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More children were born in the following years. Suddenly the farm, which throughout Rachel’s entire childhood had been such a quiet, sleepy place, came alive with happy calls, crying, and the babble of the very young. Cousins and brothers of Baram’s came from next-door and helped to expand the farmhouse, raising two new rooms off the back behind the hearth, one for Carlen and one for Rachel and Baram.
The children were a special joy for Carlen. Their presence seemed to ease her loss. She guided them as they grew, teaching them how to do their chores, watching them during their play.
“They are another gift to me,” she said to Rachel one evening, as they sat by the fire. Little Gunter was asleep on the rug in front of the hearth, and his even littler sister Gerta was asleep in her grandmother’s arms. “I have lost much, but looking at these young ones, now, this is my life.”
Rachel and Baram were young and strong, and the farm prospered. Rachel worked even when she was with child, and then a brother or cousin from next-door would come to help when she was near her time. And sooner than seemed possible little Gunter was in charge of the dairy cart. Now Rachel milked the cows each morning and placed the large jug of fresh milk on the cart, and little Gunter drove the goat next door to drop off the milk. At first he went with Rachel, and then Rachel went with him, and then he went on his own, back in time to sit down to the breakfast Carlen managed to prepare for them all while caring for the younger ones.
The first time she watched her son move off down the track on his own, leading the goat they all still called New Goat, Rachel felt a peculiar aching in her heart. It was something about his shape, growing smaller and smaller as he moved farther away down the track in the dim morning light. He had chosen to go by himself in the morning, before full light, rather than in the afternoon. He was an adventuresome boy, and he had chafed at her presence on the walk for six months, insisting he was old enough to make the trek himself. Rachel watched him go. He didn’t look back, though once or twice she thought he stopped and almost turned. Then he was gone round the bend, and she felt her heart would break. The feeling seemed all out of proportion with what she was observing – he would be back before full light, he would be back for breakfast, she had made that little journey herself so many times, since she was so young she couldn’t remember the first – but she couldn’t help it. Tears welled up in her eyes, and the aching in her heart welled too. It was as if he were leaving forever, walking down that empty dirt track. When her eyes cleared she found herself standing at the edgeward boundary, staring off into the distance with the light of the firmament strengthening to her right. It was twisting cold and blue at the beginning of this morning, very active and energetic. She jumped when Baram put his hand on her arm and told her that little Gunter was back, having delivered the milk but forgotten to stop at the stream on his return trip to wash out the empty jug. She shook her head to clear it. She must have stood there near the boundary stones for over an hour while her son made that journey on his short young legs.
Rachel sometimes traveled from farm to farm on the outskirts of town, for day trips to care for the sick and injured. She only very seldom stayed over night, always preferring to come back to her own farm and her own bed. Despite her youth her skill at healing was evident. Gerta had taught her much, and much else she divined through careful observation and even more careful experiment. She never went into town to work her craft, only going in on festival days with the rest. She met the herb man there on those occasions, and they consulted, but were content to leave each other to their territories.
She went to care for Baram’s aged grandmother, but the woman only asked that Rachel hold her hand and tell her some stories of her great-grandchildren. Several hours passed this way, and then Rachel looked up and saw that the woman was dead. She saw strong, solid Bresson cry and sob over his mother’s body. She fetched Baram, Carlen, and her children, and they joined her husband’s relations at the next-door farm for the burial and the death feast.
Soon it was little Gerta’s turn to take the milk each morning. She learned from her brother, who made the tutelage quick. He was eager to move on to what he called “strong work” with his father. He nudged Gerta towards making the trip by herself, sometimes needling her about being afraid. She was fierce, and didn’t wish to be thought cowardly. But the first time she went out by herself she came running back before she was even out of sight. Rachel went with her that first time, and for a week after either Baram or Rachel went, or Gunter (though he protested). And then Rachel brought the jug out into the yard one morning to find the goat hitched and the cart ready, and as soon as the jug was in the cart Gerta was off, waving to Rachel to let her know she wasn’t needed. She remembered to wash the empty jug in the stream on her way back.
The farm grew. More children, one by one. Baram traded for two more cows, and one of his nieces came down from next-door to help with cheesemaking. When Rachel went out to gather herbs, or to tend to the sick, she brought the wheels of cheese in a sack on her back, and traded them to the families she visited. Yet another sleeping room was added to the house, and the main room extended. Cheese was traded, one spring, for several long boards to make a new table with room for everyone.
One by one the youngest children learned from their elders and took over the duty of the milk cart. There was a new farm, an outgrowth of Bresson’s, further along the track, peopled by one of Baram’s older brothers and his entire growing family. So there were two stops on the milk run every morning. Two stops for Ralf, the next child, then Bertram, then Carlen, and three for Mavrin, and four for little Diona as yet more farms sprang up, colonies of Bresson’s brood.
Rachel found herself staring edgeward. She had, for no reason she could remember, climbed up on the fence at the boundary of the farm, leaning forward with her legs braced against the highest rail and her arms free and loose at her sides. She’d pulled her long brown hair out of its braid, and it was flowing free around her in the breeze borne in by a summer evening. Edgeward the firmament was roiling, golds and purples clashing against each other. Sometimes it acted like that, as if battling with itself, and she thought of it as a storm.
She stared out edgeward, and knew that something was coming. The feeling felt familiar, as if she had felt it many times before. It was the feeling of a real storm coming their way, the quiet and the stillness, though the warm breeze had nothing of that feeling and the air felt fresh and lively about her. It was no storm of the weather, not flowing on the winds of the air but on the winds of fate. She stared and stared, but could discern nothing in that direction, just the rolling fields of the farms further out, eventually the darkness of a wood in the distance. She sometimes went to that wood to gather her herbs, and it was nothing but a small extent of young trees, but from here at the edge of her farm it looked sinister as the light of day faded.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there, perched so precariously on the rails of the fence, when Baram walked across the field to join her. He put his elbows on the top rail next to her and stared out as she was staring. Seeing nothing of interest, he looked up at his wife.
“Hello, lass,” he said. It was what he always called her.
She looked down at him. Long and lean, he kept his face shaved. His eyes were open and honest. He was a good partner.
“I’m a lass no longer, husband,” she said, and climbed down from her perch. Leaning back against the fence she looked out across their fields. The small dairy herd was out grazing. She could see someone up on the roof of the new house that Gunter was building. He’d taken his time about it, but that spring he’d married a girl from one of the farms between them and the village, and convinced her to move out here rather than start a family under her family’s roof. “My son will have a son of his own soon.”
“Yes, that’s the way of it,” Baram said, smiling. “And on and on.”
She recalled that when they were young he would have gone on and on, talking on the theme till he ran out of breath. He’d grown quiet at some point during their marriage. She couldn’t say where. Now he was sparing with his words, each one considered, with little wasted breath.
She took his rough hand in hers and squeezed it. There were tears in her eyes and she didn’t know why. He didn’t see, for he too was busy surveying the bustling farm they’d built and grown together.
“There is something coming, husband,” she whispered. She didn’t think he heard. “I can feel it at my back now.”
And she could. As she’d never felt it before. The weight of the thing was monstrous. She’d known it since she was a child, but could never put a name or a face to it. She only knew that when it came it would sweep her up and change her life forever.
“I am afraid,” she said, more loudly. Baram heard, and turned, and saw the tears in her eyes and the look on her face. Though he did not understand – for she’d never spoken of these things to him before – he took her in his long strong arms and held her close. They stood like that, leaning into the fence at the edgeward boundary of their farm, for a long time, as the last light of day faded and the stars came out, with the firmament roiling in a glowing uproar below those glinting points.
Carlen died early the next spring. She lived to see her first great-grandchild, but only just. The babe was named Bresson, and was born to Gunter and his wife Sarah. Rachel sat by her mother for hours in the last days. They spoke of times long gone, when it was just Rachel and her mother and father on the farm. And they spoke of times even further back than that. For the first time in many years Rachel heard the stories about her brothers Bertram and Ralf: their growing up, their brief time as young men. For only the second time in her life Rachel heard how her two older brothers went seeking the witch in the deep forest and lost their lives, one after the other.
“Edgeward,” said Carlen, murmuring. “I watched my sons go edgeward, but I never saw them come back.”
They talked of other things, and after a while it was only Rachel talking. Carlen slept, white, pale, and frail, and she didn’t wake.
At the next dawn they buried her, beside her husband, and her parents, and beside the markers that were all that was left of her two sons. In that earth there was also a child of Rachel’s, a stillborn boy who would have been between Mavrin and Diona in age. Many members of the extended family were there, come from the farm Rachel used to think of as “the next-door” and also from further out, from the new farms. Even Bresson, having passed eighty years in the winter, was there, his beard and hair flowing white, his frame only slightly shrunken by his years, leaning on the arm of one of his great-grandsons. He and Carlen had been all that was left of their generation on the farms, and now he was the last. He spoke the blessing, as was proper, but when his voice failed Rachel took it up, speaking clearly and firmly so that all could hear. Bresson crumpled back into the arms of his kin, leaning heavily on his staff.
The death feast was a sparing one, because the spring festival was only two days away. The mood was festive already, even merry. All of Rachel’s children solemnly mourned the woman who had raised them, but amongst Bresson’s brood there were few who had known her well, and the feeling of spring was already in their hearts. Rachel presided over the feast as was her right as the the eldest living relative of the deceased. But soon after the meal had formally ended, while the children from her husband’s extensive family played in the grass, she went back to the edge of the fontward wood and stood looking down at the graves.
Her parents had both given their bodies back to the earth now. She felt a passing of something from her life. A boundary had been crossed, the most recent of many. First childhood, then girlhood, then apprenticeship, then marriage, then children and herbs and the ever-growing farm. Each of the earlier stages was clearly demarcated in her mind. There were markers at the end of each. Each end was also the beginning of the next age of her life. And as she looked at her parents’ graves, one very old, one very fresh, she felt something she hadn’t felt before. She felt that she stood on the boundary between one part of her life and the next. As if she were hovering between childhood and adulthood, actually standing on the wall between them, and was aware of it as she stood there. What came next? She was farmer, herb master and healer, mother, wife. Wasn’t that the rest of it, till the day she too lay under the earth next to her mother and father and her unborn son?
She ignored the presence of her brothers’ empty graves, kept her eyes away from them, but they seemed to draw her for no reason she knew.
The next day was the day before festival, and there was a heavy anticipation hanging in the air. Rachel felt it looming over her head, and it sent her into a panic somewhere deep inside. On the outside she seemed as calm as ever. She ordered the preparations with a steady hand. But inside she was quailing. Every few minutes she looked out the window, or across the fields, or out of the cowshed, out edgeward. But nothing was there. Nothing came.
Her family swirled around her, loading the wagon with cheese and bread, getting everything ready for the following morning. She oversaw the preparation of the meals for the day – sparing meals, everyone saving room for the feast on the morrow. She was helped by her daughters and her daughter-in-law, though Sarah had the babe Bresson tied in a wrapping of cloth, snuggled to her breast. They cleaned the two houses, all the rooms, they cleaned the cowshed and the new barn.
One more meal. The air in the house was full of the whisperings of the younger children, eager for the festival, and the quieter but still palpable excitement of the children who were in the midst of becoming young men and women. They were thinking of dances on the green around the fire the next night. Some of them were of the age for it. Gerta had her eye on a boy from the village who she pined after in the time between festivals, and dance with exclusively four times a year.
One more evening sitting beside the hearth, even Gunter and his little family come over from the other house to share the excitement of the festival eve. And then Gunter and Sarah and the babe went to their own hearth, and the children went to sleep, some in the main room, some in the room they had shared with their grandmother. The ceiling hung with herbs seemed like a dry forest upside down above their heads as Rachel and Baram sat beside the dwindling fire. Then Baram got up, kissed her on the head, and went to bed.
She followed him moments later, and slept for a little while. She woke to darkness. She went into the main room, poked at the embers of the fire, put on a few sticks. She didn’t look out the window into the night. She went and lay in Carlen’s empty bed for a while. One of the children would take it eventually, but it was empty still, for now. Her children were sleeping around her, breathing softly, but she could not give herself over to that silent oblivion. She lay in her mother’s bed for an hour, two. Then she stood up and went into the main room. It was still dead night. It would be another hour at least before Gunter would be up milking the cows. She strode across the room and opened the window. The firmament was slow, twisting in a dance where each step seemed to take a lifetime. It was gold and green. The stars were bright behind it, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A late, light snow had fallen during the evening, and it glowed in the light of the firmament.
She closed the window. There was a pack lying by the door. She had filled it the day before during the preparations. It contained cheeses and loaves of bread, some dried beef and pork. A few changes of clothes. A good supply of her herbs, her small kit with kettle, pot, mortar, pestle, knife, all her tools for healing and the other goods she could do. She didn’t remember why she’d packed it that way, as if for a long journey out amongst the farms.
She was dressed, though she didn’t remember when she did it, in one of her traveling dresses of good sturdy wool. She pulled her cloak about her and shouldered the pack. Then she took a walking stick that had been her father’s from the beside the door, opened it, and stepped out into the night. She closed the door behind her.
With the firmament glowing above her, slowly smoldering, Rachel walked away from her home. She walked out across the fields. She climbed the fence at the boundary. She walked in her sturdy shoes across the light snow, leaving dark footprints behind her. The light of the firmament was enough for her. She walked straight out and she didn’t look back. She walked edgeward, and she knew that nothing was ever coming from that direction to sweep her up and change her life forever. What she had been waiting for, all her life, was the day she would stretch her legs and walk – walk edgeward.
A tension shattered as she walked. The storm had broken. She was the change that was to come.
She walked edgeward and felt herself relax. She no longer stood on the wall. She was on the other side, having coming through motherhood, wifehood. There were tears streaming down her face. She took another step, and another, and her life was swept away on the wind.
She did not see it, because she didn’t look back, but behind her the night warmed and a heavy rain swept over the farm, melting the snow, obliterating the tracks which were the only sign of her leaving.
There was a great silence in her mind and in the land around her. She had been alone before, away from her family. Whenever she went out among the outlying farms, healing, bringing comfort with her herbs, she had almost always gone alone. She was used to the physical silence, the absence of the family noise around her. But some part of her deep within had blossomed into an emptiness. It was as if a bee had been buzzing in her ear her entire life, and had suddenly fallen silent, just now, for the first time. She felt herself an observer of her own thoughts. As the observer, she knew that she should be feeling pain, and shame, and the sorrow of her family left behind. But the emptiness was where those thoughts should have been. And in the emptiness was peace.
Edgeward. That was all that was in her. Edgeward, with morning on her right. And the day passed. She did not stop, just put one foot in front of the other for the entire day. And then night rose fontward, on her right, and swept across the sky, and the stars were above her. The night was cold. She walked for some time under the light of the firmament. She spotted a haystack across a field, and she spent the night there, aware of the farmhouse visible across several more fields. She slept for several hours and then started off again, still under the cover of darkness, still earlier than the farmers in the house would be up.
The next day was warm. Spring rolled in with the glow of daylight. The stars hung stubbornly behind the firmament for a long time that morning and then subsided, their brightness lost in the general glow. She stopped mid-morning to eat. The farms had given way to rolling low hills. She saw sheep on one and changed her course to keep another hill between herself and any watching human eyes. She stopped on the shoulder of one of these hills to eat her first meal since leaving home. There was a boulder there, still chill with the night’s cold, but she leaned her back up against it for support. She ate bread and a little cheese, and a very little meat. From where she sat she could see no one, no living thing save for a few birds hopping from one low tree or bush to the next. The landscape was empty and quiet, and the firmament was subdued, the ribbons of colored light almost invisible against the bright day. It seemed as if the earth and the sky echoed the blooming lack within her – lack of content, lack of meaning, but also lack of pain, lack of fear.
Two more days she walked like this. Each day was warmer than the last, till on the fourth day she removed her cloak, rolled it, and tied it to her pack. Her feet were sore, and she stopped more often now to stare at the landscape, at the sky. She still ate sparingly. Her loaves were gone, but they would have soon gone stale anyway, and she was supplementing her meals with wild greens and roots she foraged as she walked. The rolling green hills with their sporadic sheep had flattened out again, spreading themselves into a lowland dotted with fens and marshes. This was rich land to her. She harvested as she went, tied herbs to the outside of her pack with cord twisted from the fiber of grasses. She ate well, and thought often of Gerta, her old teacher, dead a generation.
Through all her journey she’d seen no path that could be called a road. There were some beaten tracks, most clearly made by animals, others which might have been made by human folk. She avoided these, stuck to the animal trails, though she’d seen no other human being since she’d left home.
She reached the end of the lowland around noon on the fourth day. A few hills, rockier than the ones with the sheep, brought the land up, and after her first climb she could see back over her trail to the green hills in the distance. She munched on a caseril root, bitter but full of food, and watched a large bird lift out of one of the marshes and glide over the grasses. Other than the gray bird there was no movement in the landscape. No one was following her. The thought brought a twinge of pain to her heart. She felt this ache pass across the outskirts of the quiet within her. Then she observed it as it faded away, overcome by the calm deep within.
Edgeward. Her course was ever edgeward, keeping font on her right, fade on her left, and morn behind her all the time. She crossed the rocky hills and saw off to her right a dark forest stretching as far as she could see. It was fontward of her, out of her clear-pointed path. Ceasing her descent, she sat on the steep side of the hill and waited, looking first edgeward, then towards the forest. A hawk left the trees and fell like a rock into the grasses between her and the forest. It rose seconds later with something hanging from its mouth and returned to its home.
She was awake to the sensations within her, though they were so quiet, so calm and untroubled. Ever since the anticipation she’d felt all her life had melted away on that early morning, that spring festival day, she had been keenly aware of the place where that feeling had formerly lived. It was a strange place she’d never been aware of before, because it had always been filled with the anticipation of something coming – something going, myself going, she thought, the first thought she had formed in language since leaving home. Now the place was empty almost all the time, except when she looked edgeward. Then there was the sensation of a pull in that place, drawing her onward. Or perhaps it was just a feeling of rightness, the feeling that edgeward was the right way, the correct way.
Now the pull was absent. It had gone as soon as she saw the forest.
Feeling nothing either way she got up after a while and walked down off the hill, taking her time, for the footing was uncertain, with frequent patches of gravelly stone ready to slide out from under her. She reached the bottom of the slope without incident however, and turned edgeward once more. There was a stream running off to her right, in the middle of the land between the forest and the hills. After another hour she walked down to it and filled her waterskin. The pull edgeward had still not returned, but nothing had arisen to take its place. Lacking clear direction, she went on in the way she had been going, following the stream edgeward, with the forest on her right, the hills on her left.
Then, when she had just begun to see the first darkening of evening arising fontward, above the far reaches of the forest, she felt a sudden tug. She was looking at the forest, the trees dark and soon to be darker. She walked back down to the banks of the stream and looked into the waters. They were smooth and placid, slow moving. She could see her reflection in them, colored by the rose of the firmament above. A woman in the middle of her life, with long brown hair just starting to see some gray. A plain strong face, lined by the sun and by joys and cares, a little stern, with dark, deep eyes. She looked, also, like someone who’d been sleeping outside for days, and the bundles of drying herbs tied to her pack made her seem wild, like a creature of the forest, not the town or farm. She stared down into her own eyes, distorted by ripples, for a long moment, then she turned away.
Moving down the stream she found a place where the land dipped and the stream fell over a little shallow place at a higher pace. It spread out to thirty feet or more, but there were rocks above the water, and using these she made her crossing without getting her skirts wet. On the other side was a little scramble up the eroded bank, and then she was on the broad grassy area abutting the forest.
The forest loomed ahead of her. Even at the outskirts the trees were tall and wide, and the forest dark under them. There was a heavy boundary of small trees and bushes at the edge of the forest. They sheltered under the overhanging leaves of the larger trees further back but also basked in the light of the day. She walked up to this barrier, the grasses pulling at her skirts, leaving sticky burrs in the wool.
There was no path that she could see. Without looking back she pushed her way into the boundary trees, parting their branches with her hands. They tugged at her body, and smaller shrubs and vines pulled at her legs, but stepping high and pressing ahead she came through the densest stuff. Once she was properly under the cover of the larger trees the smaller growth grew smaller still, till it dwindled away almost completely. The light dwindled as well. Even though there was still daylight left outside the forest, beneath the leaves twilight came early. As far as her eye could see she saw huge trunks, most bigger around than she could reach. They stretched up very high before spreading their leaves out to touch the canopies of the other trees nearby, and very little light could break through. The forest floor was soft with a thousand generations of fallen leaves. Sound also vanished once she was through the boundary. It was almost as if she had entered a cave, as if she were deep under the earth rather than standing on its surface. Far head of her through the trees she could see daylight, a clearing of some kind. Weaving between the trees and around their great twisting roots she set out in that direction.
The trees were old. The forest must have stood, unchanged, since the beginning of the world. Each had its story, its life, from seed to sapling to great towering grandfather. And she felt the shortness of her own life compared to these. She knew she could not count the generations of her family that had lived and died while these trees had lived each one a single life. And still they went on, and they would go on long into the future, with more human generations pouring through the years while they stood unchanged.
Stood unchanged. Until they fell, they stood unchanged. She had reached the clearing, with the light of the late afternoon pouring down from high above and feeding small growth, a field of grasses with saplings scattered throughout. The clearing was long, with one end very thin and the other end wide. Down its center lay the remains of the great tree, slowly rotting, becoming just a long mound of mossy pulp in the middle of the field. It had taken smaller trees with it when it fell, causing the clearing which allowed so much life to flourish. For such a tree to die it must have been old indeed, or else ill. Perhaps this tree was one of the first in the forest to grow, and now it was one of the first to fall.
She stayed in the clearing that night, unsure where the next would be and unsure of walking safely in the darkness beneath the canopy. There was a young tree growing from what had been the branches of the old, already providing its own shade so that around it only cool soft mosses grew. She lay down atop these, wrapped in her cloak, with her pack for a pillow, and slept as deeply as she ever had, surrounded by an ancient place which thought nothing for her fleeting life or her fleeting thoughts. Her dreams were like the trees, old, dark, slow, and when she woke her mind was too quick for them. She couldn’t think them back to her.
I realized today that we’re about a third of the way through She Danced with Shadows (it’s short). This makes sense to me, in terms of the story. About a third of the piece concerns Rachel’s childhood and her life with her family. This seems nice and neat, but I’m not convinced that the pacing is working at all. It feels like we’ve spent an awfully long time watching her grow. Feel free to send me your thoughts on that (acodispo@gmail.com).