Chapter 21

A Bag of Snails

‘You should carry something shamanic. Then people wouldn’t get confused,’ Vali suggested. ‘Something creepy, like a skull.’

‘Are you offering to donate yours?’ Aliya muttered sourly.

‘I was only trying to help!’ Vali protested. ‘How are we supposed to get anywhere with your “I’m not a shaman” routine?’

Aliya growled. ‘Well, it doesn’t help if you ride into a place and announce, “Oooh, she’s a shaman on a secret quest, you all have to help her.” That went down well.’ She shook her head, and a lump of half-dried mud fell out of her hair.

She waded into the river fully dressed and lay down in the shallows, letting the gurgling water rush over her and peel away the layers of stinking mud. Letting her head sink under the water, she enjoyed the brush of soft ripples against her skin. She came up for air only when her lungs were burning. She took a deep breath and began the serious task of scrubbing every inch of herself and her clothes.

Vali was still standing on the bank looking glum and guilty. ‘Why are you so angry all the time?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why? Because people are dying and everything is falling apart—and I like it! That’s the worst part: all this disaster, and I’m more alive than I’ve ever been. How can I forgive myself for that?’

Vali’s eyes expressed boundless confusion. What did he know about hard choices?

‘Oh, get in the water,’ Aliya said, ‘you smell nearly as bad as I do. I won’t snap at you anymore.’

The water had scoured her of emotion. Now that she was clean, she could look back on the day as…well, not a complete disaster.

They had arrived at a small village in the late morning. It was set on a slight hill, overlooking the road and the river beyond it, a collection of forty or fifty houses surrounded by a few fields. It reminded Aliya of home. But it wasn’t as friendly. When the occasional traveller came to her village, they could be sure of a meal and a bed for the night, even if all they had to trade was a bit of news; but here, maybe because travellers were so much more common, the villagers were less inclined to be helpful.

On the way up the hill into the village, they had met an ageing woman carrying a large jug of water and tried asking her for directions.

‘The fire-mountain?’ she said. ‘Why do you want to go there?’

‘She’s a shaman,’ Vali piped in. ‘The mountain is going to tell her its secrets.’

‘A shaman!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘Well, that’s good news for my old bones—I’m too old to be carrying water up this hill.’

‘Um, would you like me to carry that for you?’ Aliya asked.

‘What? Oh, no. He can carry it.’ She thrust the heavy water jug at Vali’s chest, and his skinny arms sagged with the weight. The woman grabbed Aliya’s arm. ‘You can come and meet the chief.’

When they reached the village, a small crowd gathered around them. The village chief looked at Aliya sourly. He had a very long, thin beard, knotted every few inches. It was probably meant to make him look wise, but it just made him look thin and bitter. ‘This is the shaman?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Vali with his usual naïve enthusiasm. ‘She’s on a quest.’

‘Are you?’ the chief demanded of her.

‘Ah, no,’ she stammered, seeing the memory of angry faces lit by torchlight, casting blame, driving away…‘A quest, maybe. I’m not sure.’

‘How can you not be sure if you’re a shaman?’ the intimidating man asked. She wanted to say, quite easily, actually, but he carried on with, ‘Well, can you find water?’

‘Water?’ she repeated.

‘Yes, water: our well has run dry, and we need to know where to dig another one. Can you tell us that, girl? If so, we can talk about fire-mountains and whatever else you need.’

‘Um, I’m not sure,’ she said again. She was hemmed in by bad choices. Leave now, without the knowledge she needed for her quest. Fail, and risk their anger. Succeed, and risk their rejection. ‘I can try, I suppose…’

The villagers all stared at her. What did they expect her to do—dance?

‘Give her some space. She needs quiet to work,’ said Vali as he began herding the villagers away. Churie joined in the task enthusiastically, acting like a sheepdog with a naughty flock. For once, Aliya was grateful for Vali’s interference. Now, at least no one was watching her stand around dumbly wondering what to do.

It should be possible to find water. The old oak tree had shown her how to sense patterns and relationships flowing through the earth; maybe she could use the same sort of awareness for this.

She tried to focus, blocking out the sound of the villagers’ chatter and the occasional angry ‘Mhaaa!’ She sank down, as if into a trance state; but instead of going inwards, she sent her mind outwards, trying to understand the different textures: the open space of the air, the solidity of earth, the creeping growth of trees. She found water easily enough: the river at the bottom of the hill. It was hard to ignore—a noisy song of movement and change.

She followed that song away from the river and into the earth, a hundred tiny trickles of life-giving moisture threading through the ground; and there, an underground river, spreading and branching below her…

‘You shouldn’t need to dig a new well,’ Aliya called out, and the villagers clustered around her again. ‘There’s just a blockage in the water flow, not that far from the site of the well. You could tunnel across and get the water back.’

‘What, from the bottom of the well?’ one villager asked incredulously. ‘Who’s going to go down there, then?’

‘You’ll go down there if I tell you to, Greffet!’ the chief said.

‘I will not!’ the man responded. ‘I don’t want no grindylow eating my ears off.’

More voices chimed in, scared and irritable. Aliya leaned close to Vali and whispered, ‘Do you know what a grindylow is?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘They live at the bottom of wells, and they have long thin arms to snatch children who lean too far over the edge.’

Aliya had never heard of them, probably because in her village they drew their water directly from the river. ‘That sounds like a story to keep children from falling in the well.’ She walked over to the well and leant over the waist-high stone wall surrounding it to peer into the darkness. She pushed her senses out again. No water, but no sign of life, either. Would she be able to tell if there was some creature living down there?

‘I don’t think anything is living at the bottom of the well,’ she said. The arguing villagers quietened to listen to her.

‘Are you sure about that?’ asked Greffet, the believer in grindylows.

‘She’s a shaman, isn’t she?’ Vali said, ‘Of course she’s sure.’

Aliya was about to say that sure might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the chief said, ‘Well, she claims to be a shaman—I’ll believe her if she can fix our well.’

That stopped the villagers’ arguments, as there was a general agreement that if she was a shaman, she had nothing to fear from a grindylow; and if she wasn’t, she deserved to have her ears eaten for deceiving them. Aliya wanted to protest that she had never in her life claimed to be a shaman, and never would, but she had a feeling she would end up at the bottom of a well, regardless. She shot Vali a dirty glance. He bounced on his toes in excitement.

‘Well, I’ll have a look,’ she sighed.

Before too long, she found herself sitting in a loop of rope being lowered down the rocky shaft. The squeaking of the winch gradually faded as she descended into darkness, the torch she carried lighting a small halo of space around her. She guessed she was about fifteen metres underground by the time she reached the bottom, where she sank into thick mud up to mid-calf. It made a horrible glooping noise and released bubbles that smelled of rotten eggs.

Holding her nose, she swung the torch in a slow circle, examining the rock walls. There was a jagged crevice where the water was supposed to seep in; a rounded hollow, a shining reflection that looked like eyes; bare rock with a hint of algae…

Hang on—eyes? She swung the torch back around to the little hollow—and sure enough, nestled into the depression in the rock, was a creature with large bulbous eyes and sickly green skin. He—or she, or possibly it—hissed at her, revealing blunt teeth that looked like they were coated in pondweed. It did have very long arms. They were wrapped right around its knees and back to the opposite shoulder, but they weren’t long enough to reach to the top of a well. In fact, the whole creature was no larger than a five-year-old child and looked a lot more scared of her than she did of it.

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said in the calming voice she would use on a spooked horse. ‘Are you all alone down here? What do you find to eat? I doubt it’s naughty children.’

Aliya was quite surprised when the grindylow answered her. ‘Me eats tiny fishes and flies. When me’s veeery lucky, me eats snails. Not now, though…’ It blinked its huge orb-like eyes sorrowfully. ‘Now water is gone and me’s very hungry.’

‘Couldn’t you leave and live somewhere else?’ Aliya asked.

It shrank back. ‘Me’s scared of the big people. And me goes to the river once and is scared of the big sky and big fishes. Fishes bigger than me. I wants eats fishes, not fishes eats me.’

The poor creature was scared of everything: how ironic that the ‘big people’ were also scared of it. ‘Well, let’s see if I can get you your water back,’ Aliya said. She hadn’t felt that inclined to help the surly villagers, but she was willing to put some effort in if it meant helping this ugly little thing.

Craning her head back, she shouted, ‘Vali!’ The shout rebounded off the walls and finally flew into the narrow patch of sky.

A shaggy-haired head inserted itself into the circle of light. ‘Hello!’ Vali yelled down to her.

‘I need a pickaxe,’ she called. ‘Oh, and some snails.’

‘Nails?’ Vali questioned.

‘No, snails.’

‘Where am I supposed to get snails?’ he shouted.

‘I don’t care where you get them.’ She slipped her arms out of the loop in the rope and called, ‘I’m sending the rope back up to you.’

The creaking from overhead resumed, and the rope slowly lifted out of sight. Aliya shivered. Now that she wasn’t tethered to the surface, the well seemed a lot deeper. She was strangely glad for the grindylow’s company.

As she waited for Vali to hunt down some snails, she mapped out the flow of water in the rock around her, pinning down precisely where she needed to dig to release the blockage. It was easier to sense from down here, with no distractions and a real feeling of connection to the earth.

Before too long, the rope was lowered back down to her; as well as holding a pickaxe, it also had Vali attached to the end of it.

‘What are you doing down here?’ she asked as he swam into view above her.

‘I want to see whatever crazy shamanic ritual you’re going to do that uses snails, of course,’ he said. He held out a small cloth bag and she took it from him when he got near enough.

‘Oh, these are for the grindylow,’ she said.

Vali yelped. ‘The grindylow?!’

He tried to run back up the side of the well, but since the rope was still lowering him downwards all he succeeded in doing was landing on his backside in the mud. When he came face-to-face with the cowering creature, his eyes went as big as the grindylow’s. Aliya handed it the bag of snails and it gave a coo of joy, slurping one out of its shell. That was a sound she wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

Trying to ignore the snail-feast, she bent down and peered into the jagged crevice in the side of the well. ‘This is where the water used to come in,’ she told Vali, ‘but it got blocked up and the water took a different path.’ She inserted the pickaxe into the gap, followed by her arm and half her shoulder. She did her best to swing the pick at the back of the crevice. Her best turned out to not be much.

‘Shall I have a go?’ said Vali.’ ‘I’m skinnier than you are.’

Aliya worked her arm loose and handed him the axe. He got down on his knees in the mud and made a good attempt at hacking at the accumulated rock and grime. A few chalky, white slivers came away.

‘There is at least a metre of this build-up to clear away,’ she said. ‘They need to send a proper team down to fix this.’ She glanced at the happily chomping grindylow. No… Best not to get any more people involved. But they needed a better solution or she and Vali would be here for a week.

As if he were thinking along the same lines, Vali asked, ‘Do you think they’ll send us something to eat while we work?’

In what Aliya considered an act of supreme generosity, the grindylow held out the cloth bag and offered, ‘Yous is having one of my snails?’

Vali gulped and said, ‘I thought guarding a shaman would be a bit more glamorous than this.’

‘I’m not a—’

‘Yes, yes, I know; you’re not a shaman,’ Vali agreed, ‘but I hope you’re about to do something a bit shaman-y so we’re not stuck down here all day.’

‘Yous talks to water?’ the grindylow asked.

‘I do?’ Aliya wasn’t sure if the creature was asking a question or making a suggestion. Did she talk to water? She’d met a couple of water elementals, sure: did that mean she could communicate with water itself? Was that what she was doing when she sensed its presence beneath the ground?

She squatted down in front of the fissure and reached out to the underground stream flowing just out of sight, trying to call to it. The blood flowing through her veins and the flow of the water became one, her heartbeat pumping the water where it needed to be to sustain life. Then, she was thrown backwards as a gushing jet of water, splintered rock, and foul-smelling mud burst out of the narrow crevice, flattening her into the well-bottom, half-burying her in silt and rubble.

As she choked on a mouthful of mud, Vali grabbed her by the armpits and hauled her upright. He had escaped the worst of it and was only coated in slime up to his waist. Both their torches had been quenched by the deluge of mud, and he was a dim shape in the gloom. He grinned. ‘That’s what I was talking about!’

The grindylow gave a hoot of joy and began splashing around in the mud. A steady trickle of clean water was oozing in through the crack, and the level in the narrow shaft gradually rose.

‘Come on, we need to get out of here,’ Aliya said. She groped for the rope and helped Vali loop it around himself. Then, she shouted for the people gathered above to winch him up. He ascended brandishing the pickaxe and shouting about their success. By the time the rope came back down for her, she was up to her armpits in thick muddy soup. She fixed the rope around herself, and, with a horrible sucking sound, it pulled her out of the gloop. Her mouth still tasted like mouldy fungus. Spitting out something green and slimy, she tried to rid her mouth of the disgusting taste. As she headed back to the daylight, the grindylow waved goodbye with one of its long, skinny arms.

People gasped as she climbed out of the well. She was coated head to foot in dark green slime and was wearing a thunderous scowl.

‘Wait two days for the mud to settle before you drink the water,’ she snapped at the village chief. The water would probably still taste of rotten eggs for a while because of the trapped gas, but that wouldn’t harm them, and she found she didn’t much care if they had to hold their noses while they drank. ‘Now, payment: I want a week’s supplies and a new set of clothes for me and Vali. While you get those things for me, tell me how to get to the fire mountain.’

Maybe she looked more authentically shamanic covered in mud, or maybe it was the fierce look in her eyes, but there was no argument this time. Sending people scurrying off for supplies, the chief told her, ‘You’ll pass two more villages; at the third, ford the river and head west. I’ve never been there myself, but I’m told you’ll reach the mountain in about a week’s travelling.’

With a grunt of thanks, she stalked over to Meera, more than ready to ride away from this place. Meera sidled away from her and wouldn’t let her mount. Even Quantum, nestled between the horse’s ears, wrinkled his nose as she came near.

She stuffed the new supplies into her and Vali’s packs. ‘I trust you’ll at least be willing to carry our bags?’ she asked Meera, while slinging them over the horse’s back. Vali was telling a circle of rapt villagers about how she had bargained with the grindylow and fed it snails so it wouldn’t eat her ears.

‘Vali,’ she snapped, ‘we’re leaving,’ and marched down towards the river with the horse and the boy trotting obediently behind.

• • •

Now, with the sludge gone and the horrible taste out of her mouth, she felt embarrassed about her reaction. It had only been mud, after all…but it wasn’t about the mud. It was about feeling out of control. Her life was taking on a shape she hadn’t chosen.

Vali was enjoying the changes. ‘That was a properly exciting shaman-day,’ he said as he helped prepare the evening meal. ‘I mean, I know you’ve been doing all those great dream-things, but I can’t see those, so they’re a bit boring. Today was all magical creatures and boom! Exploding things with your mind.’

Aliya slammed her knife down so hard the hilt cracked. ‘Never tell anyone that I’m a shaman again,’ she said. ‘I’m trusting you with my secrets. I expect you to keep them.’

‘Why are you so determined to deny that you’re a shaman?’ Quantum demanded, exasperated. ‘It’s respected in your society.’

‘But it’s not something anyone would actually wish to be,’ Aliya said. ‘Shamans sound good in stories, but you’re never best friends with one; you never play games with one; you don’t invite them to your house unless someone in your family is sick. Shamans have to live on the outside. They never get to be normal.’

‘You think I don’t know what it feels like to be the odd one out?’ Quantum asked. ‘I spent years trying to fit in, and it made me miserable! But you have helped me to realise that I don’t have to be like everyone else. It’s okay just to be me.’

‘Why would either of you want to be normal?’ Vali asked. ‘I’ve been normal my whole life, and I hate it.’

Quantum cocked his head. ‘I suppose it’s not about whether you fit in or not; it’s whether you’re happy with who you are.’

‘But I was happy!’ Aliya said. ‘It’s different for the two of you: you both left your homes because you didn’t like it there. But I had a good life; I didn’t want things to change. If it wasn’t for this awful plague, I could have just carried on as normal.’ But even as she spoke, she knew that wasn’t true. Things had changed for her before the sickness came along. She just hadn’t wanted to admit it. The life she missed was the life of a child, and there was no going back to that.

There was a moment of silence. Then Quantum said, ‘Things always change, whether we want them to or not. Fighting that just means you give up control over how things change you. Even terrible events can make us better people. Growing into a different person doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice being happy.’

‘I would sacrifice my happiness if it meant I could get Juna back,’ she said.

Quantum smiled. ‘But, Aliya—why not aim for both?’