out through her skin.
The song, inside the cave where they would keep the fire burning through this, the longest night, had no words, and yet, it did. Erin closed her eyes against the smoke and let the song flow through her veins.
She heard Macha join in.
She heard Charlie, on her other side, sing the wordless song of the world too.
Opening her eyes, she looked across at Stephan, but he had curled himself into his skin, tucking his bear nose between his paws. She closed her eyes again, listening to the beat of the drum, to the lilting wind of the flute, the chanting song. She listened to them with her ears, and her skin, and her blood, and all her organs.
She listened to it with her spirit, and it danced and spun, and she swayed where she sat, because the song of the world was inside her, and she was inside it.
There was a small, tight ring of stones, and inside them, a pyramid of kindling waiting for a flame. Erin cupped her hands together and held them against her face. She closed her eyes and let her spirit loosen and flow. She filled the cave, the rock, felt the grass growing on her back, felt the secret flow of underground rivers in her veins, and down deep, she felt the heat of the earth and reached for it at the same time she reached outside into the crisp air of the winter night, the longest night, where the air was silver and glossy from the moon in the mist, and she took that light into her, warming it, reaching for the spark, for the song, for the part of the world that was fire, for the part of herself that was fire.
And it was there. The spark that came from being part of everything, and the fire that was inside her, because she was part of everything.
The tiny flame fell upon the waiting tinder, caught, climbed, grew.
There were bones laid out in the back of the cave and she bent over them, the song in her ears. She reached out a finger and touched the curving scythe of a rib, the flat plate of a hip. She looked down at the tiny rows of finger bones, splayed out in the dirt, and knew one was missing.
But that was all right, Erin thought. She knew where to find it.
Outside the cave, it was night, a swelling moon caught tight in the mist over the glen, silvering the air. She stood and looked out over the loch, watching the clouds reflected in the deep water, seeing something stir the surface for a moment, a great long shadow, then disappear.
And there on the shore, there was Kria, her skin as white as the moon, as the mists. Erin’s boots crunched on the moon-spun grass as she picked her way down the hillside.
She hummed as she walked. Her heart beat in time to a faraway drum.
Kria stared sightlessly up at the sky beside the ruins of her fire and the charred remains of a seagull. Erin dropped to her knees beside her and touched the smooth face.
This time her fingers did not pass through Kria, but she felt the cold skin under them. She smoothed Kria’s hair back from her face, pulled Kria’s clothes back tightly around her ruined body, then lifted her own head and looked around.
There, where Kria had left them, was the pile of feathers she’d stripped from the gull. Not all of them for the wind had claimed some, but enough. There were enough. Erin picked a handful, and knelt back down, smoothing Kria’s hair and humming as she rewove her hair, fastening the white and grey and black feathers into the braids, careful not to get them sticky with spilled blood.
She hummed as she wove, and remembered flying on the wings of the seagull, how the water had looked far below them, how the wind had sounded against the steady beat of their wings, how sharply their eyes had seen all around as they circled and swooped over the liminal space of earth and sea.
She sang and imagined Kria’s spirit, flying now with the seagull, up over the sides of the valley, through the mists that were cold against their feathers, pushing through into the clear night sky, where the stars waited like diamonds in the cupped hand of the heavens.
There. The feathers were wound into Kria’s hair, and Erin reached up to touch the feathers in her own hair for a moment. Raven’s black feathers, which she’d found on her doorstep, as though left there for her. Along with one long grey one, from the raven that sat on her windowsill and sometimes invited themselves in to sit on the back of a kitchen chair, watching her with their knowing eyes.
There was one more thing to do, and Erin traced her fingers over one of Kria’s hands, unfurling the fingers from their fist and plucking up the tiny bone that rolled free. She tucked it away in her pocket, then bent and kissed the cold fingers, returning them to Kria’s side.
Erin scrambled to her feet, then bent down and scooped her arms under Kria’s body. She knew she’d be able to pick the girl up, and she did, lifting Kria’s spirit gently into her arms so that Kria’s head was cradled against her shoulder.
She weighed less than a leaf on the breeze. The seagull feathers fluttered behind them as Erin turned back the way she’d come. Her boots crunched again on the stony soil. The smell of the loch was on the breeze and she breathed it in as though it was a secret she wanted to taste.
She wondered about the creature swimming in its depths.
But she wondered for only a moment before she reached the small, pursed mouth of the cave, breathed deeply, looked down for a moment at Kria’s pale face looking up at the sky from the crook of her elbow, and then she bent down and entered the cave.
Somewhere, deep inside the rock, there was the steady beat of a drum, like the heartbeat of the earth she crouched inside, lying Kria down beside the delicate bones of the other woman.
Erin spread Kria’s hair out around her, tucked her chin down to hide the red slash across the throat, and looked at her for a moment, before backing out of the cave.
The air outside was cold against her face, inside her lungs. Something moved again in the loch, sending wide rippling waves out to each shore. Erin listened to them lapping up against rock and stone, then stepped once more out onto the path.
Macha stood to one side of the stone hut, her red hair blowing in the breeze, the beads in it clattering gently together, but Erin ignored her. This wasn’t the time for words, for conversation, and they both knew it.
The skins on the bed were jumbled, but Erin brought them outside into the silvered night and picked through them, choosing the finest and folding and smoothing them over her arm. It was too dark inside the hut to hunt for anything else that might do honour to Kria, but Erin didn’t think there was anything there anyway. She hadn’t seen anything.
Kria had deprived herself of every comforting, of seeing any beauty. She had clung to her abandonment, to the fear and the stories she’d been fed. She’d not looked, questioned, kept to her training, cracked open and seen.
Erin skirted around the body on the shore and took the furs back to the cave. The breeze, blowing up over the loch and through the narrow ravine of the glen, lilted and swept from side to side like the lilting notes of a flute played by a dark and mysterious faerie man.
Outside the cave, Erin hesitated, breathing in the cold air. She turned and looked back down at the loch shore, seeing Macha standing there, leaning against her staff, and for the first time in a while, the woman’s presence strengthened her.
They were here to do what was necessary.
Many things were necessary, Erin was discovering. And most of them were not easy.
She slowed her breathing, ducked her head, and went back inside the cave.
The drum beat steadily. The flute whistled, lilting up and down in its song.
Gently, quietly, Erin drew the finger bone from her pocket and reached over to place it back where it belonged, putting it on the grey soil near its mates. She sighed over it, then went back to the fur blankets, spreading one over the bones of the unknown woman, who once upon a time, a long time ago and in a place far away, had brought herself here to this cave, to lie down and hope for rebirth from this small womb in the world.
