The
River
Wife

Also by Heather Rose

White Heart

The Butterfly Man

The
River
Wife

HEATHER ROSE

First published in 2009

Copyright © Heather Rose 2009

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 prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

The author acknowledges the generous support of Arts Tasmania and Varuna, The Writers’ House

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Original artwork by Marina Strocchi
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Isabelle Ocean

As the sun crests the dark line of land, I wake and step from the river, and that in itself is what is called magic.

We have always lived here. We have been here since the lakes began. We have brought the rivers to the oceans since the world was cold. We are bound by a spell so old there may be none left who are caught by it, except for me. My father once said that any story of a place was a story of sadness because everything changed. So a story of belonging would always be a story of losing.

I have walked beside the river all my life and listened to its music. I have climbed to the reaches where rivers are born and I have swum in all the lakes that rest in the hands of these mountains. I have watched lakes filled with sky, hurried by wind, hidden by mist, whispering in rain. Lakes that overflowed into one great river that slipped away from the mountains. The river ran, sometimes quiet and filled with light, sometimes shouting through rapids, growing as it tumbled down into the deep of forest, spilling over outcrop and boulder and around the roots of trees, swept into moss banks, glinting under the watchful gaze of trees, hastening over shallows until it reached the greatest lake, which stretched further than I could see by day. From there the flow of water became a broad penumbral river that moved through folded hills and cast its tributaries across the land.

Water is a message. It is a truth that asks nothing, a story older than people and older than mountains, a holder and deliverer of memories beyond time. It runs away and never back and it takes with it everything we are.

One day, when spring had taken the earth to her breast and warmed it, love lay down by the river. He slept in a blue shirt and through the afternoon he did not stir but dreamed with the river’s song beside him. When he woke he saw me.

Love was not the pattern of leaves and the texture of bark, it was not the underbelly of river or the way of fish, though all that was here was part of it. Love was the passing of the sky across a face, it was the arc of conversation, the thought of forever, the yearning to go on and never back, the desire to be something other than I was. I see him standing there in farewell and my breath hurries to me, the day falling away behind him, the sky about his shoulders. I never thought to ask what belonging was, nor how I might be free of it, until I loved Wilson James.

This is the story of a river and the making of stories and the nature of love. Some would say that any story of water is always a story of magic, and others would say any story of love was the same. And being a love story it begins with a broken heart.

In the years before I was born, my father carried each stone from the riverbed to make the walls of the house. He felled the trees and made the beams for the roof and the chairs upon which we sat, and the table and benches where he prepared food. He carved the bed upon which he slept and a smaller bed he made for me when I was still inside my mother, though he was sure I would have no need of it at night.

The shelves of the house held the carcasses of beetles, the bones of small animals, the lacework of insect wings. There were the plates and cups, the pots and implements he used for his cooking. The warm weather came late and left early, and my father lamented that little grew in the short summer. But in his walled garden he grew all manner of root and plant, and in the forest he hunted all the creatures that tasted good. The jars on the shelves were filled with dried foods—meat, roots, fruits—and these he would bring to life again in the soups and stews he made.

When my father first came to the forest, the world he walked away from had left no colour in his heart, only the black and white of a fear which had stolen autumn and spring and summer from him.

‘I had seen things no human should ever see; I had done things that rent my heart in two,’ he said. ‘The young man I had once been I carried upon my back, heavy as stone, and the old man I would become bore the burden of that youthful heart. But beside me walked another man—a man who whistled a strange, captivating song. That man had no name nor any past or future, but tattooed on his face was a leaf. A colourless leaf. And one morning, as I awoke beside a pale stretch of road, the man with the leaf on his cheek was gone. Bending to bear my youth upon my back, I realised I had forgotten his name and even the day of his birth. I left him there asleep, the boy I had been, and I turned from the road and entered the forest and came at last to the lake. I climbed up, up, up to this part of the river and here I laid down and slept, and my heart made no sound.’

He rubbed his cheek and the leaf with no colour moved under his fingers on skin made soft by time.

‘It is in the mending,’ my father said to me, ‘that the fabric of a heart is sewn.’

‘What do hearts get mended with?’

‘Sunshine, kindness, the touch of your child’s hand in yours, spring rain, the green wings of dragonflies, rainbow scales, the webs of spiders, the voice of a woman who loves you. For a long time I was afraid of so many things. I could not forget. I was haunted by dreams of the things I had seen and done.

‘Your mother took the lines from my face and wove them into stories that no longer belonged to me but were a part of the stories of men, and somehow that took the pain out of them but not the sadness. Sadness can inspire our hearts in surprising ways, but not pain. Few can hold the hand of pain and grow strong or kind.’

‘And then I was born?’

‘Yes, and then you were born.’

‘But what about your other family? Your mother and father?’

‘It was as if everything I had once been went away. I had no desire to be anywhere but here.’

‘And you will never leave the river?’

‘No, little fish, I will never leave you.’

Such were our conversations, me with my feet shimmering in the water, Father twisting the lures he made with a snatch of fur, a trim of soft feather, a twist of hardly visible twine. These he made and sold in the days he still went to the town, when I was very young. Lures for fish he would never catch.

Through the time of deep snow we would sit beside the fire and listen to the crack of flame, the creak of winter, the rasp of a dark bird on a branch beyond the window, and my father had many questions to ask of me.

‘Where does the rain come from, little fish?’

‘Where does the snowmelt go?’

‘How old is this rock?’

‘What song did you sing the river as you woke this morning?’

‘What tales have you heard arrive on the footsteps of winter?’

And I in turn had many questions for him.

‘Father, is it because I am a human like you that I like to be here by the fire, and not in the river, when snow is falling about the house?’

‘Father, is it because I am a human like you that I like to eat the soup you make?’

Always he would consider my questions as if I had never asked them before.

‘Little fish, you are your father’s daughter and your mother’s too, and only time will tell if you are more one than the other.’

‘Tell me something about my mother,’ I urged. ‘Something you’ve never told me before.’

‘Your mother longed for a daughter so she made a shoe and placed it in the river. Every day she checked it. The river grass held it and the water lapped at it, finding a current around the heel, the water passing through the eyelets where laces might tie it to the foot of a man, the river moving it a little in the shift of gravel. That shoe was in the river a whole turn of the moon before I found it and slipped my foot into it—and that is why, it is said, I have never left the river. And why I am your father.’

‘There is nothing sung of a daughter born to a human and a river wife,’ I said.

‘You are your own song and every day you add a note to it.’

And so I grew in the river and also in the stone-walled home with its wide-open fire that glowed red as I left it each night to return to the moonpool.

My father was the footstep ahead of mine in the forest, the voice that hummed as he cooked, the scent of roasting food, the knock of axe on wood, the turn of chisel, the maker of necklaces, the one who braided my hair with the small feathers of young birds, who scooped me in his arms when I ran inside each morning. He was the one who knew me, who listened to me, and I was not alone.

As I grew older we walked the upper reaches of the river and sometimes I settled the frog spawn back in the riverbank when it was loosened by storm, or cleared the sticks and leaves from spring surges and patterned the rocks to turn the river’s stories this way and that. On the banks and in the glades I spread the songs of water to the ferns and small trees that pushed up from the wet earth and took hold and grew tall, so that the world beside the river was deep with the knowing of water. The rhythm and pattern of the forest became known to me, each rise and fall of pathway through the trees or across the river rocks, the change of light that flowed past the river.

We walked to where the ferns stood taller than me upon the shoulders of my father. We visited the highest lake where the mist hung so still in the air it was as if the clouds came each day to kiss the water. By the lake there were trees which knew words so old that all the other creatures had forgotten them. There were berries which grew red on four different plants and caves with webs of golden spiders. There were markings on stone of circle, dot, hand-print, circle. The markings were from the old people who are no longer here, but their songs are in the rain and in the river still.

Father and I walked from the river’s birth to the great lake where people came to eat and walk. Father said it was far enough and I was happy not to go beyond the great lake. There on the water’s edge, when the world of daylight had disappeared over the horizon, and with it the people who came there, Father would walk and I would swim. My father played a flute he had fashioned from a finger of tree, the sound of it like the song of a white bird flown far from its homeland. All the forest stopped to listen when my father played and the moon bent her face to gaze upon the human who had slipped so far from his kinfolk to become a man of the earth.

When my father still walked the river with me, the rain came in all seasons and the trees grew tall, so tall the flowering tops and dark canopies had songs all of their own which whispered and rumbled through the forest. In winter and even in summer there was snow deep about the house and in spring the slopes of forest glowed with leaves the colours of fire. The land was damp underfoot and the sky was brilliant above. In the passing of a day, a lake could glow as many shades of grey as there are sounds in the wind until it rested at last in the quiet of night where no bird shadow caught in its waters.

The river and lakes had names. I did not name them. Father took note of everything that grew in the forest and lived in the river. He drew pictures of each leaf and petal, each pattern of stone, each winged creature, feathered or cased, large or small enough to rest on the tip of his finger, each tree and each and every form of moss, grass, fern and fungus. Later, when he put away all that he had written and read, he clasped the names of everything that happened upon the landscape more closely and would drop them from his lips as if they were the shape and form of the thing itself. But I laid the names aside as the years without Father walking in the forest stretched away. The names, and all they had once spoken of, slipped from me and I let them go. Would Father have understood? I do not know.

I have wondered if these things of the world were also part of the claiming of me. The name of a tree, the weight of a shoe, the sound of an axe, the warm crust of a loaf, the smell of tobacco.

My father told me that love was a perhaps-hand. He said a great poet had once said so and it was what he knew love to be. He had loved my mother, and there was so much of her that was perhaps, for my mother was a fish. A long-bellied golden fish, dappled with scales as black as night, who slept in the moonpool beneath the waterfall. My father liked to tell her he’d catch her and eat her for breakfast and some say he did. When my mother walked upon the land her feet were covered with scales, grey and pearly, all the way up from her toes. In company she wore crocodile-skin boots brought by a journeyman who knew something of the sense of humour of fish. The journeyman had come from the ocean reaches by way of the warm rivers when the way was still open. He had a long trail of white marks upon his back where the crocodile had fought him. The boots are finely made and I have them still.

In the ocean there are fish as old as trees who have swum among the memories of all time and who know as many stories as there are to be known. I had thought, as I grew from child to woman, to visit with these fish, but I was not sure I could make the journey so far or, having gone so far, how I would ever get back. I had thought to travel downriver to see the ocean and walk upon the sands that rim the sea. I wanted to see what the river became, what the rain made possible. I thought to stand in the swell and listen for the songs of the river wives who went down to the sea and did not return.

My father told me there was a story children learned about a river wife who gave her voice and with it all her songs for the chance to walk only as a woman and never again be a fish. He said in the end she died and floated away as sea foam. And that all children knew this, that when sea foam washed up on the shore it marked the passing of a river wife whose songs were the songs of all the stories that had ever been told.

‘Why did she so want to be only a woman?’ I asked.

‘Because she fell in love with a man.’

‘And he did not love her as a fish?’

‘He did not ever know she was a fish.’

‘Why didn’t she tell him?’

‘She thought he would not have loved her if he knew. Remember, the river wife had given her voice so she could not tell him. And the man fell in love with someone else. When he married the woman he loved, the river wife died.’

‘It is a story of such sadness.’

‘We are as we are and we cannot be otherwise without paying a price, and that price may be too much for us to bear.’

‘And my mother? Did she ever wish to be only a woman?’

‘I do not think so. She walked as a woman and she swam as a fish and she was more beautiful than any sky. Almost as beautiful as you. She never meant to leave you, I feel sure of that.’

It was my father who took me to the river and laid me in the water on the day I was born. My mother had felt the flip of me inside her and the swish of my tail. She was surprised I was born on land at all. But she was not sure if this half-human child would change as she changed when darkness slipped across the land. My father knew. Of course he knew. So he laid me in the river at twilight where he was sure I belonged. And then she watched. And then she cried. Of course, I was just like her.

As I grew I walked the river each day and Father did not always walk beside me. Many times he said to me, ‘Promise me you will never feed from the river in daylight, never swim in its waters until the sun is gone, little fish.’

‘Am I truly a fish or truly a human, Father?’ I asked.

‘Is the day the true light of the world or is darkness?’ he answered.

‘Would Mother have let you go, Father, even if you’d wanted?’ I asked him when I had grown old enough to know what it might have taken for him to stay and never venture from the forest again.

‘As if I could ever have left her, could ever have put her in danger.’ He laughed and then grew still again. ‘Are you asking me if I have regrets?’

‘I think I am. Or maybe I want to be sure I haven’t been the cause of you losing something that might have been yours. What I want to say now is, Father, if there is any place you wish to be . . .’

‘Ah, my daughter,’ he replied. ‘What could offer more than this? To see you step from the river. To see your mother come home again, though I know she never will. I didn’t realise it until I got here, but this is my home. It holds everything that is dear to me. My favourite memories. My most loved people. The sounds and smells and patterns that make me happy. How rare it is to find all of that. No, what I must work out is not how to go, but how to stay.’

My father’s face softened into the kindness of moss that grows in the furrows of trees and asks for nothing but dappled light and the touch of rain. He carried with him a carved stick when he walked, to steady himself. He was happy with the simplest things. He smiled and his eyes carried the brightness of sunshine caught in a ripple of water.

As if he glimpsed the years ahead, he asked again and again of me that I make no contact with any human who came to the river. To never speak with the humans who visited the lake.

‘I wonder sometimes what the world is like beyond here,’ my father said. ‘I wonder how the cities have changed. We may need to go further upstream. Go further into the mountains.’

‘What worries you, Father?’

‘The world I came from and this one here may yet meet. I do not want you thinking it would be kind if that happened. It would not. Whatever I can do to keep you safe from that, I will.’

‘Somewhere there are humans that I belong to.’

‘Nowhere more than here, little fish.’

‘But if there are people, if they do come, they are not so different from me, surely,’ I said. ‘I am your daughter.’

‘They are as different from you as rock is to water. You must promise me that you will never be tempted to speak to them, to choose one for friendship, for I fear it would be the end of all that is here, and the river itself and every story within it would be lost.’ And then he said, ‘But there are other people you belong to.’

‘River wives?’

‘Yes. And other keepers of things. Like your mother.’

‘Where are they, Father?’

‘They will come.’

And as my father had imagined, my own people did come for me, and my father was happy. It was as if he had been casting a thread for many years and had finally caught what he needed. The Winter King arrived on the first day of deep snow with his companions and musicians. He had travelled far from the land of blue ice to find the river wife who was spoken of in stories. My father walked deep into the forest with him and many days did they talk and many songs were sung before the Winter King asked me to be his wife. Asked me if he might be my husband through all the days of winter and depart each year at snowmelt to return to his land where spring and summer never visited. When he returned the following winter I agreed.

On the day of my wedding, my father spoke to me of a journey he wished to make to the lands beyond the mountains.

‘I will be back, I hope, by summer,’ he said.

But it was many seasons before my father returned. The Winter King had travelled nine winters to be with his wife when my father at last came back to the river. It was late spring. I stepped from the river on a bright sky day to find my father waiting on the stone he liked to sit upon. His hair had grown quite white and his face had the light of the moon in it. His back was no longer bent and he did not need the staff he had once used to help him walk. He was straight and tall and he had no words. Only the light that shone from his eyes spoke to me.

It was that summer my father began standing still. At first he did it for a day and later more days. Not coming into the cottage at night. Not eating his soup. Not coming to sit by the fire. Just standing right there beyond the house with his feet in the river.

Within a season he was no different to the forest. Moss and lichen grew upon him. Golden toadstools sprang up in the earth around him and others grew fawn and pale in his bark. Many birds have been born in his branches and many creatures have sheltered in the quiet of his leaves. Still he stands there on the riverbank. Still love is possible. Some love never ends.

Time swelled and withered, the river flooded and thinned. Night and day watched over the forest. Seasons passed and returned, and returned again. As I tended the river through all its cycles, the rhythm of the river shifted. Snow settled upon the mountains but not in the forest. The trees awakened to whiteness but soon the snow gave way to patches of dark earth and wet fallen leaves. Again it snowed, and in silence ferns bowed their heads to winter. But by evening the whiteness had seeped into the land, water trickled and ran along every pathway, and the colours of the forest returned. I thought the coming of snow was like the coming of flood and the arrival of spring. It would return. But it did not. Deep cold abandoned the forest.

No snow lay heavy upon the house. The lakes no longer froze. And the Winter King came no more to the forest. No cloaks hung beside the door. No voices spoke who knew my name. The table was without guests. The fire went unlit.

I tended the river and wove the stories of the world but I was alone. I glimpsed my mother’s life before my father came to the forest. A life of time sweeping away behind and laid like a valley ahead without any person beside her to share the pathway, note the shape of clouds, the ending of rain, the coming of night. So solitary my days became that I imagined the skin that bound me might unravel, and the scales upon my skin that shimmered at night in the moonlight might wash away, until I was bone and only bone, pale and unearthly, neither woman nor fish, and none would ever remark my passing.

Humans came as Father had said they would. I watched houses being built. One after another as the years worked upon the forest, as trees grew and fell, humans took root upon the lake’s edge. A house was built just at the bend in the river and I was sure Father had never thought they would come so close.

I listened for their voices. I sat upon the platforms they had made out over the water and watched the stars emerge, imagining for a moment that beyond was my family, there where the yellow light pooled on the grass, where the house hummed with noise, there was my husband, my children.

I listened to their talk and their laughter, which broke sudden and unexpected as a strange birdcall. I heard harsh words that travelled far in the night. I listened to the voices of children playing in the trees, a child in a darkened house crying softly, and then I listened no more but slipped under the water and returned to the river.

And that was how love found me, long after the pattern of faces that had been dear to me had slipped away and I was a wife only to the river.

Spring had settled herself in the forest when I found Wilson James. The blue of his shirt caught my eye as I arranged the flow of water over the tumble of rocks, threading fragments of stories together before they disappeared downstream.

There was something about the way his eyelashes lay upon his cheeks as he slept that should have warned me there was mischief afoot. He slept so deeply in the unrolling fronds of ferns. Blossoms smaller than new mayflies had blown down upon his hair and settled upon his face. Mosquitoes had been at the side of his neck. I reached out and touched him. I had no fear that he would feel my touch and wake. We didn’t live in worlds that touched at all. At most he might feel a passing breeze, but not my hand running along the line of his cheek down to his mouth. His skin was warm and rough, soft and fine, like the bark of a tree softened by rain.

His eyes opened suddenly and in the surprise of it we gazed at one another. Who would have thought such blue eyes would spring awake from those lids? I took my hand away and leapt back, for he spoke, and it was clear he could see me as well as I could see him and that was not as it should be.

‘Well the dreams do run wild here,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Didn’t know I’d fallen asleep. It was quite a trek up here.’

I had made no shoe. I had woven no basket. I had tied no red cloth in the branches of a tree. I had spoken not to any bird or snake who might have acted as a messenger. What was at work that I had not noticed as winter slipped from the earth and the sun no longer hid like a moon behind grey clouds? No human had ever come through except my father, and that had taken my mother’s knowledge. Wilson James crossed the line as if he did not even know a line existed.

The next thing he was at the river’s edge washing his face, and his hair was going light and dark where the water took and didn’t. His mouth was slurping the river from his hand, the water was falling from it and catching the light. He said, ‘I guess you see a few in here. Trout mostly?’

He turned and looked at me. He had stepped into my world. All that Father had warned me of, all that he had prepared me for, was standing in front of me. I thought to run, run, take the river two leaps and away and be gone from him faster than a dragonfly.

‘It’s okay, I don’t bite,’ he laughed, and his laughter ran across to me over the sound of the river. I watched him. And then Wilson James did what my father had done when he too had laughed—he rubbed his hand through his hair as if to finish the laughter and sweep it away behind him.

I said, ‘There are brown, golden and rainbow fish. Of course in the lakes there are the dark old fish and the small silver fish who are born and gone before the season has passed. It’s impossible to know how many there are.’

He laughed and slapped his pockets and said, ‘Now where did I put it?’ and swooped back into the fernery to grab a pouch then rolled a long white hairy-ended paper and lit it. He sat upon a rock and fog came out of his mouth which smelled like dank pools caught at the lake’s edge after spring melt has flowed away. I had seen men on the platforms doing this and smelled the dank smell they breathed but never had I been so close.

He said, ‘It’s so noisy, the river.’

He was a man talking to me, seeing me as if I was simply a woman. It was a wonderful cold curious thing. He was as talkative as a frog. ‘God, there’s nothing up here. It’s unbelievably remote. Forest as far as the eye can see. Crazy you can’t fly in. It’s a terrible road. Mary was right when she told me to stock up. I’m staying at Mary Kitchener’s house. She’s let me have it for the summer. You know, back . . .’ He indicated with his head where the house was.

I knew the house. It was at the bend of the river. I had seen it built. And then a fire took it and it was built again. It was the one that had come closest. Perhaps because she was a woman I had been less concerned by her. I had not seen her for many summers.

‘It’s the only one they’ve allowed this side of the river, by the look of it. I wonder how much she paid for that,’ he said.

‘The woman has not come here with you?’ I asked.

‘It’s too far. She’s over eighty now. By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m Wilson James.’

Wilson James. It had a music about it like a birdcall mid-morning. Wilson-James-Wilson-James. He reached out a hand and I leaned forward and held it. His hand had the dry paper feel of sunshine on bark. It was warm and the water within him was soft in his skin. My fingers lingered against his and then his hand slipped back and away from me. I had not imagined a hand could do that, spread its warmth through me the way his hand did.

‘You are easy to touch,’ I said.

He smiled but did not offer it back to me. And then he sat again on a rock by the river and breathed slower, his head moving like a hunting bird.

No creature of the forest has this custom of humans, to touch and then not touch at all. Father would have liked that I had remembered my manners. ‘Manners are what separate us from beasts,’ he had said. ‘Or at least that was what I used to think. Trout have no manners though, I learned that here. Which is why we do not mind that people come to the great lake to catch them and eat them. As long as they do not eat my daughter, I am happy.’ And my father had rubbed my feet as I sat upon his legs, my feet with their green-gold scales. ‘You know how to be safe in the water, don’t you?’ he murmured. ‘You have your mother’s pool, yes. None will ever find you there.’

‘I will be safe, Father. You have no need to ask it. Of course I will be safe.’

‘Ah, my daughter, my little fish. You must keep the stories strong for as long as you can. Keep them strong.’

I had tended the water and sung the songs that sifted the stories one from the other. If the river was quieter, if the banks were higher, it was not because I had not sung the songs. I had done what I could to keep the world as it was.

Pebbles were shifting a little in the river flow. There would be rain tonight. ‘I must go upstream, Wilson James. You will not see me again.’

‘Now why would that be?’ he said, jumping up.

‘You are still dreaming.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. Then, ‘Where do you live?’ as I stepped back into the forest. ‘What’s your name?’

Those eyes could not be bad. That hand, that skin, it held nothing I thought was bad. But as I slipped into the trees I felt how my skin had grown tiny prickles that nibbled at me. I should never have spoken to him, never have touched him. How was it possible? How had he come through?

‘Father,’ I said in the last light of afternoon, with golden shadows floating in the air between the trees, ‘a man has slipped through and I do not know why. Has he come for me, Father? Like you came for Mother? Do you think he is broken? Shall I help him?’

I sat on the river’s edge beside my father and I said very softly, ‘I do not think he means me harm, Father. He may be gone tomorrow and I shall have no more trouble with him.’

I wove the river to sleep that night and my eyes watched the face of the moon smile gently through the water. I thought of Wilson James’s question—What’s your name?

I had lived in the river and beside the river and I had never known how to be other than the river.

What’s your name?

My name is the river and the river is my name.

Fragments of darkness lay upon the path. Moss lifted its colour first to the day and later ferns offered their fronds and rippled with the gift of sunshine. I stepped from the river and that day I thought of Wilson James before I thought of the song I must sing. Was he still here? Was he at the house by the river bend? Would he be able to see me again?

No human, other than my father, had ever seen me. That was the way it was. My father said my mother had put her hand through the veil to touch him. She had done it to nurse him back to health when he was dying. I had not meant to break the veil. I did not know how to repair it, as my mother must have done. If I was visible to this man who else might see me?

And then a memory, so misted over I had almost forgotten it, swam to the surface. I was a young fish, a child on the shores of the lake playing with my father and learning the effect of songs. A man was seated on a rock. He said to my father, ‘What strange creature plays there at the water’s edge? I thought I saw her for a moment like a trick of light. She was neither nymph nor fairy but some other being. Can you see her? There! What strange translucence she has, and scales upon her feet. You see her, do you not? I would like to draw her for surely she is something from the world of old stories.’

When Father turned to go I walked to the man and rested my hand upon his shoulder. He was mixing colours in a box with a brush and water. He drew a child with long dark hair standing upon the shore, and in her hand was the orb of the sun as if it was a ball she had caught in a game. Father was very grave when he saw me there and made me promise never to go near the man again.

When we came back to the lake some days later Father found the man sleeping beside the shore. Father said he would not wake again. Not ever.

‘What felled the man, what took his breath?’

‘Perhaps it was his time,’ my father said.

‘Perhaps it was me.’

‘No,’ my father said. ‘Do not think that. Don’t ever think that.’

But I was sure. My touch was surely the cause of it. I think Father carried the man to where his own people might find him, though he never spoke of it to me. Slowly I forgot the man and only with the arrival of Wilson James did I think of him again. A man on the edge of water.

I waited for Wilson James to step out onto the rocks, but he did not come. I listened to the forest, for any sound of Wilson James. And what I heard was the part of me that had always believed, or hoped, a human man would come to me. The part of me that longed for the shape of a hand to hold mine, a voice that knew nothing of the vast reach of time.

Eternity is a river and the span of a human life is a cup that comes to drink from it. When love arrives to the eternal it comes in the form of eagles and lightning, as horses and thunder, as a white bear in the snow. But human love, I discovered, comes in the simplest way. As a man or a woman seeking their heart. Love is a restless wind. It is as skittish as a willow sapling, as vapid as a newborn trout, as urgent as a buzzing bee mad with the simple pleasure of a fragrance. I had thought I understood the pattern of things—the moods of silver the lakes threw back at the sky, the impulse of green that changed by day and sometimes by moment here in the forest, the tremor of raindrops, the voices of wind. But that first day, when I knew Wilson James was in my world, I had not even begun to glimpse his quest nor the nature of my own, and love was still far from us both.

Had I killed him? It was, I thought, such a happy thing to speak to another after all this time. A bird would not forget how to sing, and neither had I forgotten how to speak. I was still able, I thought, to be my father’s daughter, not simply my mother’s. But Father would say that I was not to go near Wilson James. Not to speak with him. ‘You must promise me,’ he had said, ‘that you will not seek a human for company.’

Shadows played in the crevices of grey and pale bark. In the morning breeze the river laughed at me for my thoughts. Wilson James was not beside the river. He was not among the ferns. I followed his footsteps over the rocks and through the forest to the house set back from the river. There the light caught the uppermost windows and shone the sun back at the sky. All was quiet. I stepped onto the verandah.

There was a bench there I had once liked to sit upon when the days were warm and the house empty. If people came to the house, they had come for tiny fragments of time. They took the fish from the river and sometimes let them go and then those people went away again. I had known the house before the fire and after the fire. For a long time the house had been closed. Now the windows were open and there, asleep on the bed, his body quite naked, was Wilson James.

I watched carefully to see if he was breathing and soon he turned. His skin was white and the hair that grew on his body was the colour of button grass. His body had a softness to it, as if Wilson James couldn’t outrun a butterfly. There was not a part of him that looked strong. Rather, he looked as if the food he had eaten and the water he had drunk had weakened him. He had none of the uprightness of a tree nor the form of a branch about his arms and legs.

I wondered if this was what a man was. Had my father looked like this before he lived here? Had he been a soft thing like a river snail without a shell?

Wilson James did not die. The next day he was again at the river’s edge. He whistled and threw small stones into the water. He looked about him into the trees as if he expected to see me. He came by the house Father had built but he did not see it. He even called out, as if he could sense that I was near, ‘Hello? Hello?’ I watched and would almost have called to Wilson James but I did not. The veil of the house held and all we had made here, Father and I, remained unseen.

I watched Wilson James from the forest at nightfall when light spilled from the windows upon the lawn and the moon contemplated summer. I saw the silhouette of him sitting. He was reading from a book. My father had books when I was still small but he did not tell me the stories from them. The trunk beside my father’s bed had been full of books and I had liked to lift the lid and smell them. They had a withered smell, as if the plant they had once grown on had dried there in the sunshine.

‘Can I not learn to read your words, Father?’

‘Little fish, you have the stories of the world inside you. These things that keep me company at night when you are gone to the river, these stories are as if we sat one day under a certain tree and all the stories were of its fruit and flowers, its bark and roots, its seasons and ageing, the grass beneath, the sky above. And all the feelings were of what we experienced as we sat—anger, sadness, joy, loss, passion. But the river’s stories are as if you are a bird flying above an enormous forest, as wide as the eye can see, and I would not rob you of the landscape you know, yet I fear I would, if I made you settle by the tree with me.’

All the pages in my father’s notebooks were used up with drawing and words before he took them with his other books and buried them somewhere in the forest, for one day they were gone from the house.

‘I am done with the words of the world and now I am with the world,’ Father said that evening. Hail clattered on the river rocks and the birds that had stayed beyond the last warm breeze were silent in the grey light. We had made a fire and Father sat close beside it as if he was cold.

‘Are you unwell?’ I asked.

‘I am very well, little fish. I am simply alone.’

‘I am here,’ I said.

‘It is not my body which is alone. Nor my heart. I have let the last of it go, that which I knew, and I find myself strangely alone, like a branch which has fallen from its tree into the river and been washed ashore far away on the river’s edge. I have no hope of returning. That time is past but this old branch finds that it is part and has been part of all things, not simply the tree. If I am to stay here with you and not grow old as men do, then I must let go of what I anticipate, and step into whatever may be beyond this limited knowledge I have collected from the books I have read. Now tell me a story, little fish, before you go to the river, and I will soon be warm again.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘today I found a story of a boy who came to catch a fish. When he caught the fish it was so large it filled his basket and, well pleased, he carried it home on his back. As he walked the basket grew heavier and heavier until at last he could carry it no more. He took it off and discovered a young woman sitting in the basket.

‘ “What are you doing in my basket?” the boy asked.

‘ “You caught me and brought me from the river.”

‘Now the boy was scared, but the woman was young and beautiful, so he said, “Surely you were a fish when first we met. What am I to do with you? I thought I had found food for my family.”

‘ “If you will carry me back to the river there will be food upon the table for your family and the crops will grow plentiful in your fields.”

‘The boy did as the young woman asked. He carried her on his back to her home in the river, and when he returned to his family he found the table laden. For a whole turn of the seasons the crops grew plentiful, the trees were heavy with fruit and the boy was greatly celebrated for catching the river goddess. But after a year life returned to normal. The bounty faded, the crops and trees gave only their usual yield. So the boy’s older brother thought to also win the regard of his people.

‘He went to the river and he caught many fish and each one he carried in his basket back along the path to the village. None was the young woman his brother had spoken of and each of the fish he flung down on the path. All day he fished until at last, as the sun was sinking to rest among the mountains, he caught a black fish with scales of gold. When he carried the basket on his back it grew heavy so he laid the basket down and from it stepped the young woman. She looked about her and saw the dead bodies of all the fish the young man had thrown away and she was dismayed.

‘ “What is it you seek from the river?” the girl demanded.

‘ “You can bring bounty to our table and plenty to our crops.”

‘ “You have taken food from the river and you have wasted it. You must return me to the river and no food will sit upon your table and your crops will fail,” she said.

‘But the brother bound the young woman with a rope, saying, “I will bring you to our home and you will make sure the table never runs low and the crops are plentiful, and because you are more beautiful than any girl in the village I shall consider making you my wife and I will rule over the village.”

‘He carried her on his back but when he arrived home, instead of a woman on his back, he bore the skeleton of a great fish.

‘The younger brother was so distraught at what his older brother had done, he carried the bones of the fish back to the river. He laid the fish upon the water and the bones turned to mist and rose into the sky. When he returned to the village his brother and all the people who had lived there were gone. Water came no more to the land and it has been that way to this day.’

My father nodded.

‘Father, when I die will I be a fish or a woman?’

‘I am not sure you will ever die.’

‘Only if I leave the river?’

‘You belong to the river. We both know that.’

‘Mother left the river.’

‘Yes, little fish.’

‘Do you think she went to the sea? Is that where river wives go?’

‘Perhaps, little fish.’

‘Do I look like her?’

‘You do, so much like her. But of course she was not human at all. So when I held her it was like holding time itself.’

My mother had gone when I was so young I had few memories of her. I longed for her but she was not here with us, and I hovered between wanting to know everything about her and wanting to know nothing.

‘Will I really live forever, Father?’

‘My not-so-little fish,’ and here he held me gently against him with his arm about me and looked into my face with his smiling eyes, ‘you are life in some form I could never have anticipated. You are my own flesh and blood, yet you are so much more than that. How late it has come, this understanding that I have been entirely shaped by my human brain and all the limitations it has. How far we might go if we could reach beyond our form, and yet I suspect the very notion of reaching beyond is part of the human condition as well. Ah, it is a riddle, life. I cannot see the future but I know I will never leave you. Even if you are here forever.’

I saw life. I saw it in flies swarming, in butterflies, in bubbles floating on the river, in fog lifting, in the breeze with its gentle invitation to move. The river changed and change was its pattern, the tumble of cycles one upon the other like a stone thrown into the lake at dawn when the surface was pulled tight with silence. Only the sun was constant, and the sun owned me. By day I could walk upon the land or swim as a fish, but when the day was gone and I stepped into the river I became a fish and could not be a woman again until the dawn returned.

‘It is a great riddle,’ Father said. ‘You are the riddle we might happily never solve.’

Wilson James was a flash of colour in the forest. He was the sound of twigs breaking, leaves crushed underfoot, damp earth imprinted with the mark of a shoe. The lingering scent of his clothes and skin settled in the air with the drift of smoke from his house, the banging of a door, dissonant in the hush of mist through the trees. He stepped about the forest like a large animal. He trod heavy upon the paths and watched with a face as keen and blind as wind. Often he did not wake until the sun was playing in the centre of the lake, and as night slipped through the forest the unclothed windows of his house emblazed the trees.

Rain fell as it had not fallen for many seasons. Melt from the mountains found the river, and when the river could carry no more it overflowed into the fern-filled rock cascades beside the river’s course. Loud was the river and loud was the rain and with the fremitus of the river came stories, each one to be sifted, untangled and tended. Wilson James was the unfamiliar bird whose call I did not recognise. I did not know its food nor the purpose of its flight, but it settled into the forest and brought no more disturbance than its own discordant music.

On the days when clouds walked down from the mountains but brought no rain, he came every day to the river. He wore a green jacket and a soft black hat and he had with him a notebook. After a while he seemed to find a thought to his liking. I crept a little closer. Wilson James’s pen caught the sunshine and sent it dancing on the tree trunks. He scratched lines black as wet sticks across the page. The pen flew and rested. He wrote words and made drawings of fern fronds and rock forms. His pace was unsteady, stopping and starting, his head cocked like a bird observing a certain call, a note upon the air which I could not hear.

Spring captivated the forest with the invitation to grow and bear. Insects fled the constraints of their shells, flies awoke early from the dark places they had slumbered. In the afternoons Wilson James often fell asleep against a tree. Insects flew in his breath and the notebook stirred on his lap as a breeze played with the pages. At last I could bear it no longer. When I could have left him there to sleep undisturbed I did not. I had all those days avoided contact with him, preferring to observe the flow of his daily ritual, his lightening tread upon the paths, his increasing assurance as he stepped from rock to rock. I had stood close enough to touch him. I had sat in a tree above him. I had waited behind him on the riverbank in the gloom of green sunlight and he had not glimpsed me. What made me reach forward, disregarding entirely the words of my father?

I thought I had taken the measure of him in small observations, as if in the accumulation of patterns and rhythms I had a picture of the whole. I did not know that in the span of a human life, shorter than the cycle of a tree but much longer than that of a bird, flows an undercurrent deeper than it is possible to understand unless we choose to swim in it.

‘What are you saying in your book?’ I asked.

Wilson James jumped like an afternoon fish. He dropped his pen and book and picked them up and then dropped them again. He stood up and then sat down again. Small flies flew up from the rock where they had settled beside him.

‘You have returned,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think I’d imagined you.’

I saw his eyes were not the same, that his face was two faces, one half each. Wilson James had a face that was as soft as a leaf and as hard-edged as a flint of stone. He had curves in his cheeks that ran down from his nose. His face had many journeys in it and I wondered if he would die before he became an old man.

I said to Wilson James, ‘When are you going away?’

‘Well, I don’t exactly know. I was planning to stay three months.’

‘You have stayed longer than the others.’

‘I wasn’t sure I’d like it here.’

‘Do you like it here?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Have you seen many places?’

‘A few.’

‘Have you seen the ocean?’

Wilson James looked more keenly at me. I could not tell what both sides of his face were thinking.

‘Have you?’ he asked.

I saw that it would not be wise to answer him.

‘Why did you come to this place?’ I asked before he could say another word.

‘I’m writing a book—or avoiding writing. More the latter. I have been trying to find a story but all the stories have run away from me and are hiding.’

‘Perhaps you need the snow to come,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘In the breath of winter it is possible to hear the oldest stories.’

‘Ah, yes, but I am looking for a new story,’ he said. ‘The old ones have all been heard before and no-one wants to hear them again.’ He threw a stone in the river.

‘Why do you need a story?’

He sighed. ‘I am a writer. Writers need stories.’

‘You have found stories before?’

‘I have written four novels.’

‘I would like to hear one of your stories,’ I said.

‘They’re long and complicated,’ said Wilson James.

‘Good.’

‘Now?’ he asked.

‘Yes, now,’ I replied.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, they’re novels.’

‘Stories?’

‘Yes, long stories.’

‘Good.’

‘I will try then,’ he said, and rolled his damp moss in paper and lit it with a red-tipped flint from a box in his pocket.

‘I gave it up years ago and then I found this packet of tobacco in the house and it seems to go with being up here,’ he said.

‘Are you cold?’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘I’m not cold. Perhaps it’s the being alone. A cigarette is good company.’

‘My father, when he put his stories away, he also grew cold. It will pass.’

Wilson James looked across the river where the frothing water plunged and ferns shivered in a pale grey mist. The day was warm and the rocks on the riverbank glowed. Two large bronze-winged insects hovered together under the far bank which curved out over the river. Blue and white flowers dipped their heads towards the sound of the water as it rushed and danced by our feet.

‘You are a ghost, aren’t you? Or some kind of apparition?’

‘I think you may be the apparition, Wilson James.’

‘Surely one is true and not the other.’

‘Oh, I cannot be sure. I cannot be sure of anything at all since your arrival.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I will wake up.’

‘You are quite awake and you are going to tell me a story.’

He looked away and smiled. ‘Then I will begin,’ he said. He began and began again. He said, ‘They are easier to write than they are to tell.’

‘You do not trust them.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not.’

‘When cold lies on the land like a secret you will hear stories too fragile for the light of day.’

He gazed at me with his blue eyes. ‘It is very remote here, for a woman.’

I skipped a small pebble across the river and downed one of the bronze-winged flies and almost leapt in to eat it but thought better of it.

‘Do you live with many people?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said. His eyes went flat and his face revealed a grey shadow. ‘No. Well, yes. When I open my door I’m in a city of thirty million.’

‘Is it a good place?’

‘A good place, a bad place. Hell, it’s a city.’

‘It must have many stories.’

‘That’s one way to describe it.’

‘Who tends your forests and rivers while you are here?’

‘Well . . . nobody. There aren’t any forests.

And the river . . . well, it’s not like this at all.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘How is it possible you don’t know? Please don’t tell me you’ve been here your whole life.’

I said, ‘I have been to the mountains that way and to just below the great lake that way.’ It was not really an answer, but how could I say, ‘While you have been measuring time in the passage of a human life we have been here and always here before your people were ever upon this earth’?

Wilson James picked up a rock and rubbed it in the palm of his hand.

‘You are serious, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My father said it was a failing of mine.’

He stopped rubbing and looked at me for a while and I looked back and then he started on the rock again.

‘He about, your father?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I would like to meet him.’

When he put the rock down it glowed with the heat of him, and the colour he left on it was pale blue with a yellow edge.

‘And your mother?’

‘She has not been here since I was a child.’

He sat very still. Gently, very gently, he reached over and laid his hand on mine. Just for a moment the dry warmth of his skin moved into me. Then he removed it.

‘You are real,’ he said. ‘Cold but definitely real.’

‘You must come to my house, Wilson James.’

‘Is it safe for me to come? Is it made of gingerbread? Will you turn me into a beast?’

‘I think that it is safe for you to come,’ I said.

‘When shall I come to your house?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Fish are both solitary and seek company. They are colourful in light and drab without it. Trout in particular are prone to melancholy. Some of the memories of fish are as vapour, for they have no need of remembering their own lives, and the world above the water passes them by without remark. They can forget in a day the taking of one of their kind from the river by a fisherman, but they can remember my mother and the long years back, for every fish born is born with this memory, of the river wives who birthed them and the songs that they sang. The stories are in the water for any fish to listen to. Fish spend a great deal of time listening to the water’s stories. They move about in the river catching first this one then that. They are so entranced by the stories, so filled with wonder at a story of love or sanctuary or belonging, that sometimes they do not remark the man upon the shore, the feathered trick that skids and lands, skids and lands again above their swimming place. Almost in irritation do they snap at it, so that it will be still while they hear the story, and then they are caught and the stories end.

Sometimes I thought of the river wives returning. But would they welcome me? Or would I seem so other to them they would not? I had seen strange creatures born and the mother walk away. I had considered that this was what my mother did. She walked away. And were it not for my father it would have been the death of me. Or so I liked to think in the long days of early youth when Father was not able to answer all the questions of a young fish and I was restless with my duties.

‘You were capable from the moment I laid you in the river,’ my father said, his hands tying the threads of a snare. ‘There was no need to tend you. You knew without any help from your mother what to eat in the river. It was on the land you were unsteady, as any young child. In the water there was no stumbling or falling.’

‘You said that human babies feed upon their mother’s breast.’

‘Well, there was none of that for you. It was my chest you rested on as the day disappeared, and then I would take you to the river and you and your mother would swim away to the moonpool. At dawn you would be at the water’s edge, your golden eyes watching as I came close, your silver scales rippling in the new light, and I would lift you and there in my hands, there against my chest, you’d become my warm-skinned baby again.’

‘And Mother? Did she not carry me about?’

‘I carried you and she sang to you, and that is how you grew. She sang to you, and if she was near or further up the river always you turned your face to the sound of her voice. Her hands were full of the tending of the river and the weaving of stories. You see, I think they never knew the baby stage, her kind. I did not ask about it much for it felt a thing so vast, the gap between what I was and what she was, and love doesn’t need many answers. But she made me smile with her questions. “They do not walk for a whole cycle?” she asked. “No,” I replied. “Sometimes longer.” And your mother said, “May the wind blow her upright soon, for she is fearless but never was life more fearful, to be so helpless.”

‘ “Ah, but I shall watch over her,” I said.

‘ “It is what humans do, this care of the young, isn’t it?” she asked as she gazed upon your face. “I had not understood the tenderness it takes. I have listened to the songs of mothers and never quite known what it is, this tenderness, until I see her and then I feel it.”

‘She loved you as much as any mother ever loved a daughter. Perhaps more, for you were such a wonder to her. You would think that listening all that time I would have learned the songs too. But I never could. I don’t have the ears you have. I don’t hear any words. Not even a tune really. But it’s beautiful. ’

‘When did I start singing?’

‘By the time you were running about.’

‘Did Mother ever hear me sing?’

‘She did. I promise. We were collecting kindling for winter. I didn’t even hear you start, for you babbled as any baby and I talked back, so when your singing started it was more like an extension of the conversation we’d been having. But the light in the forest had changed and the sticks I was bending to pick up were on a leaf mulch so bright and golden, and the moss had turned a green like no other earthly green, and the wind, it was suddenly full of voices, old and young, kind and full of tears. I was suddenly part of a great valley. The valley was full of memory and a power so strong nothing could hold it back. Your mother came and stood beside me, her hands wet from the river, and she took my hand and smiled into the sky and said, “Her singing has begun.” ’

Long ago it is since the river wives came to this world. Every fish in the world is the descendant of those women who bore fish of every type as they swam in rivers and oceans. Some fish still swim upwards to the lakes, as if they remember that it is from the lakes that first they came, and there they lay their eggs and die. But we do not die. I do not know how many river wives still live and walk by day upon the shores of lake or river or ocean. I have never heard the voice of any other river wife in the rain or in the river.

I thought when I was a small creature that I could hear the songs of others, sometimes faintly, in the flood waters of snowmelt, in the spring rush when ferns unfurled their fronds at the river’s edge, in the lazy river of autumn when leaves drifted upon the surface. But though my songs travelled down to the sea, no songs came back to me. I could hear only memories. Long-ago memories of river wives catching the stories of the world, singing and weaving them into water, threading them together through time so none were lost, and all were waiting to be heard.

I did not know if other river wives took husbands from the people of the earth and gave birth to creatures such as me. My mother was gone before such things could be asked. I remembered that she swam beside me at night in the river. I remembered her dark shape sheltering me from the currents that moved over us. I remembered the line of her body, her fins frilling in the water, her watchful eye, her golden skin glowing as moonlight slipped between the folds of water.

‘Why did Mother leave us, Father?’ As I grew older he would still sit to answer me and sometimes he would take my hand and stroke it gently.

‘Perhaps there was somewhere else she needed to go. She never looked old, but she was. Older than the lake below and the lake above, and still I wonder at that for she was as young and as bright as summer to me. And you were born. Perhaps that was what she needed: a daughter to be here to carry on for her.

‘You will always be young, my little fish,’ my father said, ‘and one day I will be an old, old man.’

‘You will never be old, Father.’

‘I will, little fish, and there is nothing we can do to stop that.’

‘But you will stay with me?’

‘Forever and a day.’

Wilson James followed me along the path and dipped his head a little as he passed through the door of the house my father had built. He ran his hands along the stone walls and gazed at the ceiling that was the wood of many trees. He moved about the room, trailing a finger along the table rubbed to a glow with beeswax, along the mantelpiece over the stone hearth. He looked out of the windows and rested his knee against the wide ledge where Father had liked to sit and watch the river.

‘Your father built this?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes.’

‘He is quite a craftsman. Is he about today?’

‘He is beside the river.’

Wilson James observed me. His face had taken the colour of a man who knew the sky. He wore his shirt of blue lines and his feet wore boots that humans wore to walk in the mountains. I saw he had lost some of the softness that had startled me the day I saw him naked and sleeping. I felt a flush of warmth overtake me as he met my gaze. Wilson James turned from the window and his eyes found the bed and stopped. He walked over to it.

‘It’s a polar bear skin,’ he said. ‘It’s real. Unbelievable. Where did you . . . who gave it to you?’

‘My husband.’

‘Your husband?’ he said, and his voice was shallow. ‘Where is he?’

‘He is not coming back.’

Wilson James stood very still and ran his hand through the fur and then he looked at me.

‘What did he do, your husband?’

‘He was . . . a woodcutter,’ I decided.

‘Ah,’ said Wilson James.

I smiled and said, ‘What sort of tea am I to make you?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Oh no,’ I smiled. ‘I will decide for you.’

I stood and looked into his eyes and saw the circle of dark about the pupils. I saw the flecks of gold and cream that pulled out from the strands of deep blue. I saw the ache in his cheeks, the heaviness that lingered on his lips, the words that would not quiet in his ears, the whispers of childhood in the lines about his eyes. I saw his life waiting deep in his bones. I saw the food that had burned him from the inside, the sweats that worried him at night, the twitch at the edge of his face that was there when he awoke. I saw the gentleness in his skin that told me he had not found enough friends. I saw his eyes had not cried sufficient tears nor seen enough of what he truly loved.

‘What does your body need?’ I said aloud.

‘Coffee. Or a shot of Drambuie.’

I made the tea to my mother’s recipe. Her recipes asked for many things and I had everything that was necessary. Bark, moss, leaf and river rock. I made the tea that would help the sadness in Wilson James’s eyes. It had not been made for many years, not since my mother made it for Father when first he came to the river. It had been long before I was born, but I knew every ingredient just as I had always known every song my mother had sung.

Wilson James held the cup and sipped at the tea. He had settled into Father’s chair by the fireplace and the scent of him was the scent of somewhere far from here, where the world grew other trees. Dust spiralled in the open door as sunshine fell onto the floor stones. Steam drifted from the pan that cooled beside the fire. He sat forward and said, ‘You have not told me your name.’

I looked into his face and said, ‘I have found in the naming of things that something happens.

My father had names—the trees, the lakes, the mountains, the river, the small flowers and mosses. The butterflies. The fish. Each of them had a name that was fixed as lichen is fixed to a rock, but even lichen grows old and crumbles. I have lived for a long time now without the names of things, for when I name them they grow smaller. There are times now in the forest when a flower appears, berries grow, a certain fungus blooms, and if I name it I can pass it by as if I have seen it already. I do not want to pass it by. Every change is one of the sounds of the forest. Every fish is marked a different way. The bark of each tree has a pattern that is unique, a constellation of small creatures and plants which grow there and make it home, and it may have a neighbour which stands also in bark of a similar cloth, but it is not the same because its name is the same.’

‘Tree. Lake. Mountain. They are also names,’ said Wilson James.

‘But they are questions too.’

‘Perhaps I will think of a name for you.’

‘You may make a name but I will not be that every day.’

Wilson James finished his tea and I poured more for him.

It was the beginning of the summer when the sound of the river grew quieter to me than the sound of his voice, where the proximity of him made me consider how close they all were, people, to the forest. How long would it hold? Was it just him or would others soon be able to see me? I knew I must travel down to the greatest lake to be sure.

I could have been afraid. I found the size of Wilson James in the cottage larger than I ever remembered Father being. But I had no fear of him. I wanted instead to lean against the arm of him so that I might feel the warmth under his shirt, put my head on his shoulder and watch the fire smoke weave faces in the air.

‘I am suddenly weary,’ he said, resting his head against the back of the chair.

‘Then I will tell you a story,’ I said.

The story that came to me was the story of the white swan and the black swan, and as Wilson James sipped the second cup of sadness tea, I began.

‘It is said that one of the great rivers of the world is made from the tears of people who have wept over the anguish of time—too little time, time going too fast, time passing, time moving on. One summer day there came to the river a young woman who had promised herself that she would love no-one but Time itself. She washed her golden hair in the river, and sang the songs of day and night as the moon slipped between the branches of the trees and the sun turned the river white with its brightness. So long did she wait that Time stepped from the river in the cloak of a young man and said, “Why are you waiting? You grow older each day. One day your youth will fade and none will marry you. Why do you wait?”

‘ “I will marry only Time itself,” said the young woman.

‘ “Why is it Time that you want?”

‘ “I would live forever and see all things that pass and hear all songs that are sung if only Time was my husband. I will never lament the passing of time as others do, my children will never die and I shall be eternally happy.”

‘ “If you step into the water I will take you to Time,” said the young man.

‘The young woman liked the face of the young man, as it had a purpose in it she recognised as her own. So she stepped into the river. Deep did he take her, down into the coldest parts of the world, and long did they walk through the tunnels of the earth until they came to an underground lake so vast none could see its boundaries. Reflected in the lake were stars as bright as those in the night sky. It is said that the stars above the Lake of Time are the lights of children coming to the earth. The longer the child lives the more the star fades, for this is where Time begins and ends.

‘ “Long have you travelled, and many have been the days since you left the world behind,” the young man said. “Look into the water. You have walked with Time all these days and have I not been a gentle companion? Have we not talked and sung? Have we not been happy?”

‘And the woman looked into the water and saw she had grown old beyond recognition.

‘ “All women are married to me from the moment they are born. I am in your face as it grows from child to woman, in your womb that carries the children who will walk in your footsteps upon the earth, the grandchildren who will bury you and the land that will change about you in the passing of the seasons. But you have turned away from these things, these gifts of mine. Now time is in the furrows of your face, in your womb that will carry no children, in your eyes too old to weep tears and in your hands lined by the longing for things that cannot be caught.”

‘And in saying this he dropped the garb of a boy and took the form of a black swan that slipped onto the surface of the lake.

‘The woman stepped into the water and for a moment she felt the hand of the child she had never borne, the warmth of the grandchildren she would never hold, the cheek of her husband as he slept beside her; she smelled the summer grass and the fall of rain and the salt of the ocean before she slipped under the lake’s surface and was washed far away through the caves of the earth to the sea. There her spirit rose up into the sky and fell as rain and came at last to the great river, and there sat a young woman. The spirit of the old woman stepped from the river and said, “What is it you wait by the river for?”

‘ “I had thought to catch Time and make him my husband so that I might become eternal,” the young woman said.

‘ “Daughter,” said the old woman spirit, “go home to your village. Choose a man who will love you all of your life, bear children who will bring laughter to your days, enjoy the grandchildren who are the late fruit of the tree you have planted, remark at the seasons and the skies that change as the days go by, and with every breath know that you are married to Time from the moment you are born and by your side Time walks every day. While Time may bring the gifts of life, it is not life. Life is what you do with the gifts Time brings.”

‘And with that the old woman was transformed into a swan as white as snow, and to this day you will not see a black swan and a white swan swimming together, for one is Time and the other is Life and they have their own work.’

By the end of the story Wilson James was asleep by the fireplace and the colours of his memories floated about him like the dust of pollen in spring air. Much later, when the day had almost passed, I went out and found the logs that stood still beside the house where my husband had stacked them and I made of them a fire of deep warmth, for Wilson James had grown very pale as he slept. I sat beside him as dusk fell over the river, and so many memories did that fire bring to me of Father and weather and the Winter King coming in from the snow.

Wilson James slept on there in the chair and I slipped from the cottage to my place in the river. In the morning I found him still sleeping and I was happy to have him there at dawn with none to gaze upon his face but me. His sleeping face, his resting fingers on the blanket I had settled about him, his breath, his eyelashes, the skin beneath his shirt, his legs and feet. The smell of him was gentle and keen all at once but I did not dislike it. If I had known he was to sleep so long I would have had him lie upon the bed—but then he did not know he was to sleep at all.

I took the leaves from the bottom of his cup and placed them upon a shell on the ledge above the fireplace and patterned them into the shape he was seeking. I left them there where the warmth of the morning sun would reach them. He was still asleep at midday. I thought it best I did not make his tea so strong from then on.

When he awoke at dusk he thought only a few hours had passed, not a whole day, and I did not tell. He unwound himself from the chair and stretched. ‘I missed your story,’ he said.

‘One day I will tell it again.’

When he left he did not reach out and touch me, but his eyes touched my face.

‘I’m sorry I fell asleep,’ he said. ‘I feel quite strange.’

‘Tell me.’

‘As if the forest is talking to me.’

‘Then perhaps you may find your story yet, Wilson James.’

When it starts, love hides its ending well. But the symptoms are there of what will bring the dying and, like a withering branch or a greying leaf, the symptoms and the cause can be two very different things. I went about my work and Wilson James, with his footfall on the riverbank, remained. When I saw him it gave me rise to think again of him asleep in the chair by the fire, and though I left the tea leaves in a basket by his door, in case he wished to heal his sadness, I did not visit him and went first upstream and then down and then across the dark wetlands and forgot for days on end the cast of his eyes.

When I returned home, I looked for the light of his house beyond the trees but the light had gone. The tea was not upon his doorstep and his house was closed shut against the night and the day. Music with a lone mournful voice ran up and down inside the house like a bird felled by an arrow. For many long days it was this way, and I saw nothing of him. At night a faint rim of light marked the windows and I saw the merest flicker of a shadow and knew he was within. When he came out upon the riverbank at last an ache lay upon his cheek and the smell on his skin was of something dying.

I waited upon the stone steps that led to the river path, and when he saw me he smiled against his sadness.

‘Ah, you have returned again,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is a sign.’

I said, ‘There is a new reflection of yellow flowers at the lower bend.’

‘Is there?’ he said. ‘You must show it to me.’

We took the rocks and found the bend. He gazed into the flowers shimmering there at the water’s edge, the breeze quivering their heads a little and the reflection making of the flowers twice what they were on land. The river had taken a new current to its centre, turning the water like the hair of a drowned woman warrior. We sat together, though the scent from his skin was strange and unsettling, and Wilson James placed stones one upon another until they tilted and fell. I wondered at a life measured by a span of years. I saw that if words were what he sought then the years were short to find them all and catch them on his page.

He said, ‘What are you seeing?’

‘I am seeing the late morning upon you.’

‘Thank you for not being truthful with me,’ he said, his hand curled against his mouth, his shoulders heavy that day with weariness as if he carried a burden in his arms.

The river wound its song about us and the small creatures of forest and water went about their days as heat began to fill the air. The ferns bent to the river and whispered shade and light, shade and light. The grasses stood upright, unfolding from the earth, reaching for a breath of breeze to give them movement. Bushes white with flowers bowed and dipped, rustling with the wings of birds seeking nectar. Far above, the heads of the tallest trees rumbled with coming weather. And no word passed between us for a long time.

‘I must set about my tasks,’ I said at last. I looked at him still sitting there.

‘Are you going away again?’ he asked, staring into the river.

‘This is my home. I never leave.’

‘I do not always see you. I have never seen your father.’

‘We are always here,’ I said, ‘beside the river.’

I looked into his blue eyes, the shadow of hair that marked the edge of his jaw, the way one of his hands lay over the other between his knees. I thought how Wilson James’s face would look if he saw me slip into the water.

‘Are you my muse?’ he asked. ‘Have you brought me a story?’

‘You will find your story, Wilson James. I cannot find it for you.’

Standing upstream in the river alone I watched the scales form on my feet and hands. Silver, green and gold.

‘What story have you brought me, Wilson James?’ I whispered. ‘Is this what it is to be human?’ I asked the river. ‘To feel this restlessness?’

Leaves shivered and the shiver passed on, reflected in the surface of the lake. The sky lay low on the hills and the air was so quiet in the mist that no sound other than our breathing came to us. Across the sheen of lake came bubbles of light floating towards us, rainbow domes of swirling pink, gold, palest green, mauve, the finest fabric water can make, each bubble holding within it the breath of the lake. They passed us by, that fragile flotilla, and drifted onto the shore, still whole, still rainbow lined.

‘What is that?’ asked Wilson James, his breath no more than a whisper, as if his voice might burst the fragile membranes that held the rainbow spheres afloat. ‘Where have they come from? Is it something in the lake causing it?’

‘They are the dreams of children that have risen from the Lake of Time,’ I said, for that is what my father told me. As a fish I had watched them form beneath the lake’s surface, the cold and warm currents spiralling in long strands until they slipped free and rose into lines of bubbles transporting the sky’s smallest rainbows.

Wilson James closed his eyes. The bubbles vanished mutely one by one. When he opened his eyes again Wilson James said, ‘How old are you?’

‘That is not a question I can answer,’ I said.

‘I thought not,’ he said.

Brushing off the crumbs of food he had eaten, he said, ‘You do not feel the cold, you are not dressed for this place and yet you seem more of this place than the trees.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you eat? I saw no food in your house.’

‘I liked the bread of my father and the soups he made. But he has no need of such food anymore and neither do I.’

He nodded. Wilson James had taken the human path that was marked with red shapes on trees. For a little way the music of the river followed the path through the lichen-covered trunks of the forest. But the path left the river behind as it climbed higher. Once Father and I climbed the mountain to the west and he thought it was a walk we could do from sun-up to sundown and that it would be safe for me. There were small streams and water pathways, but as soon as the river’s voice was gone I felt a darkness about me as if I was entering a world where I was blind. I chose never to walk the human way again but took always the river’s path.

I found there was much I wished to ask Wilson James as we sat upon the shore. Wilson James, I had discovered, had words for every thought and colour, each mood or expression. It reminded me of Father and the words he had kept for each plant in the forest, each colour and texture of rock. Words were the clothes Wilson James wore, as if in speaking he cast a cloak about the world and it kept him safe as he walked.

‘Where are your parents?’

‘Oh, my father died last year—a stroke. He was on his way to an appointment. And my mother died some years back. Cancer.’ He looked up at the sky and rubbed his thumb against his other hand. The deepest sadness in Wilson James was still buried like a treasure inside him.

‘Is your heart broken?’ I asked Wilson James. ‘Are you in need of moss and spider web and rainbow scales?’

He looked startled. Then weary.

‘My heart is as it is. I am not sure there’s much to be done with it,’ he said.

‘Tell me about the sound of your river.’

Wilson James sighed. ‘The river is as wide as this lake and the colour of yellow mud. It has roads and bridges and high-rises built beside it. There is one big park right in the middle of the city that has lots of trees. But not like these trees. I’ve never really had much interest in trees. Until I came here I’d never sat on the edge of a river. I used to go fishing on the coast with my father as a kid. But we only went a couple of times. It’s very strange to find myself here. It’s so quiet. Yet I am occupied. Occupied in a different way. I have mastered an axe. I watch the sky. I am befriending solitude. It scared me at first, but slowly I have started to feel as if I can breathe and no-one will take that breath away.’

‘How old are you, Wilson James?’

‘I am forty-seven,’ he said.

‘Have you mastered many things?’

‘No. Perhaps nothing. In forty-seven years I have written one good novel, two bad novels and one novel everyone seemed to think was brilliant. The good novel followed the brilliant novel and then the two bad ones followed that. The manuscript I wrote last year hasn’t even found a publisher. My own just shook her head. And what was worse was I couldn’t see it was bad and I had no idea how to fix it. None of the greats grew worse over the years—their books got better. Not mine. It’s enough to make any publisher, and my agent, very nervous. “Wilson James is the great un-read. People think they ought to own his books but they can’t bear to read them because they’re just awful.” That’s what one reviewer said about me. I’ve become a critic’s expression when a novelist pulls off a good second or third novel—“So and so has proved he’s not suffering from the James effect.” The James effect? You see, in some ways it’s worse to fail later than earlier because people have expectations. They pay good money. And then if you let them down they’re not kind. I had a neighbour stop me in the street and say, “I read Narcissus Lives and it made me very sad.” And I knew it wasn’t the book that made him sad, but my failure. When you’ve written well and then you go into decline, it’s as if you haven’t been trying hard enough. As if the muse has run off, appalled at your inadequacy.’

‘Have you always been alone, Wilson James?’

‘No, surprisingly, I’ve been married twice.’ He smiled with the merest lift of his mouth. ‘My second wife left me after an interview that went horribly wrong was published in a magazine. I’m afraid that I am about to find that my best living, and my best writing, is done. That there is an awful stretch of loneliness ahead of me. That I will live always with a sense of a life missed or avoided. That, after all, I had no real or lasting ability at anything. That it was all something wishful.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘No comfort,’ he said.

I had written no books. I had tended the river and I had never wondered for how long I would do these things. But I wondered then.

He looked far off across the lake. His lips were a steady line marking two shallow hills. His nose was sculpted to suit him. His teeth were white when he smiled and the hairs that grew on his chest sprang up grey and white and brown over the fabric of his shirt.

On the surface of the lake a ring appeared, and another, and beneath its surface I saw the flash of a fish as it rolled.

Wilson James said, ‘It’s as if I was swimming— for forty-seven years—and then suddenly one day I looked up and saw that I was swimming and that took all the joy out of it.’

‘You don’t like to swim?’

‘It’s all I know how to do and I am tired of it.’

‘Of swimming?

‘Of being. I think of just being.’

‘I like to swim,’ I said. ‘It’s what I love to do.’

‘In the lake? It’s freezing. When do you swim?’

‘At night.’

‘That I have to see.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Will you swim today?’ asked Wilson James.

‘Later,’ I said.

‘I will wait on the riverbank until you appear.’

‘Then you will be bitten by many mosquitoes,’ I said.

‘Shall we walk back together?’ laughed Wilson James.

‘Until the next lake I will walk by the river with you,’ I said.

When we parted company and he went on along the path he said, ‘I am running low on supplies. I’ll be gone a couple of days. I’m happy to get anything you need.’

Father had brought tools for the house from the town I had never seen. Father said town was full of things people needed. He said once you started needing things from town, you never stopped.

‘I will not be needing anything, Wilson James,’ I said to him.

Summer played gently on the lake’s edge, nesting in the long evenings and the pearl dawns. Creatures brought their young to the lake’s edge. The grass plains above the forest were filled with yellow-winged butterflies as I walked the open pathways between river and lake, singing to the small tributaries and streams that ran towards the river, clearing them of stones and sticks that had tumbled there, singing to the little creatures the stories of the world and the river which was their mother.

Wilson James came by the river late in the afternoon and called to me. He carried a cloth wrapped about something in his arms. When he unwrapped it on a fallen trunk I saw it was bread, bread sending its smell like a memory into my bones.

‘The first two times it didn’t rise. And then . . .’ he said.

The sound of my father’s voice was clear again to me as if he stood just beside me, the knife in his hand, the loaf upon the cutting board. ‘Be careful, little fish. It is human food and I am not sure it is what you need. Eat it slowly now.’ And I had. Nibbling at its hard edges, the crumbs falling into my lap, the warm, fragrant centre of it soft in my fingers. Father had made for himself stews of meat, but for me he made a clear soup and I would dip tiny pieces of bread in it and let them soak on my tongue.

‘Here, try some,’ said Wilson James. He pulled from his back pocket a knife and then the blade was hovering above the loaf, waiting to bite the crust.

‘The berries are ripening all about,’ he said. ‘Do they make good jam?’

‘I do not know it,’ I said.

‘Jam? Goes on bread.’

I shook my head.

He handed me a slice and I took it and smelled it. It was still warm. He watched me and there was a happiness on his face, buzzing about him like a visiting fly.

He cut a slice for himself.

‘I don’t have any butter. Nor honey,’ he said.

‘Honey, yes,’ I said, leaping up. Something about him watching me made me want to buzz like a fly too. I darted over the riverbank and into the house, and found there, upon the shelf, one of the glass jars Father had stored. Bringing it back into the light I saw the honey had turned dark gold in the passing of time.

Wilson James lifted away the rusted lid and sniffed. Using the knife he dug a chunk from the jar the colour of amber quartz. When he tasted it, his eyes closed and he shook his head. ‘That is the most amazing flavour. Where is it from?’

‘From here in the forest. You may take the jar. I have more.’

‘What happened to me?’ he asked suddenly, clouds moving across the forest above him though there would be no rain. ‘One day I was in a city with a schedule and friends and withering reviews, and now I am here and it is as if the world I have known no longer exists. Every day this place is different. I can’t rely on anything. Like the sky. How did the sky get so big here? In the city it’s grey. It’s grey every day. But here the sky is blue. Incredibly blue and so close. Like it’s right here with us. Not far away. Sunshine makes just about anything pretty. I never noticed things like that before. I thought I was noticing but I wasn’t at all.’

He watched me nibbling at the bread. ‘Don’t you like it?’

‘I think this is how loving a child tastes. New and tender yet like a habit as old as the seasons.’

As I said it a purple veil threatened to close over Wilson James. But he held and gripped.

‘Do you have children, Wilson James?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You?’

‘No,’ I said. But it was not the truth. A river wife can bear only one daughter and my only daughter was no longer with me. If ever I went from this place there would be no daughter of mine, no river wife left to weave the songs and stories of the river.

‘I found a couple of old books in town on fly-fishing,’ he said at last. ‘Do you fish?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Your father?’

‘No.’

‘I heard a story when I was down there about a man who built a house up here but no-one’s ever found it. Apparently the guy was seen in these parts for a long time. Too long. Made people think he was a ghost. But there’s a case down there with some of the lures he made. I wondered if that was your father, the one they talk about?’

I said nothing. Wilson James nodded.

‘I heard there are giant fish in here too but of course no-one’s ever caught one. Too many deep holes and currents. The river below the big lake is easier, they say. Browns and rainbows. Will you come with me one day? Trying to catch a fish may be a perfect distraction from writing.’

I shook my head.

‘Sometime?’ he asked.

‘I think you would be luckier without me,’ I said.

‘Why would that be?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t I find your house when you are gone? I go and look for it but I can never find the path. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

‘You must take the bread with you,’ I said. ‘I will not eat it alone.’

The water was not cold, although Wilson James said it was freezing. He took off his boots, unlacing each one and putting them side by side on the shore. He slid off his socks and stood in the shallows in the brown spin of water. Wetness glistened off the smooth stretch of skin beneath his ankle, along the arch of his foot. The hair on his legs was dark against his skin. He sat beside me with his trousers pulled up over his knees and water pooled on the white gravel beyond our feet. The air hummed with insects that he waved away with his hand.

‘So many things go on that are invisible, so many things happen that you would never know,’ he said. ‘There are swarms of flies that rise off the water. There are fish which leap for no reason.’

‘They leap for food.’

‘The river is liquid but it is airborne,’ he said. ‘All this moisture that rises off it, the mist and spray, it must get breathed in by everything here— trees, ferns, moss, fungi, flowers. This whole place relies on water. It’s like water is its air.’

I said nothing, listening only to the sound within his voice that reached for me and drew me closer. His voice ahead of me on the path, the cadence of his stride a rhythm that suited, the air between us coloured with words, the mist of river that settled on his hair and curled it. These are the particles that love can gather from.

‘The summer is passing into autumn and I think that I will stay on a little longer,’ he said.

Then, ‘How did you meet him, your husband?’ he said suddenly, and in the suddenness of it I answered him truthfully.

‘He came from the mountains,’ I said.

‘It’s a long time since he was here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Wilson James drank from the cup he had carried down from the house.

‘Have you found your story, Wilson James?’

‘I think I have it then it slips away. But I’ve been listening. Listening takes a long time, but strangely I am okay with it. The world leaves me alone. Once it might have troubled me to be without anything to claim me. Is this what you do to all the men who come here? Bewitch them with this place?’ His eyes watched me and his smile lingered on his lips. ‘Your husband?’

I considered that perhaps it had been the Winter King who bewitched me, the young river wife he had come so far to find. He had walked as a bear, and he walked sometimes in the form of a man, and sometimes his form was falling snow. He was my husband and my daughter’s father, but above all he was winter’s guardian, one of the four keepers of nature’s cycles who walked the earth.

At dusk each evening the Winter King’s companions appeared with their instruments, and long into the night did they play. But they were gone when I returned to the shore at sunrise. If I glimpsed them as they truly were, it was only in the tracks they made in the snow. The house grew bigger in their company. The table was laden with food. The fire roared, the music swelled, their laughter echoed across the roof beams, and as I shut the door and walked towards the river, the sound of their songs died in the darkness.

In the mornings my husband would sometimes be a bear and other days he would be a man waiting on the riverbank at dawn. He would slip his hands into the river and lift me as a fish and hold me as I changed before he carried me back to the bed in the cottage. I think it amused him to be a bear with a fish he could love and not eat. He would laugh as he plucked trout from the river and ate them whole, though this unsettled me.

The last winter he came through the mountain path, he had been as tender with me as if I was a bird in need of healing. He carried our daughter about on his shoulders though she had grown tall and strong. She was excited to have him home, as she was each winter. His companions were quieter. The singing was all of journeys that were to be made, of caverns made of ice and of winter without spring or autumn. I did not know. I did not guess that this was his way of telling me he must leave.

‘My people are retreating,’ he said. ‘They will not return. I cannot hold against the time that is coming. The old cycles are changing.’

‘Is there nothing you can do?’

‘The singing that has been on this earth is ending. It is a vessel leaving the shore. There is no end I know or understand.’

He heard it earlier than I. The music of the world had changed.

So very gently did the Winter King lay me in the river that final night. He knew I would never leave the river, and that to try to persuade me was as if to ask a bird to stop flying. I slipped away to the moonpool with no thought that I would not see him again. In the morning, when I stepped from the river, there was no sound of him, no chop of wood or smoke from the fire. No footprints in the melting snow. It was as if he had never been, but for the skin, the pure white bearskin, that lay upon the bed.

When I sat beside Wilson James there was no haunting music, no shifting from one form to another, no knowing of each other as creatures who were not human. It was as simple as the small-leaved heath that grows everywhere it can in the forest. It was framed here in the forest by the distance between his home and mine and the course of the river. It had the smooth texture of bark from a slender tree, the smell of forest. It was a thing so simple it would have been easy to overlook it, like clouds so common they went unremarked.

‘I have nothing to offer you,’ said Wilson James. ‘I would like to find a gift for you.’

‘Why?’

‘I think you are some sort of guardian, a spirit of this place, and that it would be appropriate to bring you something.’

‘You have brought me bread.’

‘I will bring you jam to go with it,’ he said.

‘I will pick the fruit tomorrow morning. There are berries ripening all along the riverbank. I am sure they are edible.’

‘Yes, Father dried them but I . . .’

Sometimes in passing I plucked the fruit and let it rest upon my tongue. But I had let it all go, Father’s garden. The fruit vines he had planted had seeded through the forest, but the vegetables he had tended each day had long been overtaken by fern and scrub. The house too had sunk into the earth, as if one day it would relent and give itself back entirely. I had come from the river to find puddles on the floor. I could not fix it. I could not carve the pieces to fit as Father had.

I knew that one day the house would no longer offer the shelter Father intended.

‘Come to my house after midday. I’ll be ready,’ said Wilson James.

‘Will you, Wilson James?’ I smiled. ‘Then I shall be there.’

He turned to walk away, calling gently after him, ‘If the spirit of the forest is flirting with me, that must be a good sign.’

Inside the house there was much that was unfamiliar, but not Wilson James or the fruit in bowls upon the table. The house was bigger than I had imagined it would be. My shoes made no noise across the floor, which was softened by something like fabric. But it was the smell that struck me as the strangest thing inside the house. The forest was gone from it. Although it was just beyond, the house was still and empty of the bright scent of trees.

‘Do you know the story of this place?’ Wilson James asked.

‘The child was killed.’

‘Yes, the gas tank. Apparently it took out the whole side of the house. You can’t tell.’

‘The trees have never grown here again after the fire.’

‘Mary’s daughter.’ He picked up a picture in a case above the fireplace and there was a child spinning in the sunshine, her face smiling as she whirled, her hand just beside her face. ‘It’s why Mary could never sell the place. She always felt that a part of her daughter was still here. Even now. It’s more than fifty years ago.’

Wilson James replaced the picture above the fireplace.

‘She was ten, Mary’s daughter, when she died. The same age as my son.’

‘You have a son?’

‘He died seven months ago. He would have been eleven today. Mary offered me this place so I could get away. A long way away.’ His voice strained but ran on. ‘Eustace was the happiest person I have ever known. He had a genetic condition that slowly paralysed him. He lived as if he knew his time was short. He played the most beautiful music. Piano. Since he was two. For the last part he couldn’t play or walk. He loved to sit on the beach. Other than music it was the thing he most liked to listen to, the sound of waves. We’d sit on the beach together and he’d make me tell him stories of mermaids and fish and all the creatures of the sea. When he died the last thing he said to me was, “Dad, I will see you on the beach one day.” Once I counted him as a limb of my body. Every day I wake and for a moment the limb is with me and then it is gone, snatched before I can grasp it. I am an amputee. I have ghost pain.’

So there it was. A child lost to a place he could never follow. I wanted to tell him that I understood. That I knew what it was like to feel the ghost limb of my child. But if I began to talk of my daughter how would I explain her? How could I explain myself?

‘I am saddened that you have lost your son, Wilson James. And I am glad you came to the river.’

He lifted his head and looked at me. I wanted to take his hand and put it to my cheek and say, ‘I will hold you.’ Our eyes did not leave one another and then I said, ‘I would like to hear one of your stories, the ones you told him on the beach.’

‘I do not know if I can remember them.’

‘Will you try? Are you really a storyteller, Wilson James?’

‘Well, as it is his birthday,’ said Wilson James, and though his eyes were bright with water, a smile attempted to rest on his mouth. We sat and picked out the stalks while fruit heated in a large pan. Our fingers grew red with juice and this is the story he told and later I added it to the river for others to hear.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘when Eustace was only four or five, we walked along the beach and found a fish. A silver fish, only this long.’ He indicated the distance from head to tail with his hands. ‘It was still breathing and we put it back in the water. It swam about in the shallows but seemed reluctant to swim away. We watched it for a while and then we continued on. There on the beach just a short distance away we found another fish, almost identical, but this fish was no longer alive.

‘Eustace asked me why they threw themselves on the beach. So this is my story for him. The Story of Two Fish.

‘Once, deep within the green ocean,’ he began, ‘there were two fish. Both were silver-backed with mother-of-pearl eyes. These fish were friends as seaweed is friend to a rock and shell is friend to a snail. They belonged to each other. They did not remember a time when the world had been without the other, as if the tide of their friendship had been the rhythm of their lives.

‘And so it was one day that one fish said to the other, “When we leap above the sea and the golden world flashes bright in our eyes, do you not think it would be wonderful to have more than a moment? To have more than a glimpse of the golden sky?”

‘ “I think in those moments I am smaller than I ever realised,” said the other fish. “And if I stayed in that bright light I should become so small I might never know myself again.”

‘ “It is golden and the air stings me and I am frightened, but still I long for more,” said the friend.

‘ “It is not for us to step beyond our world. It is not the way. We are bound to the sea for a reason,” said the other.

‘ “I do not always want to live by the way,” said the friend, “but by what inspires me. What touches my heart and chills my skin, what lifts me up.”

‘ “The golden world does not lift you up,” said the other. “You lift yourself to it. It is all your own doing.”

‘ “Still I think it is my destiny,” said the friend. “I will spend my swimming thinking on how I can live in the golden world for longer than a moment.”

‘The friend travelled far and asked many questions and the other stayed close beside the friend and did not leave, and so it was that they both learned of the shore. The shore was the place that bordered the sea. Each day waves painted the white sand. Each wave that tumbled to the shore returned dizzy with stories of the surrender and rush of sea as it leapt against the land.

‘And so it was the friend said to the other, “We must throw ourselves out from a tumbling wave, throw ourselves into the golden air and bathe in the glory of that world, and then the next wave will come and carry us back to the sea again.”

‘ “But none return upon the next wave,” said the other. “It is not possible.”

‘ “We will,” said the friend. “I know it. The trick is not to leap too far.”

‘ “I am afraid,” said the other.

‘ “I am also afraid, but the shore will be kind. Nothing so beautiful could be unkind.”

‘Day after day as they swam the blue reaches the friend could talk of little else. They began practising their leaping, going closer and closer to the tumbling waves, sharpening their eyes on the golden light as they leapt.

‘ “Let us go this very day, for I feel it is my destiny,” said the friend at last. And because they were two, and had been so all their lives, it seemed the destiny of both.

‘And so they went together, for truly they had no thought to go alone or ever to leave the other, though their hearts sang different songs.

‘ “If we do not return . . . ” said the other.

‘ “We will. We will always be together.”

‘Closer and closer they were carried and the sea was dark and then lighter until they were between sand and golden sky, carried in a fold of green. Faster and faster they were carried as the sea pulled up and back and began to fall towards the silver sand.

‘ “Leap!” said the friend. “Leap to the light!”

‘And so they both leapt, higher than they had ever leapt before, and the swirl and tumble of water crashed beneath and they arced their silver bodies up, up, up. Each was transfixed by the shining brightness, the searing pain of beauty that captivated each until their bodies fell and hit the hard crust of wet sand, and there they stopped. Each of them was too far from the other to know that they were not, in fact, far at all. In vain they sucked at the golden light that, now there was time to really look, had about it a distant vivid blueness that might have been the sea after all. And there they lay stilled by the light and shivered alone.

‘And then, as one fish watched with its mother-of-pearl eye blind with the golden glare, it felt a soft warmth and the sensation of being gently held and lifted. It glimpsed the fleeting shadow of an enormous creature before the water enveloped it and the breath of life returned.

‘But though the fish waited beyond the tumbling waves for the friend to be returned to the sea also, the friend did not come. The tide changed and changed again. Darkness came and the golden light returned and still the other waited and knew it was too long, and in time the fish returned to the deeper sea.

‘ “I have seen the golden world. I have lain upon the shore. And upon the shore it is not possible to breathe and so it was as if I had died. But there are creatures on the shore who watch over us. And some of us they return to life, and some they keep with them,” said the fish when it was asked.

‘ “How do they choose?” a fish asked.

‘ “I do not know,” said the other.

‘And the fish was glad in the time that remained to live in the green ocean and be not dazzled by things unknown. When another asked to swim beside the fish and hear the story again, the fish said, though it caused more pain than to breathe upon the shore, that it preferred to swim alone.

‘And so it is,’ said Wilson James, smiling now at me, and himself again, ‘that fish leap still to the shore to bathe in the golden light, and fall and wait on the silver sand. And rarely, though not unknown, a hand reaches down and carries the fish to the water and watches as it takes flight back into the sea.’

I said to Wilson James, ‘Was it the one who wanted to leap who was saved, or the one who did not?’

‘Perhaps it is the one who led, perhaps the one who followed. It depends on how you listen,’ he said.

‘That is the secret,’ I said, ‘to every story. It is always in the listening.’

‘I never told Eustace,’ said Wilson James, ‘that when I was a boy I found a man washed up on the beach. I was always happy whenever I walked on a beach not to find such a thing again. In the last few months of Eustace’s life his mother and I took a house right on the coast where he could hear the waves at night. It had been years since we had lived together, but having to be with one another and be kind because of him, somehow we managed it. It changed the perspective on everything. When he died it all fell apart, but while he was alive, we were somehow better than ourselves.’

After a while he said, ‘I should have had more children. I thought when I married again . . . It is a strange thing to choose a mother for your children.’

Wilson James washed jars and lined them up on the table. He stirred the jam and tested it on a plate to see if when it cooled it ran this way or that or stayed quite still. ‘Jam is tricky because you never know how your mood will affect it. If you are sad it always goes runny and will not set.’

I said, ‘Are you often sad?’

‘Do you have no simple questions?’ he asked, but he was not unhappy. ‘I do what men do. Instead of being sad I grow angry and arrogant. But lately, since Eustace . . . It’s helped being here.

I don’t know what you are—a muse, a ghost, a spirit. If it’s madness that I can see you and even touch you then I feel perhaps at last I am understanding what it is to be a writer. In the back of my mind I wonder when I will know that the madness has gone far enough. That it’s time to return.’

‘On some days you do not feel the sun on your face at all but stay here in the house. You smell sometimes as if something harsh has possessed you. What is that?’

He looked out the window. ‘That is caused by a bottle. But I think I’m coming out of that.’

Wilson James took a clean plate and poured jam onto it and breathed on it. He reached out and lifted my hand towards him. Dipping his finger into the red sauce he drew on my skin first one long straight line and then another shorter line crossing through it. He said, ‘I believed in the idea of heaven when I was a boy. I thought this was the sign that meant that I was safe. By the time I became a man I knew it wasn’t true. I turned away from believing in anything. I thought there was more assurance in no reassurance. But here, in the forest, I want a symbol. I want something that makes me feel safe again.’

I took the plate and dipped my finger and turned his arm over. I drew first one flowing red line and then beside it another flowing from the skin inside his elbow to his wrist, two lines that were not hard but soft and moved as the river moves into the palm of his hand. The mark of a river wife. I felt the warmth of him beneath his shirt and I wanted to rest my hand against his chest and feel the beat of his heart. I wanted to tell Wilson James that when a new bird flew down into the forest, sat upon a branch and watched me, that my heart leapt to think it was my daughter returned. That the knock I thought I heard at the door, the sound of the silence bringing snow, the white flash of a creature in the forest, that all these moments I imagined her come home again, though always as the child she had been.

I had no picture of her grown and I imagined her in countless ways.

I said, ‘They are never far from us, the ones we lose.’

‘No, you are wrong,’ he said, drawing me to him. ‘They are so far and I am still walking and he does not get any closer.’

‘I have no life beyond the river,’ I said suddenly, and wondered at my courage.

‘You mean you are afraid?’

‘No, I can never leave here.’

He held my face and kissed me. His body was like a cave I wanted to curl up in, his mouth a pool where I could taste sunlight.

‘I want to make love to you.’

‘It won’t help,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘We cannot.’

Ilingered in rain as it settled on my arms and nose, and licked the mist from my fingertips. I ran my fingers over bark. I touched the hairs of unfurling ferns and the skin of new leaves. I rested my cheek on vivid moss. I thought of how Wilson James had looked before he kissed me. I thought of how the lines that marked his forehead were deeper than any other lines on his face, and when we laughed together it was as if we were young and saplings.

‘What is unseen has always been the greatest challenge to humans,’ my father said, and I understood him as I never had before. Wilson James had drawn a thread across my skin and it pulled me towards him. I resisted.

As a fish I did not think about skin and touch. I was a creature of watchfulness. I was absorbed by movement. I sought food. I sought shelter. To live in water is to understand submission. As a woman I was consumed by the need to touch. I felt the rush of yearning, the flow of desire, but I would not submit to it.

After some days his face receded. I stayed upstream and focused again on ripples and whorls caught in water, and the weaving and folding of stories before the river flowed on, carrying with it the alchemy of told and untold things. The moon filled and emptied and Wilson James did not rise up except when I chose to think of him. Then I found myself quite still, as if listening, but instead I was watching the pictures I had gathered of him.

I had not tested the visibility I had with Wilson James upon another human. But I had to know if others might see me too. If others could reach out and find my skin. Had the years of living with none for company called up in me the capacity to slip beyond my domain and enter at last the world of humans? Is this what my loneliness had made? A pathway to others who were like me?

I darted and tumbled through rapid and rock fall, over waterfall and through crevasse, until I was carried into the greatest lake. The mountains were fired by dawn. I swam across the lake and slipped into a quiet finger of river. There I stepped from the water and took my woman form and waited to test this Wilson James effect. I smiled for he would like to think that his name had another purpose. The James effect—to see people from the world just beyond the reach of human sight.

The heat of the day had passed before a man came through the trees and stepped onto the riverbank. His face was shaded by the brim of his hat. As he stood in the water he made small hissing noises through his teeth. Sometimes he mimicked the songs of birds in answer to their calls in the forest beyond.

Dragonflies came and inspected his fly trick that skimmed across the water’s surface. The man adjusted his rod and waited. The silt in the water stirred at his feet and settled back to the river bottom. He went quietly downstream into the deep ponds, clambering over unseen rocks in the river. Again the feather darted across the water. I saw two trout turn and move upstream, leaving a small circle on the river’s dark skin.

Leaves gathered and moved slowly downstream. Between the grasses on the river’s edge spiders spun their webs. A frog sounded and then another, reciting their small poems over and over again. Insects hopped right into the river and were eaten before they were wet. The man caught his web in the leaves of a tree and pulled for its return. I stepped from behind a tree and he did not glance at me. I moved closer to him along the riverbank and still he did not appear to notice me. I stepped into the river and I remained invisible to him.

His hat was the colour of trees that grow tall in the snow. He could sense a fish close to his legs but the day was too warm and the fish was not interested in him. I said to him, ‘A river wife knows every fish and no fish would be caught while she is watching.’ The man heard nothing. But I knew I must make a final test and this was more difficult. I placed my hand on the man’s arm. He did not even remark it as a thread of hair or a passing fly.

In the shallow light of the water I looked at the face that looked back at me. My face had not aged as my father’s had. The dress I had cast as I stepped from the water that morning was the yellow green of summer grass with a tiny leaf pattern on it. My hair was as dark as water in shadow.

I stood beside the man and saw fish were feeding on a wash of dead flies that had drowned in the rapids upriver. Birds were singing coming- home songs. I watched the man spin his web and it made patterns in the sky one more time before I slipped back upstream to where the river rushed and tumbled. Only Wilson James could see me and touch me and hear me, and I could touch him. The mystery of it deepened. And I was happy thinking that somehow Wilson James had come through for me.

My daughter was born in the river and from the river I carried her. Deep and early was the snow that fell that day and brought the Winter King to hold his baby girl for the first time. I had carried her inside me and large had grown my belly and dark my skin so that I thought to burst, so full did I feel with the creature inside me. When she was born I was surprised to find I could feed her the milk from my breasts and I worried at her humanity. Would she change shape and form? Blue were her eyes and soft was her skin. She was, from her earliest days, her father’s daughter, but at night she was mine. In the moonlight I carried her to the river and together we swam to the moonpool and fed as fish do. At dawn I brought her with me from the water and together we would lie and watch the sun descend into the forest and catch the brilliant gleam of snow among the dark trunks of trees.

As soon as her legs had found her she was running. By the following winter she was gone from my breast. As soon as the sun touched the water she was out of the river and she would not return by day, wanting only to be in the mountains finding colder and colder places, searching out new valleys and higher rivers, each one further than the next.

‘I do not like to be warm,’ she said.

‘We need to tend the river for all seasons.’

‘It is better to be higher. To be colder.’

My daughter trembled on hot days. Through late spring and all through summer she was restless. She lay in her human form in the deepest pools, yearning for cold, and would not settle to her songs. She was happiest when the winter returned and her father with it. She loved the forest, but she ached for mountains bigger and further than I could ever go.

‘Could I go there with Father to the mountains that are made of ice?’

‘I do not know if you can leave the river.’

‘I would go with Father to the far reaches if he would take me.’

I knew what it was to love the man who held your hand in the forest and rubbed his cheek against yours before sleep. How could I hold her to me when she strained to walk in her father’s footsteps, to be gone from the binding of night and day, forest and river, darkness and light? She was my heart and she was the river’s creature but she was born for a different story.

One late afternoon, as her father’s companions played the music of snowfall, she fell asleep at the table. I put her in the small bed my father had once made for me. As she slipped into dreams she became a bear, a white bear cub, there on the bed, and her father cried. Though she could swim as a fish, though she had the luminescence of fish, soon she could change her form to bear and even bird at whim.

As she grew older I saw that in the making of her we had created a creature more strange and wonderful than I had ever imagined. She was not bound as I was bound and I cannot be sad for her that it was so. For the binding to duty is both a gift and a burden. The burden is heavy and the gift is bright. She knew the songs of the river but she knew the songs of winter too, and the scent of cold drew her ever to return to her father’s lands. And finally she did. When the Winter King left, something more precious than winter itself went with him. My daughter.

A river wife bears only one daughter and that daughter is born with all the knowledge she holds inside her. Our daughters are the making of songs and the keeping of songs and the passing of songs on through time without end. Every day new worlds are born and new rivers begin to flow and we are called to our rivers and there we are bound to tend the stories of time. Our daughters are born as river wives, they do not choose it or learn it, they and their purpose are one.

My daughter visited my life for such a tiny fragment of time. I see her shadow through the trees, her laughing voice, her wings as she flew, the shape of her beside me in the moonpool at night, close beside me, watching the weaving of water. When I lost her face from my days, I felt as if I began to grow old and the tears I cried flowed into the Lake of Time, for time was all I wanted. Time to be with my daughter again.

And all this I lived again as I thought of my desire to love Wilson James.

Wilson James left small cairns of rocks along the riverbank one morning, and in each cairn he had placed a stem of flowers. I walked in his footsteps about the forest and saw how he had come close to the house but had not crossed into the garden. I wondered how long it would be before I found him at my door. What would I do with him then? Was love so hard to allow?

One late afternoon we stood together on the edge of the river where I had first found him. Only the small orange pods of a nearby tree added colour to the green of deep autumn. Fine rain descended lightly, dissolving as it touched the water. Wilson James said, ‘Why do you touch me so deeply? Why do I find myself with no other thoughts than the picture of your face? When I wake I listen for the sound of your voice singing by the river. I long for the sight of you by day, your footfall at night on my verandah.’

‘What do you need, Wilson James?’ I asked him.

‘Other than sex?’ he smiled. ‘Simple things. A decent bed at night. Shelter. Food. I need to be held every now and then. I need a notebook and a pen.’

His hand turned mine over and he touched the course of all my fingers. It was as if no other thing moved in the forest. I found myself looking at his lips with their trace of grey in the centre.

‘I do not know how to reach out to you,’ said Wilson James, and I felt the river rise in him and almost wash over him so deep did he sigh, as if the cup of his soul was unsteady.

‘You must not.’

‘Do you not feel this way?’

‘It would be entirely unwise.’

‘Where is your father?’ he asked abruptly.

‘He is here.’

‘No, he’s not here. I have never seen him. You talk about him as if he’s alive, but where is he?’

‘He is by the river.’

‘Where?’

‘You should not be here in the forest. You should never have spoken to me that day on the riverbank. But still you are here. Are you ready to know the forest?’

‘Why should I not be here?’

‘I have never known another man but you.

Other than my father.’

‘But you had a husband.’

‘He was not a man as you are a man.’

‘These are all riddles. Let me meet your father.’

And so I took him. We stood there on the banks of the river and the ancient skin of my father was pale in the green of forest. Wilson James shook his head.

‘This cannot be your father. He built the house, yes? He was a man.’

‘Yes. He promised he would stay. And so he has.’

‘It’s not possible. I understand if he has died and this is how you cope with it. But this is a tree.

See? It’s a tree. A man cannot become a tree.’

‘You do not need to be frightened,’ I said.

‘So is the river your husband? Or is that very rock? Did you turn him to stone waiting for you?’

‘I cannot do such things. It was my father’s choice.’

‘To be a tree?’

‘If you cannot understand this then you will never understand the river. You will never belong here.’

‘I didn’t ask to belong here. I have tried to leave. But I cannot. I pack my bags and then I find myself unpacking again. I am walking in a dream that has no end. Is it you who holds me here? If I can’t understand then let me go. I do not know what it is you want of me.’

‘I am not holding you here, Wilson James. If you are here still it is not my doing but entirely your own. You have come here to the river and it has made me remember stories I have tried hard to forget. You are all that I have learned to be afraid of.’

‘I came here because I didn’t love anything anymore. I thought that if I went far enough away I might learn again. You are right, I don’t belong here where everything is familiar to you and strange to me. You frighten me. This tree frightens me. Even the river frightens me. But I don’t know how to leave.’

He pulled from his pocket a small white rock and turned it over in his hand before throwing it hard across the river.

‘Well, sir,’ said Wilson James to my father, ‘I am sorry I cannot hear your stories. Perhaps they would answer all the questions your daughter will not. But it does not matter anymore. I will leave this place. I will leave and I will not return.’

And with that Wilson James was gone, his footsteps heavy on the forest floor, the shape of him disappearing quickly in the dark light of forest. I stayed there quiet and after a little while I slipped into the river, and only then did I settle.

Wilson James did not leave and the silence that fell between us was louder than all the words we had spoken. I knew I could have gone to him. His anger would have disappeared as clouds disappear. But he would want to know the story of my father, and of my mother, and then it would come, the story of me. I could not do that. I knew that path. One day he would go.

I had lived the years when winters came without my daughter and my husband and I remembered how long those days had been. I had waited for my husband to lift me again from the river, for smoke to drift from the chimney at dawn, welcoming me back. I had listened for my daughter’s steps upon the river rocks, her voice joining with my song. For longer than some humans live, I had watched for any bright face between the trees. Winter after winter I waited and they had never returned. I would not live that way again.

I took to standing in the river through the days until I could not feel the water at all and even the last of the flies ignored me. The rustle of the leaves became simply the rustle of leaves, not Wilson James moving through fern fronds to find me.

I climbed upstream. Clouds came past, being faces and messengers. I watched the sky and wondered why humans and trees and even fish become dry bones. I swam in the highest lake as a woman and let fish slip and slide over my belly. I watched as new flies rushed like a ghost bird along the surface of the water. A fish leapt skyward, parting the ghost bird into a hundred tiny creatures, seizing two, and arced back into the lake, the rings of its surfacing drifting away. The sky bled away into darkness and cold slept on my silver-scaled skin all night.

The hum of Wilson James accompanied his footsteps along the river. He watched the river. Pools eddied and stilled and turned on his bare feet. Wilson James stared across at the place he knew my house to be though he could not reach it alone. The light flared in the trees and sent back nothing but the forest to him.

I climbed the hill behind his house until the rooftop was like a wing out into the trees and I could have tied myself to it and fluttered above the green. One evening I stood within his garden and smelled his tobacco smoke. He stood out on the deck watching the hello-moon clouds. I saw him move from room to room, his hand on his chin, his shirt crumpled. I knew his eyes searched for a sign of me, and although I was there he denied his senses and turned away.

Long after I should have been at my pool in the river I watched him sleep and I wished I could hush myself into the air about him and run my breath along his sleeping skin. I sat naked upon the wet rocks and the low moon bathed my skin and filled me with the quiet of water once again. I wished for rain that would fall so long it would wash the heat away from me.

Why had he come? What would I do if he could not leave? If he left what would he take with him when he went?

I rested my cheek against the fur on the bed and tried to find the smell of my husband, remembered him coming as a bear into the house and dissolving into a man with his wild hair, his big laugh, his shining face. Together we had once been happy as the snow fell and the house was quiet with the tumble of burning logs in the fireplace, our daughter asleep between us in the quiet of afternoon, then waking and urging us outdoors to see the first stars, bending her face over the moonpool in the morning, saying ‘Mother, Mother, wake up, the day is here.’

The weight of stories lingered with me as autumn turned its face to winter and beckoned home.

Wilson James chopped wood for my house and stacked it on the pathway. He left bread on a stone by the river for me. One morning I waited for him and we stood together, the breeze cool on our faces. Though the water between us was calm again, my heart seemed to race inside me as if it was in a hurry to go somewhere on its own.

‘Have you ever listened to the conversation of ants?’ I asked him.

‘No, I can’t say I have,’ he said.

‘They always talk of family.’

‘I don’t think I have small enough ears to hear them.’

‘They speak loudest in the morning,’ I said.

‘Tell me one of your stories.’

‘What story would you like to hear?’

‘Oh, something about a man and a woman,’ he smiled.

‘Well then,’ I said sitting upon a rock. Wilson James took another nearby, laced his fingers and stared into the river.

‘Once there was a woman who had two shoes and one of them she laid in the river. The shoe nestled between the river grasses and slowly over the days the woman sang to the shoe so that she might have a husband. The shoe grew first a baby and then a boy and then a young man until at last the woman came to the river and found a fully grown man sitting on the river’s edge.

‘ “If you bring me the shoe to match this one,” she said to the man, showing him the shoe that was the pair of the one she had placed in the river, “you shall marry the spirit of the river and you and your children will have eternal life.”

‘The man said, “And where might I find this shoe?”

‘ “It is in the last place you will look.’

‘The man looked up and saw the moon, who was late going to bed that day.

‘ “I could ask the moon, but as that is the first place I have looked I am bound to be unsuccessful, so instead I shall ask the sun,” he said.

‘The sun was not happy to be troubled by a man but said she had seen a shoe just like that on the banks of a great river which flowed from this very river and was no more than a few days’ walk. The man was well pleased and set off downstream. But the way was hard and the pathway treacherous beside the wild river. As the man walked his skin grew fur and soon he had transformed into a wolf. The sun passed him by and laughed at his travels.

‘ “You will never find eternal life as a wolf,” she said.

‘The man now spoke to the moon, who was that night full on the horizon and so close enough to talk with.

‘ “The sun has tricked me. Where might I find the shoe I am seeking?”

‘ “I have seen one just like it in the depths of this river, but you must swim deep to find it.”

‘In the light of the moon the wolf swam in the river but no shoe could he find. He was washed downstream in the water’s flood and as he journeyed his fur was washed away and he was clothed instead in the shimmering scales of a fish. At last he was swept into the ocean and washed to the shore and his fish form slipped from him as he lay on the cold sand. There on the beach a white bird spoke to him. “If you climb that tree over there you will find the shoe you seek,” she said. “But remember it is in the last place you will look.”

‘And so the man began climbing the tree. When he was only a small way up his hands grew sharp, and soon his arms and legs were black and shiny, and he was transformed into a small beetle. The wind blew at him and rain fell and many times did he cling to the tree for life. At last, at the top of the tree, he found the bird who had laughed at him. She fluttered her wings in the breeze.

‘ “Fly to that mountain over there and look into the waters of the blue lake and you will see the shoe, and there you may choose the gift of eternal life, if you so wish it.”

‘The man was transformed into the shape of a great raven and flew high into the sky and far across the land to the last peak, where the bright light of ice glowed white in the sky. Though it took all his endurance to fly so far, at last he gazed into the lake. But, instead of his own reflection, he saw only the sky.

‘ “I am nothing,” he said, dismayed. “The lake does not even note my presence. I began as a man and I have journeyed the pathways of beast and fish, insect and bird, but now I am nothing.”

‘ “What form would you seek?” said the woman from the river, appearing beside him at the water’s edge.

‘ “My own true form,” said the man.

‘And so the man became the shoe he had grown from in the river.

‘ “You see,” said the woman, “you are what you were seeking.”

‘And the man stood up out of the shoe and took her hand, and it is said that indeed they married and many were their children and each had the gift to change shape into wolf or fish or insect or bird. And so the man, as he had wanted, went on forever.’

‘So when women look for shoes they are really searching for the ideal man?’

‘I do not know. I have never had to look for shoes.’

‘I have noticed your shoes. Did your father make them?’

‘Some he did. And others were gifts.’

I wanted to tell Wilson James that there were other stories which might be told—stories of battles, of the growing of food, the making of peace, the taking of husbands and wives, the raising of children, the making of relatives, the bringing of rain, the care of the dead—and all these stories are in the river, if he had ears for listening.

‘So if I found a shoe in the river and put it on would eternal life be my prize?’

‘Would you choose it?’

‘I am sure there would be a great price to pay.’

‘Why?’

‘There always is.’

I do not know quite the moment when I befriended love again. Was it the day he brought me green orchids from his walk across the high reaches? Was it the day he caught his first fish, a brown trout that he cooked and brought to share with me for lunch, and I cried and he said he was sorry, he didn’t know but he was trying to know. Or was it right back there on the day we sat at the lake’s edge and watched the rainbow-coloured vessels float across the water? Was it already there when I traced my hand along his cheek as he slept under the ferns? Or had it been there, this hope for love, since I dreamed as a young woman that a man would come for me, a human, as my father had come to my mother, and though I did not know his face or his voice, or the eyes he would watch me with, still I anticipated his arrival.

What did I know of love? I knew the words of sunrise and the language of full moon, waning moon and dark. I knew the sound of a leaf settling on the forest floor after a long descent. I knew the calls of birds and beasts. I knew the caress of water. I knew the first fronds of spring, the last gold of autumn. I knew the tenderness of blossom and the fragrant damp of earth. I knew the silver of river rock, the chatter of rapids, the winged music of small creatures. I knew the fabric of mist, the invisible hour before dusk and how the sun looks from deep within the river. I knew the gift of a daughter swimming beside me, the call of her voice, the stretch of her hand, the curl of her body on a rock in the sunshine.

Love, I came to see, was not simply a river; it was an ocean few crossed with ease. Perhaps it was not the crossing that mattered but the boat that was built to travel in.

The rain of the world had returned again to the forest. The land pooled and bubbled. Rain came early and talked late into the day. The land grew soft and every path shimmered. Then at last, though it had not come for years, snow fell deep in the valley. One morning I stepped from the river into a pale sky and the banks and boughs and every blade of grass and branch of fern were hidden with the sudden brightness of snow. All day it fell, as silent as love itself, and the upright forest curved and leaned and arched forward, heavy and white, every surface defined, each twig, stick, leaf upon the ground textured by the pattern the snow had made upon it. My footsteps were soft upon the world’s new surface.

Wilson James came down to the river and stood on a patch of green moss while all about it was white or black and he said, ‘I am not prepared for winter. I don’t have enough warm clothes.’

I took him to the house and said, ‘There, in that trunk, my father once kept his books and journals. But now, if you look, you will find clothes suited to this weather and I think they will fit you, though they are not perhaps what you are used to.’

Wilson James put on the coat which had kept the weather from my father and he said, ‘He really was a man, wasn’t he? A long time ago. But he was here.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And he would be glad to see his clothes worn again.’

And so it was that Wilson James came to wear the skins of my father, the hooded cape he had sewn, the gloves, the long coat that made him near invisible as he passed between the trunks of trees.

Not long after that first snow had melted I returned from upstream and found Wilson James sitting outside my door wearing my father’s coat. He had a notebook on his lap and he was writing.

‘You have found my home,’ I said.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘It was suddenly right in front of me. I shouldn’t have come here without you.’

My world was slipping from me or I was slipping from it and this man was part of it. I had no-one to help me. I wanted to understand.

‘I can go again if you like. I brought you bread. And this,’ he said. ‘Our jam. I would have brought it before but I wasn’t sure you’d eat it. That you should eat it.’

‘I will try.’

He cut the bread and spread the jam on top of it, as Father did with honey. The jam tasted like a memory of sunshine. My veins ran with the sweetness of it. I was laughing and then my head ached and I did not feel myself. Wilson James made tea for us and only after I had drunk it did I realise he had used the tea for sadness and I began to cry.

‘It’s the sugar. I’m sorry. You probably shouldn’t eat it. Don’t cry. It’s not good to cry when the sun is shining.’

‘Yes, the sun is a friend of mine,’ I said through my tears.

‘What do you mean?’ said Wilson James.

‘No day goes by that it is not by my side, upon my cheek, at my back, lighting my way. Though there are clouds and rain and storms, always the sun is hiding there. In all my life it has been my most constant companion.’

He took my hand then and said, ‘My, you have been alone a long time.’

There had been so much time when there had been no-one to walk the riverbanks with me. When I forgot the sound of my own voice talking. There had been a time when I wanted only to be a fish, for as a fish I could not miss my people nor lament their passing. There had been a time when I railed against the river and my duty to the songs and stories of people I would never know or see. There had been years when I grieved at every story that told of a mother and daughter, every story that told of winter, every song that spoke of eternity, for eternity is no friend to those who are abandoned. My cycle was so long and undulating I could barely glimpse it. But Wilson James’s cycle was written in the lines of his hands, the fragments of darkness in his eyes, the smooth rocks in his voice. I felt the net of my humanity catch me. I wanted to love him. I wanted to feel my human heart.

‘Kiss me,’ he said. ‘Turn me into a frog if you must but kiss me.’

The earth does not care for humans. The wind, the rain, the moon, the birds, the sunshine, the fall of light and dark, these things are not bound to humans. They are and they go on and that is the only duty they have, to be the cycles of growing and replenishing and falling away.

Wilson James was a whole landscape even in his face. I saw the two parts that I had first observed; the half that was gentle and the half that was hard were no longer distinct. His eyes had settled. His skin upon his cheeks, his whole face had become something clearer. The small hairs that grew from his skin were grasslands my fingers rippled through. His warmth came from deep within him. His eyes were bright and watchful and I looked into his face and his mouth flickered with words he might say.

Wilson James slipped his hand along the fabric of my dress and peeled it back to bare my skin below my neck and this he kissed.

‘Let me make love to you,’ he said.

‘You ask to know me and you think it the most intimate thing you could know, but it is not.’

‘Tell me what it is I need to know.’

I drew breath and said, ‘If you will sit by the river at sunset and watch me swim. If you will return to the river and meet me at dawn, and if at dawn you still wish to lie with me, then I will make love with you. But if you choose at any time to walk away, then I will not try to hold you to me.’

He kissed my mouth. ‘What are you?’ he said.

‘Are you brave, Wilson James?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Soon you will.’

I wondered how my mother had faced this moment. In all the stories she had left me, there was none for the journey of love between a river wife and a man. The only story of such a bond was that of my mother and my father, and I could only guess at the price each had paid. Would they still have loved each other if they had known the price? Would I still have loved Wilson James? Love seemed a world where the sun did not rise twice in the same place, nor the seasons travel one after another. Love had colours and textures all its own.

Wilson James stood upon the riverbank and the rain caressed his face, curling his hair, polishing his skin, softening his eyes.

‘Do not be afraid,’ I said. I did not kiss him and he moved to reach out his hand once before I went but we did not touch.

And then I stepped into the water. I swam as a fish and came back to the shore and Wilson James was still standing there, though I could not make out his face. I fed near the waterfall, as was my habit, and I slept in the moonpool. I did not think of him for that is not the way of fish. In the morning, when I stepped onto the riverbank, he was there, and I could see he had spent all night beside the river. The long coat he wore was entirely wet, his hands were bitterly cold and snow was falling on him. He looked more aged than Father had ever looked.

‘Come inside,’ I said. ‘You will become ill. We must warm you.’

I made a fire and slowly I took from him the coat, his shirt, his shoes, his socks. He pulled me against his skin and a ripple went through his body strong and sharp and then another, as if someone had sent a stone into the depths of him and the waves of it were washing ashore.

‘The world is not as I thought,’ he murmured.

‘It is not.’

‘You are a fish,’ he said.

‘I am of the earth and of the river.’

He held me to him and his skin stole warmth from the closeness of our blood. The days of longing for him, the coldness of his skin, the taste of his tongue, the stretch of his legs, the colour of his eyes, the texture of his breath on my skin, the weight of him above me and in me and with me, so sharp and sweet was the relief of it, so deep and urgent and shuddering. And then he held me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

We drifted in wetness. My hair laced his cheek and his arms held me to him. He slept and I slipped from him and clothed myself for the day. The snow had stopped and a sky blue and cloudless was high above the forest and so I cast a dress in a colour to match. I returned to stroke his cheek before leaving to tend the river. His skin was running with water and as hot as fire.

‘Wilson James, I think you are unwell,’ I said, but he did not wake. ‘Wilson James, you must rouse yourself.’

I brought him water to drink but his head rolled on his shoulders and his eyes did not stir beneath their lids. I wrapped him in a blanket of skins and when it was too wet I dried it by the fire and wrapped another about him. All day I dried the blankets and wiped his body until I was sure there was no more water inside him. Grey grew his skin. And then white, until I was sure he would die, so cold and silent was he.

Night fell and I did not wish to leave him. Though I kept the fire and it burned high and bright, his body was seized with shivers that came and went like cold wind through him. Then the trembling began and his breath came harsh and rattling. Several times he cried out with a desperate anguish.

I could not wake him. I could not get him to drink.

‘Wilson James, I must leave for the river,’ I said, but I did not.

Again I changed the blanket soaked by his skin. Water no longer seeped from him but beaded on his skin as leaves are beaded at sunrise with dew.

A wind blew up outside and sticks and leaves clattered at the windows. The fire shivered and I fed it more wood until it roared as loudly as the wind about the cottage. I tended Wilson James and, as the darkness of night descended, my mouth grew dry, scales emerged and shone on every part of me and each breath of air became more painful than the last. Still I stayed. His face was translucent, so pale had it become. His breath quiet and infrequent.

‘I have killed him,’ I said. ‘I have taken him from life.’ I had thought only to love him, not to hurt him. Where was it told that a river wife would kill a man if she lay with him? My father had not died. Where was it told that I might not know what it was to be a human and love as humans do? Why was I made human if I could not be, could never feel what others felt? Why bring him here at all to the river, why have him slip through only to have this, his death?

Death comes every day to the forest and the river. Death has its own stories and its own keepers. I had not needed such a conversation in all my years, but I pleaded with death that night to turn its gaze from Wilson James. And I pleaded with something more eternal than me, something fierce and hopeful, that would hurry death away.

My own life was leaving me the longer I stayed from the river. Every breath of air was a punishment, as if I breathed hot coals. My legs grew in agony as my fish body tried to return. At last I left him, for death or life, I knew not.

The few steps to the riverbank were a shock of pain like none I had ever known. I fell into the shallows, flipping and gasping for water deep enough to catch my breath, tearing my underbelly. At last the final belated transition of legs into tail, and I was swimming slowly, swept against the river’s flow, until I reached the darkness of the deep pool beneath my father and, floating there on that moonless night, I was not able to cry.

A day and a night passed for Wilson James and it passed for me. I did not step from the river, too battered was my body, too weary and, in truth, I forgot him for a day and another night so far into my fish self did I go, as if in trying to deny the ancient spell that called me each night to the water I had strengthened it even more. I fed and swam and I was not human at all. When I stepped from the river on the second day at dawn the wind had subsided. A mist of rain had closed in the forest and I could see no further than a few steps ahead. I looked down to find my human skin was red and torn, my flesh coloured green and purple with the beating of rocks. I had no strength to clothe myself that morning with the light of the day. I wished only to tend my wounds and sleep.

I crossed the dark earth patterned with snow-melt and went inside the cottage. Wilson James was turning logs in the fireplace.

‘You are alive,’ I breathed. I felt my nakedness but had no strength for anything but to rest.

‘What has happened to you?’ he asked.

‘I stayed too long from the river.’

‘What can I do?’

‘I need to sleep,’ I said, and rare though it had been that I slept in that house, sleep I did. When I awoke, long was the afternoon quiet that slipped across the floor. Wilson James was lying beside me, watching me. He had in his hand a jar and with his finger he marked each cut and scratch with the pale yellow contents.

‘I do not know if it works for fish, but certainly it works for humans,’ he said. The ointment felt soft and good on my skin.

‘I thought to find you dead today,’ I said.

‘But I am not dead, and somehow I feel better than I have ever felt,’ he said.

‘I am not sure this is wise.’

‘Wisdom may be overrated,’ he said, gathering me close to him, tender for the scrapes and bruises on my belly and arms and legs. He found my mouth and kissed me. And together we found what has been true ever since people have been. That there is no pleasure more sweet or sad, no touch more urgent or gentle, no taste more exquisite, no sound more dear, than the pleasure we take in the skin and the shape and the touch of the one we love.

The words of love threaded themselves about us as snow settled on the mountains and in the forest. The breath of love was upon every ripple of skin, every mark and crease and line, every wrinkle and crevice and pale softness of skin. Each sound of breath, each texture of touch, each expression and glance and pattern did we bind together into a story that was ours.

Wilson James brought me wine the colour of late sun on wheat grass. It made me feel like a song would burst right out of me, like the water inside me would bubble up with my heart.

I said to him, ‘Stay with me all night, lie with me in the river and tell me your words.’

‘It is winter,’ he said. ‘And I am just a man.’

So together we sat upon a rock while the scales slowly took the place of my skin there in the twilight, and he told me stories of fishing in the ocean from a boat and how the fish were as big as men and bigger still. He told me how black cockatoos only ever travel in odd numbers, three or five or eleven, never in pairs or even numbers. He told me that words were his lovers and he could never leave them. He told me that in all his life he had only written three sentences he had liked. He told me that for many years he fell in love each autumn and sometimes he had fallen in love with the same woman all over again. He told me he wished he had known his son better. He told me that the colour of my eyes reminded him of moss he once saw beneath a waterfall. He said he couldn’t believe I did not die of hypothermia. I told him I was a fish. He laughed and said he sometimes still did not believe it and so I transformed for him and dived deep and watched him as he turned this way and that on the rock. He shouted and then he waited and then he held his hands under the water. He laid his fingers wide and I swam into them and he cradled my fish body and moved his fingers along the length of me and his tears made circles in the water.

‘You’ve spoiled it for me,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I shall never eat fish again.’

‘It is not quite like that . . .’

‘Tell me.’

‘There are fish that are fish and there are fish which are other than fish. Like birds. And spiders. And trees.’

‘Trees? Like your father?’

‘Yes, it is not always as it seems . . .’

‘How am I supposed to know?’

‘You will know.’

‘How can a man know such things?’

‘They are gone, mostly, the ones who could change.’

‘Your father doesn’t change back? He has always remained as he is?’

‘Perhaps it is not his time yet.’

‘Tell me you are not the last.’

‘I think I am the last.’

On the river’s edge, he walked. Within the river, I swam. Each day’s end came fast and each morning was relief to find him still there. Snow fell and melted. The sun climbed further along the edge of the mountain. The grasslands erupted in flowers. Yellow and white and pink and brown petals arrived in the forest. The river rushed from every shelf and tarn and lake. The forest was loud with water but loud too was the quietness of companionship. By day I wove the water’s stories and he wove his.

At dawn, when I returned, sometimes he would be asleep on the bed and other days the cottage would be empty and those days I did not go to him at the house at the river’s bend, though I longed to hear his voice. I found that in not being with him there grew a kind of thread that pulled tighter and tighter until we sprang back together.

Night after night he worked, the scratch of his pen silent across the page but for the tiny dry twitchings at the edges as he turned and began again. He would not say what it was he was writing. The river flowed. Love flowed. I began to sense the rhythms of his body in new ways. The need he had for me, for silence, for conversation, for touch, for sleep. His eyes brightened and his body hardened. He mastered the tools and snares he found about the cottage. He refilled the jars long empty. He restored the pathway to the river from the house. He repaired the cracks that had appeared in the walls and the holes in the roof and about the windows. He tilled the garden and encouraged food to grow.

By summer he had closed up the house at the bend in the river and his clothes hung beside the bed in the cottage. His books lined the shelves and I looked at the pictures upon them. A strange bird I had never seen. A woman on a long stretch of land. A pair of shoes. Someone standing in shadow beside a tree. A man with a long narrow face. Some had no pictures. And all of them were filled with words. I did not ask to hear their stories and Wilson James did not offer to tell them to me.

He took to making small birds of pebbles and wood. Each observed the world uniquely. Some were curious. Others forlorn. Some bright and filled with song. He made a mask of a woman’s face from tree bark and hung it by the door. Larger birds he made along the pathways, each with its own gaze and plumage of rock and wood. Inside the house he collected wings of silver thread, a body of black shining parts, a curved husk still legged but empty, a spider’s carcass, a shell from the river, small bones and leaves that had called to him as he passed.

How short and deep the days, how fast came the sunset. I took to drinking tea or soup while he ate his lunch. I had a little bread with him at night. Were it not for having to slip to the river to sleep, I might have convinced myself that truly I was more human than fish. But the river called me. I would wait until the scales burned on my hands and feet before I slipped to the water. I did not want to leave him.

On the bright nights of full moon I swam back and forth watching the light in the house, holding to my woman form until I could no longer hold on. And there were nights he stood at the riverbank and watched the moon’s reflection hide me from him. Sometimes he sat long into the night on a rock, watching the river and the sky.

How I wanted one night, just one night, to sleep with him from dark until dawn and not be taken from him. To spend one night upon the earth. I searched for stories where such pacts could be made but there were few. There was a woman who was bound as a white deer but was finally released by the love of a man. There was a man who lived as a bear in a cave until he was freed by the craft of a bird. And there was a king turned into a mountain until he was found by his daughter.

But none of these were for a single night. It would be enough, I convinced myself. One night, so that I might know what other lovers knew and treated as commonplace: the simple notion of lying side by side and dreaming. And beyond dreaming, waking to the touch of the other, the breath and slumber and waking face of the other. The new light of day catching upon the fall of cheek, the first whisper of voice, the heat of skin.

I grew restless.

‘I think I would give anything to sleep just one night together,’ I said.

‘I’m not sure my snoring is worth it,’ said Wilson James.

‘It is not your snoring I had in mind,’ I said. I had heard that well enough in the afternoons when we had taken to the bed and loved and slept before dusk, or in the mornings when I awoke and slipped from the river to find him still sleeping.

‘What is it that you want from the night?’ Wilson James asked.

‘I think to feel as a woman feels.’

There were so many signs I didn’t see. I was accustomed to observing the paired leaves of flowers and the petals of tree blossoms, the blades of new grass and the withering of fronds. I was used to the bright flecks in granite, the shards of rock which hide the spirals and tendrils of fossils, the softness of rain-soaked earth and the light touch of fog blown in from the lake. Now his face was the terrain I watched most carefully.

By the second winter we shared together Wilson James had grown used to the cold. His body had grown broad and strong, his face bright with the forest’s air, his movement had about it the lift of a light bough, the rustle of a breeze. No step did he make that was unsteady or rough, no noise did he make as he moved along a path, climbed a track, crossed a fallen tree or rock fall. He was nimble and light and the earth had befriended him.

When I found the run of scales upon his ankle I looked at his face. He seemed no worse for them. I traced the small line of them as we lay on the bed. Pearl with an edge of pale green.

‘You have rubbed off on me,’ he said. ‘A fish tattoo.’ He did not seem unhappy as he ran his fingers across the opal edges. ‘Now there is a story. Not the woman who gave up her fish tail but the man who grew one. Perhaps you may have me for a night after all when I join you as a fish in the river,’ he said.

When he slept I checked his wrists, the insides of his arms, his toes, but they were nowhere other than his right foot. We made light of it and at first there were no more scales.

Summer came with red-winged dragonflies. Heavy black lumbering flies erupted from the lake shores. Boats plied the waters of the great lake and the noise of people drifted through the forest. But still we were undisturbed.

Sun fell between the trees and lit the forest with brightness. The lakes blinked blue and still and many days we swam in the highest lake with our skins white beneath the water. And then amber painted the leaves and autumn was upon us again. We deepened in our ways together as we prepared for winter. Sometimes I found us humming beside each other and he would reach for me and kiss my mouth and he had never looked so alive.

One morning I came from the river to find the first frost upon the ground. Time had not occurred to me before as anything but a pattern that was behind and ahead of me, but I had come to understand it was much more than that. Time was a vessel that held all manner of memory and hope.

Wilson James was sleeping deeply upon the bed. His naked back was beautifully marked with scales all the way up his spine.

‘See,’ I said, and guided his hand when he awoke.

‘What does it mean?’ he asked.

I shook my head. On his ankle it had been a small sign of our union. But upon his back it seemed that Wilson James was undergoing his own transformation.

‘Am I to be a fish?’ he asked. ‘After all this, is my destiny so clear? Did you know this would happen?’

‘No,’ I whispered.

‘I thought there on my ankle it was a way of knowing I belonged somehow, here, with you. I have tried to pretend it would pass. That it would go if ever I left here. And that while I stayed with you it made me safer.’

I nodded.

‘Is this what happened to your husband?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Where is your husband?’

‘He is with my daughter. He is not a fish.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

‘You have a daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you never told me.’

‘I could not.’

‘I have told you everything that has mattered to me.’

‘I could not speak of her.’

‘Where is she? Is she a fish?’

‘She could swim as a fish but she walked also as a bear for her father . . .’

‘He was a bear?’

‘Yes, and also a man but not—’

‘It’s his skin. On the bed. All this time—’

‘No!’ I said. ‘He left his skin behind when he . . . when he and my daughter went away. I didn’t know they were leaving. I would be with them still, but I am bound to the river . . .’

I should not have said it. It was as if by wishing myself with them I had wished him away. He turned from me and said, ‘But now you will have me to keep you company.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We will make it stop.’

‘Really? I am not so sure. Will it stop if I leave? Can you make it stop?’

‘I do not know,’ I said.

‘I am not like your husband or your daughter. I am just this one thing. I can’t be as you are. I am just a man.’

Wilson James checked his arms and legs. He ran his hand behind him over the scales and they shimmered as they moved.

‘How much time do I have?’ he asked.

‘We can’t be sure.’

And then he said, ‘You asked me once if I was brave. My love, I am not this brave.’

My father hunched in a land far from the river. He said he hunched where the leaves were as big as branches and heat dripped from the sky. He had been with a group of men and other men found them and killed all of them except my father. My father hid so silently in the bushes they did not know he was there. He squatted low on his heels in the greenness and the men set up camp right beside the bushes he waited in. They stayed there for three days. He stayed there for three days too. To move was to die. So he didn’t move. They made food and told stories in a language he did not understand and for three days he waited. He had to take sips of water, he needed to eat, he had to sleep, and all these things he did as slowly and quietly as if he was a flutter of breeze, so still did he become. On the third day they packed up camp and left without ever knowing he was there. So slow was he by then that it took him three weeks to walk back to camp, and though he walked past other fighting, and other killing, he was invisible.

They let him go home then. They said he had done enough. And that was when he came here. He walked into the forest with nothing in his mind but a quiet place where no-one would ever find him again. I thought of my father standing by the river, the mark of the leaf tattooed on his cheek, and I saw that the desire to stand so still that death would overlook him had not started with Mother, or ended with me, but came with who he was when he came to the forest. His love for me simply made it easier and gave it purpose.

‘You are going somewhere?’ Wilson James asked.

‘I must take a journey.’

‘Don’t leave me yet. Not yet. Perhaps it is all as it should be. Perhaps this is my journey to be with the river, as you are. Perhaps I can be this thing. Perhaps it is possible.’

‘I was born to this.’

‘Does that mean I cannot do this? Your father is a tree.’

‘In all the stories that are told there is an order. We cannot vary from it without consequence. I think that is what happened to my mother. She bore a child with a human. Such a thing was not foretold. It had no place in the order of things. And I think she paid a price for that. And this is our price. My price. I am half human and yet it seems I am also eternal and it is not the order of things. So I have lost all that has been dear to me. My father and mother, my husband and daughter. And now you have crossed into the world of the unseen and you too are beyond the order of things.’

‘But who determines this? Who says what is the order and what is not?’

‘They do.’

‘They?’

‘Yes, they.’

‘They are . . . like you?’

‘No, older than river wives. Older than time itself. That is what is told.’

‘And where are they?’

‘In the Lake of Time.’

‘And where is the Lake of Time?’

‘Beneath every river there is another river and all of them flow into the Lake of Time.’

‘It’s a story. There are no—’ ‘Wilson James, you ought to know by now the power of story.’

‘So what must we do?’

‘It is told that where a lake does not flow to the sea there is the way to the oldest ones.’

‘Is there such a lake?’

‘My father talked of a lake he had found high up in the mountains. It was covered in ice when first he saw it, and later he climbed again to it in summer but no water flowed from it. There was no sign of waterfall or river below it. He called it the unknown lake.’

I looked to the furthest reaches where the white peaks appeared and disappeared between threads of cloud.

‘We will go together. When the winter leaves us, we will go together,’ he said.

It is not possible to glimpse the end of love when we begin. All we know is that it will end, by action or error; no effort will hold back the ever-present death that love carries with it. It is a fatal journey, one ended either when life itself ends, or simply by an unforeseen flaw which fractures the ground love was built upon.

I saw too late, too long into the journey, that somehow I had given away some part of myself to make room for him. Some part of me was gone that he had never asked for, nor would ever keep safe, and it was lost somewhere in the distance between his body and mine. It wasn’t in the water. It wasn’t in the air. Part of me had slipped away and I had no way to find it or bring it back. I heard its missing as I sang the early songs of morning, the songs of snow and ice and the forest sleeping as winter laid its cloak about us, the evening songs that saw the river’s creatures return and wake and settle. They felt it too. All about me I sensed the gap. The missing. But most of all I felt it in myself. The aching space I mistook for love which might have been called longing.

A frog can never be a tadpole again.

Being loved by him, loving him, we mistook our similarities for shared purpose. The rain does not love to fall. It falls. The river does not love to hurry down from the mountain. It hurries.

The snow does not settle on a particular leaf and frond, choosing one over the other. It settles. The crow does not fly from joy or concern. It flies. The wind does not blow as warning or lullaby. It blows. The tree does not fall from tiredness or despair. It falls.

I was eternal and the world was not. I was a fish and Wilson James was not.

One morning I stepped from the river to find Wilson James sitting in the rain. I took his hand and saw the scales that had formed there. I saw his feet. I saw the edges of his hair, his beautiful chest now patterned with scales beneath the fabric of his shirt.

The river carries the stories of air and mountain, of season and creature. Trees line the river and bend their words to it and the river fills with the music of birds, the nature of flight, the formation of clouds. The branches of trees arch out over the river and the river learns of longing and surrender and waiting. The creatures within the river are born and grow from egg and pupa and the river learns of belonging and kinship. Rocks lie on the bed of the river and whisper their old complaints of ice and crush and struggle and the river learns of strength and the weariness of age. The river flows and fish swim up it and the river learns of struggle and passion. And all creatures die and melt away into soil that is washed through by rain that travels down to the sea and is swept back up into the sky where it falls again as rain into the river. So the river learns of eternity and cycle and of coming home.

I understood that his life was simply one life, a thing that would be washed away, but it was his life, and I wanted him to have it yet.

‘It is time you came to the water,’ I said. ‘Tonight, when the sun sinks beyond the mountains, we will go together.’

‘What must I do?’

‘If it is as I suspect then it will be like this. You will feel the water take you and all of you will long to breathe beneath the river and you will slip into the river as easily as the grasshopper leaps or the bird takes wing. You will shed your human skin and find you have a swimming body with fins and a tail and these will guide you. The river will hold you and you will breathe as you have never breathed before. The colour of water and rock will meet you. You may be hungry and you will feed. The night will pass over and you will see its passing like a far world you can hardly remember, but you must remember. For when the daylight comes you must recall the warmth of the sun and the touch of earth beneath your feet and then you will step from the river and shed the skin of fish and walk again as a man.’

I took his hands. ‘Tonight you may be a fish but in the morning we will step onto the land again. And then we must leave for the mountains.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said.

‘For what are you sorry, Wilson James?’

‘I interrupted your world. I thought I had brought something good, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not come here at all.’

‘I did not know you had any say in the coming.’

‘I longed for a way I could follow my son. I wanted to stay beside him forever, but I lost him and found myself here instead. If that has brought you harm or danger then I am sorry.’

‘We must go to the unknown lake,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow.’

He packed food and prepared but the day had a feeling of dying about it. The stories I wove as the rain continued were all of love lost and abandoned. I did not know if that night he would die as a fish, or if tomorrow we would begin a journey from which he might never return.

In the afternoon one last time did we lie together, one last time did our human bodies slip together, and so deep and sad and tender and raw was it that I felt as if my heart had broken into a hundred pieces and these I sewed in all the secret places of Wilson James. There where he had been lonely as a child, there where his God had hurt him, there where his son Eustace walked, there where the sound of the sea reminded him of loss, there where he had forgotten how to find a story that was his alone, there where he worried that death would take him young, there where he thought he was not worthy of love, there where he worried his life would be unremembered, there for when he was on the doorstep to death that he might feel no fear. One hundred places I found for love, and one hundred pieces of the fabric of my heart I sewed there to travel with him.

‘It has been good to love you, Wilson James,’ I whispered.

‘This is not the end,’ he said.

We stepped into the river and Wilson James slipped under the water and became a golden-bellied black fish with deep-circled eyes. Together we swam to the moonpool. I had wanted to stay with him one whole night. And he had wanted to find a story. He had come to the river and now he was part of it. I showed him the creatures which live on the river bottom and underneath the river rocks and are good to eat. We swam together through the river’s currents and I leapt above the surface for the flies that hovered in a rise there near the waterfall. Wilson James leapt with me, a little leap at first, and then higher. All night he shimmered beside me in the moonpool, and deep and quiet was the night. Above the river’s surface stars spun across the sky chased by the moon, and rain fell in mist about the forest, but in the moonpool I was aware only of the shift of him and the watch of his gaze beside me. In the morning I found the face of his fish-self in the brightening day. I swam with him to the water’s edge and stepped from the water. But Wilson James did not step onto the river’s edge. He flipped and turned but he stayed as a fish.

I stepped back into the water and coaxed him to remember himself as a man.

‘You must try, my love. Please try. You are a man. You love this earth. You are a writer. You make bread. You like to feel the sun on your face.

You cannot do without coffee in the morning. Oh, please, my love, come back to me. Please step from the river. You are Wilson James and you need to remember. Please.’

I implored the fish before me to become the man I loved. But already he was swimming away as if he had quite forgotten me and the riverbank and the place where we had lived as a man and a woman. I swam after him but he slipped fast downstream and soon we were both in the great lake, and from there I lost any trace of him. All day I swam, ignoring my duties to the river, and all night too I searched for him. Day after day while rain deepened the lake and mist held close the sounds of birds calling and fish jumping, I searched for him. I did not know if he would ever find his way back to me, nor to the man he had once been. The world he had brought to me was silent. It was as if he had never been. I was beyond songs I knew or any stories I had heard.

It is said that at dawn there is a moment women know that is neither day nor night, and there a doorway may open. It is known by young queens seeking victory in battle, by fallen brides seeking the halls of their ancestors, by crones waiting for the visit of death, by mothers waiting for the breath of a dying child to return. It is said that in the moment of dawn it is possible to glimpse the world as a brief flicker of nothing more than light and all of us upon it as creatures of light, and there it is possible to ask for anything and have your wish granted.

I did not know if I could find the oldest ones. I did not know if they would help, but I knew I must ask. Perhaps they would laugh at the foolishness of a river wife taking a man into her world. Perhaps they would turn away and let Wilson James die as a fish. Perhaps they would take my life for his.

I did not know the way to reach them. All I could do was hope that my father had been right. That the stories were right. And that the unknown lake was a doorway to the Lake of Time.

I could not leave my love in the river. I imagined what a mighty catch he would be to the fishermen downriver, the fish whose scales were gold against his black skin.

‘What fish is this?’ they would wonder.

‘One of the big fish from further upriver.’

And they would not eat him but mount him on a wall, as Father had told me. And my love would live no longer.

And so at nightfall I began my journey to the mountains and the unknown lake alone, swimming up and up, drawn higher and higher, my fish body strong against the flow of water that sought to wash me away. Above the highest lake I chose the deepest of the rivers that flowed from the mountains, and I swam through the crevasses and up waterfalls new with snowmelt. But I knew soon enough I must leave the river and make my way as a human high into the mountain peaks, and there was no easy way to traverse the rugged slopes that lay above me.

The story of the river wives was mine and mine alone, and I wished I had told it to Wilson James when I had the chance. But there were stories of older creatures, who were here before the river wives arrived. They lived far from light and it was said they cared not for people. These oldest ones governed not stories but time, and time was their river. It was they who set the span of years for man and woman, for tree and flower, for beast and bird. When time was sought, more or less, time beyond what the day and night could give, time for finishing or starting, for beginning or ending, for chance or luck or even death, it was to these oldest ones that all beings turned.

As light touched the sky I stepped from the shallow bed of the river and took my woman’s form, breathing in the pale air, my feet deep in the powder of snow. But it was not from my father I sought guidance as I looked to the far peaks above me that morning.

‘Mother,’ I said, ‘you made this journey of love between a river wife and a human. Did you survive it? Or did you give your life so my father might live on? I would do anything to save this man. Help me. Please help me. I do not know the way.’

Perhaps it was the moment of dawn that women know, or perhaps my mother had waited all this time to hear my voice, for it seemed that a pathway became clear to me through the snow and I began to climb. I felt my body ache as I went further and further from the river. The snow hid many deep holes and gaps, and the rocks were harsh beneath. By halfway through the day I was tired beyond imagination. My mouth had dried, my skin burned for water and my ears called for the river. The path became steeper but still I climbed. I was dizzy at the view across mountains crumpled by age and laden with snow. Far away below me in one valley I could see the deep green of the forest.

Had Wilson James remembered himself and stepped from the lake? Was he right now returning to the river? If I did not find the unknown lake, if it did not take me to the Lake of Time, would I die here tonight so far from water? And if I died, what would become of him?

My arms shook as I pulled myself up and my legs trembled as I demanded of them another step and another and another. The wind worked at my skin, chilling my hands until it was hard to open them to grasp another ledge, another surface that might lead me further up and up. Louder became my body’s fear at leaving the river. I began to imagine the sound of water trickling, running in behind the rockface, but I saw no glimpse of it. I heard water rushing as if nearby a waterfall was flowing. But when I scrambled to find it there was nothing but a great chasm that fell down, so far down, to the valley floor. I had never known the world was so high, and cold. No matter how I tried to summon the clothing I needed to protect me, nothing kept the ice from forming on my skin, crusting my eyelashes and cracking my lips. Night was slipping over the world in a purple blanket and still I had no idea how far I must climb, nor if the path I followed would lead me to the lake that had no river flowing from it.

I pulled myself over a long sharp ridge as sunset slipped off the peak, carrying from the land the last of the colour, and there below me, cradled in a deep bowl of carved stone, was a great expanse of ice. I slipped down the rocky slope and found myself on a flat grey edge that rimmed the ice. I could smell the water beneath it. I tried to pull and stamp at the edges so that the ice would break and I might slip into the water but it was thick and strong and did not move. I grasped a sharp sliver of rock and beat at the ice with it but it merely grazed the frozen surface.

I stepped onto the ice feeling for movement, for a section thin enough for me to crack open and slip through. My legs were so weary they could hardly lift my feet. Further and further across the ice I walked until I was surely in the centre of the lake, but the ice held fast. And there I lay down. I lay down and did not have the energy even for tears. The stars were emerging larger than I had ever seen them. No trees shaped the sky or brushed against their light. They were so close I might have reached out and balanced each one upon my fingertip.

‘I am a river wife,’ I said to the stars. ‘You know me. You know my journey. I must find the way to the oldest ones but I have no key. I have nothing. Nothing.’

My breath was leaving me now. I felt strangely light. I anguished that I had not thought to bring any of the tools Wilson James had packed. The knife he wore at his belt. The small axe. Turning onto my side, still holding the shard of grey stone I had used on the frozen edge, I drew in the ice a flowing line. A line of water. And beside it I drew another. The symbol of a river wife. The symbol all river wives knew, that I had drawn on the skin of Wilson James in red jam, the flow of water that has no end.

‘I am a river wife,’ I said, though I had little voice to speak. ‘I am a river wife,’ I said again, and I dropped the stone and laid my hand upon the symbol. ‘I am a river wife.’ And the ice disappeared. My hand touched water. The hole widened, the ice collapsed around me, and I slipped into the darkness of the lake and the stars went out.

Down I fell. So intense was the blackness I could not see my limbs. Sometimes I felt as a stone must feel falling fast through water, and other times I was sure I was urging myself deeper and deeper into darkness.

When does love become more than love? When does it go beyond a simple explanation of someone familiar and beloved to something wondrous? When does it become something worth dying for? I had watched as we wove our lives together and then I had stopped watching and lived in the threads of our existence and it was more than I had expected. There was a song singing but I did not sing it. There was a season but it had no name. There was a sense of knowing that surprised me, as if he was someone familiar who I had somehow forgotten and was now rediscovering. I do not know when I slipped out of being myself entirely and took up occupying some place where we both were. Longing was fulfilled, sadness relinquished, joy claimed. There is something that lives beyond the shores of love and it is its own lake. As I fell I considered that perhaps the lake that love can lead us to and the Lake of Time were not so different.

Still I fell, until at last I found I was no longer falling and the great force that had swept me downwards no longer held me. I broke the surface and breathed in darkness. I swam towards a luminous shore and stepped from the water. Somewhere above me I was sure it was nightfall, though here I was a woman.

A sound came to me of voices singing. I walked towards the sound along the shore of that strange lake and passed glowing rocks that had grown up out of the ground and others that had grown down from far above and these stones were white and luminous against a deep blackness.

I entered a cavern more vast than the tallest tree and wider than the great lake. Spirals and cones of stone twisted and dripped, and every surface sparkled as if moonlight glowed here, so far underground. All about was the dripping and running of water. I knew I was looking at the Lake of Time and I wondered how old I had grown on my journey here. My hands looked no different, nor did my skin, but I knew Time would visit me at any moment and I was not without fear.

Standing at the edge of the lake, dressed in a gown of silver that moved and shimmered, was a woman. The singing ceased and it was her voice, not the voice of many, that had echoed down the passageways that led here. She said without turning to face me, ‘Human love has visited you and that is the strangest visitor of all. So full of wonder and hope, and then so binding with all its demands.’

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

‘Would you take it back, any of it?’

‘No, but I would not have him lost forever.’

‘And what would you give to save him?’

‘I do not know—everything, I think.’

‘What is yours and yours alone to give?’

Still she had not turned her face to me.

‘I could give my voice. I heard that another of us . . .’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you could give the voice that sings the songs of the river, but they will expect far more than that.’

‘They?’

‘Do you know me even a little bit?’ she asked as she turned her face to mine, and the face that looked at me, the translucent skin, the green eyes, the dark falling hair, it was my face.

‘Come, my daughter, sit with me.’

The world moved so slowly that I could not lift my feet to walk to her, but still I found myself beside her.

‘Do not be afraid,’ she said. ‘I am your mother. I am not one of them. Like you, I am a visitor here.’

‘How can you be here?’

Her face was grave but her eyes were warm and filled with tears. ‘I am saddened to see you here in this place where none but those with everything to lose must come, yet now that you are here, now that you have found your way as I found my way before you, it brings me more joy than you can know to gaze upon you. So long have I waited for this moment.’

‘You have been here all this time? Why did you not come home?’

‘I could not.’

My mother stood before me. The woman whose songs and stories lived on in me. The woman who had cared for the river and lived by the river, the woman who had taken my father for a husband and started this whole cycle of human and not that had bound me as sure as the sun and moon bound me. I wanted to turn away from her and I wanted to curl up with my head on her lap and cry. Why was she here? What had made her stay here and not come home? I saw Father beside me on the riverbank. Father, who lived so much longer than any man had lived. Father, who had never left the river because he waited all that time for her to return.

‘For Father? Did you do this so he might not die?’

‘Does he live still?’

‘Yes, he is standing by the river above the moonpool and he wears the long robes of a myrtle beech and many birds live in his branches.’

‘So he has found his quiet place.’

‘Yes.’

She wept then. For a moment she turned away and wept, and then, sweeping her tears away, she looked again at my face. ‘Then all is well.’

‘It was a beautiful gift you gave him, for I think he is very content.’

‘I gave him no gift.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You will. But first you must sleep.’ She reached out and laid her hand in mine. ‘You are tired,’ she said. ‘You have come all this way and there are many questions. Sleep. Sleep now and when you awake it may all be clearer.’

‘I cannot believe you are here,’ I said, suddenly so weary that I could not keep my eyes open.

‘But I am.’

And then I was carried away on the song she sang and I slept on the shore while the lake lay silent beside me.

When I awoke I was alone. ‘Mother?’ I called. ‘Mother?’ But no sound came from the cavern. I felt a cold wind blow on my skin. I turned and there were four creatures, although what they were I could not tell. They were as much from light and shadow as from substance.

She cannot make your decision for you, one seemed to say, but it was as if the lake was talking. Yours alone, said another.

Give your life to save this man?

Never.

For love.

All for love.

Their voices circled around me. I could not wake and yet I was awake.

He makes a nice fish. Leave him in the ocean.

Yes, in the ocean. No point in rescuing one human.

One human. Or the river and all its stories. That is the choice.

What was your duty, river wife?

Your duty was to care for the river.

Not the man. The man is not your duty.

Not yours to give really. Ours to give. Ours to give or to take away.

The last of the river wives. No more.

You know how it is to be alone.

I slept again and I cannot say how many moons glowed in the river or hid behind clouds, how many birds flew overhead or how many creatures were born and took flight above the river, nor how long Wilson James swam in the ocean while I drifted in the passage of time. When I awoke my mother was beside me again.

‘You are here,’ I said.

‘Yes, my love. I have been here all these years waiting for you.’

‘I do not know what to do.’

I bowed my head. If Wilson James died as a fish would it really matter to life? Would it really matter to me, as I lived on beside the river? I knew what Wilson James would have done. I knew that if he had the choice to save the fish upon the shore he would save it.

‘And will I die?’

‘Will you give your eternal life to save this man you love?’

‘If I cannot do this then I do not deserve to have loved him.’

‘Then you know the answer.’

I remembered the girl I had been who grew angry at my mother for the making of me. For the making and abandoning of me to the river, to the sun and moon. I remembered that I thought she had freed herself by having me. I saw how I had not forgiven her, for being the woman who had loved my father.

‘We could not foresee any of this, your father and me,’ she said, ‘when we entwined the worlds of human and not together in the making of you. Such unions risk the fabric of all that is.’

‘I am sure you should be telling me that the river is my duty.’

For the first time she smiled. ‘Only you and I know what it is to be with the river and always to hear its stories and sing its songs. You did not choose it. You were born to it and so it fell to you.’

I had imagined over the years that my mother had been fierce and distant. That she had lived so long that nothing would move her and no tenderness would live in her heart. I imagined her without kindness. I imagined that my father had loved her and she had found him interesting and useful. But I had been wrong. This woman who sat beside me was like a sliver of ice on a fern frond. She shimmered with light and yet it felt as if she was melting away.

‘Let me tell you a story,’ she said. ‘One you have not heard. On the shores of a lake was a woman who had sung the river for all time, for this was her duty. She was bound by a story older than time, and the water of the world was full of her songs. The great cycles of water flowed to the sea and were carried to the sky and fell again as rain, and each day the woman sang and tended the river’s stories that were the stories of time. And the mystery of the woman—as you can guess, my love—was that she was a fish by night and a woman by day.

‘A man of this earth came to the river. It was a forbidden thing, to join with a human, but the river wife loved this man and could not let him go. They made a child, a daughter that swam in the river by night and played on the earth by day, and though the daughter was bound as her mother was bound to the river and the songs and the passing of the sun and moon across the sky, she was also bound by the laws of time that set the span of a human life. The mother so loved her daughter she thought to find a way that her daughter might live beyond her human cycle, for the mother could not bear the unspeakable pain of her daughter ageing and dying while she herself remained unchanged. And so the mother journeyed to the old people in the Lake of Time. And they who measure the time for all creatures on earth took the mother’s life from her and bestowed it upon her daughter.’

‘But you have not died.’

‘They allowed me to stay and while ever I remain by the Lake of Time I look as young as I did the day I came here. But if I were to step onto the land again, if I were to breathe the world above, I would die.’

‘All these years you have been here?’

‘When all was said and done I lacked the courage to give up whatever precious life I still had, even if it was here by this lake. And I knew, for all the stories of time are in the water here, that one day you would come to the lake. I am so sorry, my love. Perhaps you would have preferred your human life? Perhaps the long road of eternity was not for you?’

‘My own daughter left the river,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Is she well, do you ever glimpse her?’

‘I have glimpsed her and she is well and strong. She will return a great gift to this land.’

‘She will return?’

‘Yes, my daughter, but you and I will not see it.’

‘I have missed her.’

‘A daughter new to the world,’ she said, ‘a daughter growing into a woman, is like mist on the water. She is snow settling upon moss, she is the breeze that ripples an evening lake. She is fleeting and beautiful and filled with a magic that does not settle or linger but passes through. She is not for holding but for letting go; she is like a butterfly that must leave the safety of the chrysalis, a moth that seeks the light, she is a nymph ready to lift herself from the river and fly. She is the gift that carries our songs into the ocean where all stories mingle. Too soon many things will claim her—the man she loves, the children she bears, the tasks and the duties that bind her to life—and so a mother loves a daughter as something more precious than any love, because though we may love her with an infinite tenderness we must teach her to swim, for the river calls to her and her fins and her tail are the courage we send with her and the trust that we have in her to carry for us the care of the world.’

And for a while we simply sat side by side on the shore. From time to time a single drop of water landed upon the lake’s surface and a single ripple repeated itself, growing larger and larger until it touched the shore with a quiet sigh. ‘What will happen to the river if I am gone?’

‘It will go on.’

‘But the songs . . .’

‘There are those who will hear them.’

‘Will it be enough?’

‘It will be as it is.’

‘I have loved him more, I think, than my own life.’

‘I did not see that in giving you eternity I had bound you as your human life could not. I did not understand that for a long time. Not until I watched you alone and alone and alone.’

‘All you gave for me, it will be gone.’

‘Not gone. Handed on. And perhaps that is as it should be.’

‘What will happen to us. Where will we go?’

‘The stories say that if a river wife dies she becomes sea foam upon the shore. But who knows what is beyond this world once we shed our forms? Perhaps we cling to this far more strongly than we should. Perhaps it is like the river and we flow on just as we flowed here. There may be places it is time for us to visit.’

I called to the old ones and they rose from the lake, tall and noble, and I said, ‘This life of endless time, I give it to you. On this earth perhaps it is best to have only a few short years, for in the eternity of time it would be easy to think of all that is here as commonplace. If you will allow me to go in search of my love and return him to the world then my life is yours.’

They lifted me into the lake and I saw many things. The river was changed beyond recognition. No longer the rushing water and falling rain, the mist in the air shrouding the pathways of water and trees. No longer the vast standing trees from the mountain’s girth to the furthest hills and valleys. Dry grasslands stretched away as far as I could see. Barren was the land and bare the hills. The river was gone and the stories were scattered. The songs were broken. The sky spun heat and storm.

And then I saw my daughter step back onto the land and she had grown beautiful and fierce. In her arms she bore a child but I could not see if it was a son or a daughter. She summoned the rain from the sky and waited while the earth ran again with water. She watched the trees grow up again and the land turn wet and green. At last, when the riverbed was full, she laid the child in the river and it swam as a fish. And then a terrible pain tore through me, more terrible than any pain I had ever imagined, and I saw back in time to worlds spinning and stars being born and life in darkness beginning its journey into form. At last I came to rest again upon the shore and awoke in my mother’s arms, and it was she who held me and rocked me and sang to me and it was she who wove me back together, a fragile time-destined creature with the heart of a woman and now the life of one too.

‘You must go and find your love,’ said my mother, ‘and lead him to the water’s edge. You must lift him into the sunlight so that he might again be a man and never again will he be a fish. But, daughter, I warn you, you must say no word to him. If you utter a single word he will be returned to the ocean and nothing will save him. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘My daughter, they have graced you with the span of a human life. From this day you will age a little every day as women do.’

‘I do not want to leave you.’

‘I am coming with you.’

‘How?’

‘My daughter, it is time for us to go.’

And so we walked together through the long cavern to the place where a river swept fast and deep away into utter darkness.

‘Soon we will find ourselves in the depths of the highest lake. We must swim fast and strong, my daughter, if we are not to be crushed by the weight of the water.’

It was as my mother said. The river took us and we were fish again and then the river slowed and the weight of water pressed against us and we swam upwards and upwards. As we swam she stayed close beside me as she had when I was a small fish in the river, her body a little ahead of me, her black scales shimmering as the light became stronger, her bright eye watching me. Faster and faster we swam, higher and higher, and brighter and brighter came the light until we soared through the surface of the lake and into the golden blueness. The shining of the sky, the sound of birds, the smell of trees enveloped me and the eye of the sun blinded me as we swam to the shore. I stepped from the water, but when I turned to find her she was gone. A veil of foam lay at the water’s edge.

I sat all day beside the lake and watched the foam dissolve into the water. At dusk I returned to the river and told my father of all I had seen at the Lake of Time. When night fell I slipped into the river and let it take me towards the sea. I did not know if I would find Wilson James or if I would ever return to the river.

The ocean was more vast than I had ever imagined. My body was unused to the salt that made of the water a new taste and pattern, with a weight and current so different from the fresh water of my home. My scales grew darker, my breathing slower. By day I walked on shores sometimes white with sand, sometimes dark with rocks, sometimes lined with houses where humans lived. I saw for myself the deep moon that hangs at dusk in the ocean. I saw the swell and roll of waves. I saw the wide eye of the sky as I leapt above the sea. I saw dawn and dusk as if colour was the greatest ocean.

There is a story of a woman who fashioned a basket and lined it with mud and filled it with water and carried her fish husband home, but I did not carry my love ashore in a water basket. I carried him in my hands though he flipped and twisted and would have swum away.

I laid Wilson James on the shore as the sun climbed high above the ocean and bright green waves beat the drum of time. The sun warmed him and I watched him come back to the form of a man. He opened his eyes and he looked surprised and sad and he said, ‘I dreamed you had grown old and that you were alone at the river.’

I watched his face and did not speak.

He sat up and looked about him.

‘How are we here? Where have I been?’ He put his hand to his neck. ‘I had grown scales. I was turning into a fish.’

I nodded.

‘What happened to me?’

I reached out and kissed him and then I placed my hand upon my mouth.

‘What is it? What have I done? No, what have you done?’

I shook my head.

‘You cannot speak? You have lost your voice? No,’ he said and he shook his head. ‘You have given your voice to . . . to bring me back?’

Goodbye is so inadequate for true departure. True loss is a sound that has no words. It touches the instrument of our soul and plays there, the notes changing from time to time, but the sound of it never leaves.

What might we have said if there had been words? We might have talked of the past and of the future. We might have talked of surrender, of frustration, of pain. We might have talked of children and water and stories and home. Of clouds and words and touch. Instead I fashioned a length of cloth for him from the green of the sea and he wrapped it about him and he laughed at this.

We walked the length of that wide beach and ours were the only footsteps. We felt the sun on our skin, we listened to the waves that crashed upon the shore, we heard the sound of sand beneath our feet, wind through the grasses on the dunes beyond, the passing of white sea birds, the whispers that waves leave as they run back from the shore. For that one afternoon while time was measured in rolling water, the land and the sky and the wind spoke all the words that mattered.

‘I can hear them,’ he said, his face alive with wonder. ‘I can hear fragments. A thread here. And another. I can hear the stories.’

Wilson James held me to him. ‘Can you not stay?’ he asked. ‘Please stay with me. I will buy a home by the ocean for us and you can walk with me by day and sleep here in the sea at night. Perhaps we might have a daughter of our own, or a son. Please, do not leave me. Tell me you will stay.’

So startling was this notion of life with him here by the sea, of another child, that for a moment I was enchanted. Here was the man I had chosen to love. We would grow old together. I would come and go from the water and our children might play upon the beach. But how could I resist this urge to speak with him, to tell him all that overflowed in me? To never speak with my children? It would be only a matter of time before my voice slipped from me and Wilson James would slip away. And I did not belong here so far from the river. In the many moons that I had been gone from the river my longing to return to it had grown louder than any song.

Slowly I shook my head and motioned to the sun falling and the wind dropping. The day was drawing to an end. When he kissed me it was with all the tenderness that any man can find in his heart and I took it into the place in my heart that was breaking and hid it away where sadness could not find it.

I walked away across the beach to the ocean that would eventually take me home to the mountains. I turned only once, there at the shore, to see the silhouette of him against the sky, and he raised his arm in farewell before I slipped into the sea.

The moon lit all the upturned places he had been and did not find his shadow. The raindrops leapt as they hit the river rocks and washed his footsteps away. The river retrieved her quiet places on the moss banks where he had slept with his notebook on his lap, the house forgot the scent of him.

Long has been the quiet now without his voice. No overhanging tree makes his silhouette. No clouds remind the water of his face. No birdsong replaces his laughter. No passing blue of wing matches the colour of his eyes. He filled the morning sky, he was the sound of autumn rain, he was the scent of nightfall coming, the taste of words unsaid. He was my earth, my kind, a life known and unknown, he was old and new, a journey only partly glimpsed. He was my story, and while he was here, his story was mine.

The quiet of the days went on. I traced his words, his days with me, into the river. I worked slowly, making stories that were soft but deep, and all the while I sang for him and called the world to watch over him.

He would never come back. He would not walk to the river and scoop me from it though I swam where he knew to find me. He would not come and if he did they would claim him back and so I could not long for him but longed instead to know that he was well in life, that his stories had returned to him, that his words had found him again, that love walked with him and that the hundred pieces of my heart which I had sewn inside him were with him still.

When Wilson James died years later, some said he had lived far longer than a man ought to. He went swimming in the ocean, as he had done almost every morning since he had settled there. He took his swim at dawn and the sea had been kind and the day warm, but he did not return. His body was washed up further along the coast. It was said that he had a pale line of green scales on his right foot, though some said they had fixed themselves there on his journey through the currents.

I might never have known about it at all if I had not heard the whisper of a story come on a fine mist one morning. It was the story of a man who had swum in the sea and been lost, and when his body was found his legs had become a fish tail. It was told that as a young man he had once been saved from drowning by a mermaid and had borne scales upon his feet ever since. Some said she had claimed him back, and others that he had gone to find her again. Other stories came of a man who had been a great writer and each morning he caught the stories he wrote from the sea, as a fisherman might catch his breakfast. And there was one story of a woman who waited by the shores of a river for her fish husband to return, and by day she sang songs to him and by night she slept in the river and awaited his return.

At night I swim as an old fish swims, gently in the moonpool. I have begun to feel the cold. My hair reflected in the water is the colour of snow. Death awaits me and accompanies me and death is my awakening. How beautiful the brush of clouds above the trees. How bright the catch of water as it breaks over rocks in the river. How the leaves move the whole forest in a single note of breeze. Death wheels above me like a great bird, whispers to me as quiet as the wings of a moth, and holds my hand like a needy lover. What might I have done differently? What the same?

I no longer wonder if I am more fish than woman or woman than fish. My life is governed by the span of a human life and I have found in this a simple truth that had never come when all of time stretched out before me. I am a creature of this world. Soon I will return to the earth and so I will never leave here. How fleeting has been all that I held dear. All those I have loved, each one, has been lost to me. How long love goes on for, long after voice and touch and eyes and smile are forgotten. Once I am gone from here, what I have known will continue to change and all it has been for me will not.

The river has grown quieter and the days warmer. Frost has not kissed the earth for many seasons and the mountains bear no snow. Rain bursts from the sky in wild storms and then does not visit at all. One day the forest will be grassland and the river will be gone. The tallest trees have fallen and the forest is dry in the bare sunlit patches. Perhaps my daughter will return and summon the rain to wrap itself about the mountains and fill the lakes until the land is running with water once more. Perhaps the moonpool will be deep again and other fish will come to swim in its depths. Perhaps the forest will again grow quiet and green, alive with leaf and moss and tree and creatures of every colour and pattern of movement.

There is a wonder in this world that has no words. It is the wonder of things visible and invisible, human and other. I am not one or the other, the world is not one or the other, we are both.

I have cast the stories I have heard upon the river, not woven deep, but floating within bubbles of air, helical and rainbow-infused. So light that sunshine will snap them open. See how the light catches on them? So many I have launched in their fragile air carriages. Still I may not finish with them all before it is my time to flow on. Each story that leaves me makes me lighter. Each story unfolds like a flower cast upon the water and each one has its own purpose. Each story has its place and time.

I will never see the people who will pause and listen at the side of a river, who will take the time to sit on a patch of earth in a forest, those who will watch the sky or listen as the rain comes down, those who will turn their face to hear the sea or pause before they drink. But we will all be part of each story that unfolds upon the earth.

A story is always in the listening.

Table of Contents

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

DEDICATION

BIGING READING