FOR C. D-L
There were two old men, who made a project to defy gravity. The old knight, Sir Tor, had spent his life securing borders, incarcerating malefactors, protecting widows, reforming crop rotation, sending his sons into the world, marrying his daughters, and mourning his three wives, all dead in childbed, all arrested in youth and beauty. The old architect—he was much more of a master mason—Hew, had built manor houses and a courthouse, funerary monuments and bridges, sunken gardens and the odd hermitage. His wife was not dead, and had never loved him. He had suffered because of this, and now did not. His only son was dead (he was eleven years old) and Hew suffered this death daily.
The two old men sat by the deep carp basin, which was fed by a rush of water from a stone gutter let into the hillside by a much earlier people. The water drained away through various gullies, back into the hillside. They watched a fish rise in the evening light to catch flies. Suddenly it shot up—not very far—bending its fat silver body in an arc over the dark surface, snapping, flickering a tailfin, falling again with a slap and letting the water close over it.
Sir Tor said, “Hup, he defies gravity.”
“It gives automatic pleasure,” said Hew. “I wonder why.”
“Lifts the spirit,” said Sir Tor. “Sleek and shining, going up.”
They watched the ring of water slop, wrinkle, and flatten.
There was a creature, also watching, moving softly across the murky bed of the pool, a creature both long and fat, consisting of a rope of sleek segments, fringed by a large number of hairlike, flickering legs. It had a forked, whisking tail, and a heavy flat head, with constantly working mandibles, a horny surface, and large, uniformly dark treacle-coloured flat eyes, made for peering diligently in shadows and sifting silt. She was clever at avoiding beaks and jaws, clever at finding flakes and fragments of dead flesh amongst weed skeletons and soft black mud. She could not see herself, naturally, and had not seen one of her kind for a long time. She moved slow and wavering but she could see fast movement, and had seen the fish go past, the tremble of its fin, the flick of its muscle, the turmoil of its disappearance in pale bubble and the reconstruction of its underwater shape in the closing cleft of its reappearance. She was interested in the surface.
“I always wanted a fountain,” said Sir Tor. “But it was never the moment. Too much to do. Might be the moment now.”
Hew dropped a pebble into the olive-brown water and watched it eddy downwards, not heavy enough to sink like a plummet.
The creature saw it appear above her, a smooth solid, with a capsule of underwater air that dissipated upwards. She awaited its landing, snaked over, put out a feeler, saw that although it moved it was unlive and inedible. She felt in her body the vagaries of its fall, the soft thud of its landing in the silt.
“They say those old people had a whole system of fountains just here. One basin feeding another. Fed from up in the hills. Great jets, in the basins. They say the whole hill is mined and channelled inside, draining the rainwater down, feeding it into gullies and pipes. We’ve lost the art.”
“I want a beautiful fountain,” said Sir Tor, dreaming. “I want a siren, leaping like that fish, holding a jet in her little fist, like a, like a, not a trident, not a lance, like a rainbow.”
Hew said, “You’d need a stone carver, to make her.”
She stood in their mind’s eye, aspiring and supple, made of golden stone. In Sir Tor’s mind’s eye, she snapped a muscular fishtail, like a salmon. In Hew’s head she was double-tailed, her two halves winding round each other like a gymnast round a rope. In Tor’s mind she smiled blindly. In Hew’s she frowned, young and resolute.
“First things first,” said Sir Tor. “Before she can stand there, the water must be in place. We have this steady plashing, that comes over the lip, and runs away through the drain, into the hill somewhere. But there are many dry mouths which I think ran with water in the old days. Old lizard-face, under that bluff, and that noseless water god with the ground-down hair. And you find segments of pipe and broken spouts lying in the water and in the heather up the hill. You’re the master builder. Where do you think the water ran?”
“I think it soaked into the hills—from rain, and little streams in the fields. I’ve heard that there are caves in the hill, and that the old folk went into the caves with ropes and even with boats, and built channels from the deep pools in the dark there, and directed the flow—”
“We are maybe too old for clambering inside mountains, or diving in pools in caverns—”
“We are too old for everything,” said Hew. “There is no need for us to be, at all, anymore. We are redundant. I think we might look into the hillside and see what we can see. And if we need younger and stouter legs and muscles, we can find them. We need a young man, to make the mermaid, too. With blood in his veins, not water.”
“I have blood,” said Sir Tor. “But it runs thin. And fierce in its way, because its channels are narrow.”
They took their time, exploring the hillside, although they knew they had not so much time to take. They set off on horseback, in the grey morning light, left the horses in hillside meadows, and ventured into the earth, through rifts and crannies that lay under the heather and wound into the golden stone. Most of their entries turned out to be culs-de-sac—“like stumbling down a great sock,” said Sir Tor, breathing wheezily, “and finding the toe stub.” But they also found sand-lined gullets that wound in and down, and finally one that did indeed open into a large cavern, lit from above by a natural chimney, which had no floor, but a deep pool of dark water, quite still, which lapped between stone outcrops and stretched away into a further cavern. Hew lit a torch, and the fire glittered on the inky liquid. Sir Tor gazed towards the further arch and said, “Here we have need of that little boat you spoke of.” And Hew, swooping the flame this way and that, said, “Here is where they came. There are marks cut in the stone, and look, here is an iron ring set in it. And another. There must have been a rope.”
“Or a mooring.”
“We will come back with a boat,” said Hew.
“And a boatman,” said Sir Tor. “I’d rather not drown before I see our siren.”
Though something in him thought it would not matter greatly if he did.
“I shall go in the boat, of course,” he said. “We need to see to this ourselves. Given that there is no need for any of it.”
They carried a narrow boat up the hillside, slung like a litter between their horses, to the great surprise of a shepherd girl and some inquisitive black-faced sheep. In the end they hadn’t brought servants. This was their own project, their folly. Creaking and panting they pushed and pulled the boat along the cavern, and tipped it into the black water. The ripples ran away from the wooden shell into the dark. Hew and Sir Tor made the boat fast to the ancient people’s moorings, and stepped down into the shell, with their package of torches wrapped in oiled silk, and their bread and meat, and their paddles. They cast off cautiously, listening to the slippery echoes of the displaced water, staring across the grey pool they were floating on, through the arch into the dark. They dipped a cannikin into the water, and tasted it. It was stony-cold, and tasted mineral, not brackish. Pure water. There was no slime. They pushed down with a paddle and could not touch bottom. It was deep. Slowly they paddled through the twilight towards the dark, beyond which was an inky shimmer. It was possible, Hew thought, that the water simply fell hundreds of feet down into the bowels of the hill, over some silent lip of stone. Then he thought no, you would hear the rush of it, the echo, the movement of mass. This was still water, still as death. Maybe they would slide into a dark river of forgetfulness.
Sir Tor back-paddled, as they came under the arch, and Hew lit one of his torches, which lit up high black walls, and fine fiery lines of disturbed water, as far as they could see. He lashed the torch to the rowlocks—the boat dipped, and the lines of light rushed out over the water, and over the roof of the cavern, which was the colour of the hide of black swine, not jetty, but with iron-grey or thick smoke somewhere in it.
They went on, for some time, further out and further out, and there was no change. Then they began to hear trickling sounds, sounds of an inflow, or an overflow, which? They were suddenly wetted now by falling strings of water drops which could be heard all over, dropping into the lake. Very slowly they went on. They came to a wall of stone, in which was a narrow outlet, through which some of the water poured away, quite fast. They edged along the wall and came to other crevices and channels, down which the water was almost silently pouring. It was moving swiftly, as they ascertained when they trailed their fingers in front of the stone mouths. Beside one of these they found another mooring ring, let into the rock face. And then Hew caught his breath. His torch lit up a tiny figure, a doll, sitting on what looked like a natural ledge, a doll with a featureless face, and big breasts, and a coiled fishtail. He couldn’t keep his flare steady enough to see her very clearly but she had pigment on her mouth and tresses, he thought.
“That’s where we should look,” he said to Sir Tor. “That might be our carp water. Or not. It may drain into some more infernal pond that no one can reach.”
“How do we tell?” asked Sir Tor, shifting his bones, moving his leathery fingers in the soft dark movement of the water.
“We need dyes,” said Hew. “We put packets of dye in all these drains and see if colour appears anywhere near the carp pool, or the stone mouth, or maybe the village stream, who knows.”
So they went home and prepared packets of vegetable dye in porous linen bags, asking the village weaver for the secret of durable blues, and yellows, and reds. They stewed rose madder and macerated woad and prepared a brilliant and evil-looking yellow from a kind of lichen that grew in the churchyard. Then they went back to their boat, and their lakes, and rowed out again, over the ink, under the cold drip, and dropped their little packets into the open mouths of the outlets, and watched them bob and twirl away down into the dark, and out of sight.
“Now we wait,” said Hew.
“How long?” said Sir Tor.
“Maybe forever. Maybe nothing will emerge,” said Hew.
And the weeks passed, and at first they inspected the ponds and the runnels daily, but all remained thickly brown in the lake, and weed green elsewhere.
The creature in the depths could see—did at least see—only a limited range of colours. Her pleasures were more those of taste, and feeling. She liked the sensation of burrowing through loose layers of decaying cellulose and fishy spines, the rustle and ripple of her own muscles and the tiny endlessly testing pads on the ends of her multitudinous hair-legs. She had a particularly energetic ripple of her whole length, from snout, through all her elastic joints, to the flickering sensors at the end of the fork of her tail. She would exaggerate this motion, just for the pleasure of it, letting her plump ribbon float up on a sluggish current, and using all her strength to drive down again, letting water trickle through her hairs and over her chitin. She loved eating, too. She was a scavenger. She watched for the falling flesh of the dead—a minnow rigid in its last struggle, an earthworm, bloodless and falling away from a hook, little delicious chunks of very high duck flesh, mashed with feathers, clinging to shreds of bone. She had avoided being eaten. She could whirl away from a questing, snapping bird mouth, and she could lie, still, still, indistinguishable from the mud itself, her own odour masked by its pungency, whilst the trout, and the carp, and the pike floated by.
She was curious about the smell of the sharp vegetable molecules and the bitter lichen tea that wound their way past her towards the surface. She went towards the bubbles in the mud and sniffed, and tasted, and tested, and recoiled slightly. She closed her nostrils briefly, and backed away. Later she thought of these odd smells as the beginning. Somewhere, even, they troubled her eyes with unaccustomed frequencies, a ghost of a red glare, a rush of bluish shadow, a yellow stain.
Sir Tor was polishing his collection of spyglasses when he saw it. He was sitting in the sun, and held up a spyglass to look at where the siren was not, on the sullen sheen of the carp pond. And there they were, three entwined ribbons of slow colour, red, blue, and yellow, circling each other on the surface, rising in globules from the depths. He did not move, but called Hew.
“What do you see?”
Hew came over and peered under his thin hand.
“I can see dyes in water. Just where we should most hope they might be. They are coming up, Tor. From some source in the centre of the lake. There’s a way through. And all that weight of water behind it.”
They were too old to be excitable, but not too old to be very satisfied.
“First,” said Hew, “we must find the outlet in the pond. Then we must trace the watercourse, back from where it drains in from the hill. Then we must design—or discover—for who knows what those old folk had already built—the hydraulics of the thing, the narrow pipes and channels through which the water must be forced. We must capture and confine it, so that it goes up, with its release.”
There was a mad moment when they contemplated draining the pool. They sat in the evening light, by their balustrade, with beakers of red wine, and looked out over the water. On the far side the sedge swayed and feathered. A heron stood where it often stood, resting one leg, peering down the long spike of its beak into the dark liquid. Ducks of many kinds paddled from clump to clump, mallards and pochards, glistening drakes and warm brown ducks, and an erratic necklace of fluffy golden ducklings. There were coots and moorhens and a carpet of water lilies, creamy cups and rosy cupolas on green plates. The edge of the pool nearest the manor had a stone rim, where Sir Tor had stood since he was a toddling infant and thrown crumbs to the fat carp, who came soundlessly to the surface and opened and shut their lax mouths with a fleshy popping. There were minnows and sticklebacks, darting into the thickets of green weed, and leaping frogs, and crested newts with flaming breasts and agile fingers and toes. And the water boatmen, and the beetles, carrying bubbles in their arms, to make their nests, and the dragonflies and the clouds of midges in the heat. Sir Tor saw his drained pool as a muddy prospect of gasping and slimy death and saw that he could not do it. Some of the carp were known (how?) to be hundreds of years old. They had been fed by his father and his grandfather before him.
“How?” he said to Hew, staring at the quiet water and the surface of his wine.
“By diving down?” said Hew. “I was—I am—a strong swimmer. Can you think of a way a man might see underwater?”
“A spyglass would fill with mud.”
“You might strap a glass to a man’s brow—so it was watertight. It would be cumbersome. A man might feel his way—initially—with toes and fingers.”
“How deep is the water in the midst?”
“I don’t know. The silt on the floor of it must be thick. We cannot know if we do not look.”
“I shall dive too,” said Sir Tor. “It is my pool, she is my siren.”
“You are not so steady on your legs as I am, if I may say so. And your belly is large and loose.”
“It will weight me down. And float me up again.”
“Both at once?”
“Flesh is versatile, Hew. You can command it. Until the day you cannot.”
So out they went, two old men in a kind of coracle, naked because who was there to see, let alone take an interest in, their leathery shanks and wavering buttocks, Sir Tor’s mountain belly or Hew’s mottled skin through which his pelvis foreshadowed his skeleton?
The creature saw them descending through the thick sliding curtain of greenish light. She saw the horny soles of their feet and the four trampling pistons of their legs, and between them the bobbing tubelets of their sex, and the water bubbles in the hair around them, like nests of eggs. She backed away under a flat stone. The pale light of Sir Tor’s belly wrinkled and swayed above her. Their arms flailed but she did not know what arms were and stared at the wild perturbation they caused. There were three arms. Sir Tor was grasping his nose with the fourth. Slowly the four splayed feet bounced across the silt, the toes gripping and stirring. The creature clicked her nostrils shut. She heard the roar and gasp as they blew out between their flubber lips and saw the blocks of their bodies rise up in the water, up and up, turning the thick lentil of the surface into a boiling of bubbles. Just as she was whisking out to inspect they were descending again, plunging, bounding, trampling, bubbling.
Two things happened at once. Hew’s big toe hit a man-made disk of stone or metal and a ring, in which for a moment his toe caught, so that he had to battle himself free, his lungs bursting. His toe was bleeding. The creature sipped the blood he left on the stone. Simultaneously Sir Tor was seized by cramps, along his calves, his thighs, his backside, which caused him to float and flounder, gasping, like a beached whale. Hew saw his eyes roll up, swam over, and held the lolling old head above water by grasping the hair and beard. It was some time—during which Hew clung to the coracle and to Sir Tor—before the old knight had the energy to tumble himself back into its shell. He lay there, staring at the sky, while Hew paddled to the rim.
Hew said, “I trod on a thing like a well cover. With a ring, that could be twisted.”
Sir Tor said, “Good man.”
“Can you get back to the house?”
“With pauses, yes. We are a couple of fools.”
“Indeed we are. If I went down headfirst, I could twist it loose with my hands.”
“We should employ a younger man.”
“I don’t like to. This is my task. So to speak. Our task.”
Now they undertook more active construction work. They went down again and explored the outlet—Hew did the exploring, with his toes and fingers; Sir Tor, who insisted on participating, carried down implements to scrape and twist—a spike, a clawed hammer, finally a length of lead tubing, which Hew forced into a kind of stone nozzle he had found down there.
The creature, curiously attracted by the invading flesh and blood, wound her body round and round the bubbling and seething hill water, made little darts into the swirling muck to investigate the hands and feet and their traces. She picked up flakes of skin from between Hew’s twisted toes, and turned them in her pincers before swallowing them. She prowled around the new piece of lead pipe and snuffed up the stains of blood and salt sweat. Most other creatures had retreated to the outer reaches of the lake. Only this one felt invigorated by the contact with the unwater, plunged into water.
It was time, Sir Tor said, to embark on the carving of the siren. They now had a decorous, but definitely vertical jet, rising through the narrow pipe above the surface, wavering in the air, and falling. We need a stone carver, said Sir Tor. One with imagination.
There was a young man called Rob, said Hew, who had taken over carving saints and coats of arms and such, for the churches and the municipalities. “His virgins all have the same face,” said Hew. “They look like real women. Well, a real woman. Serene,” he ended, looking for an accurate word, rejecting both pretty and beautiful, though the carvings were both, from different angles.
“Sound him out,” said Sir Tor.
Rob was a hairy, squat young man, who had no talent for speaking. The two old men showed him the jet of water, and explained the idea of the siren, with some contradictions as to number of tails, and how she related to the water. Rob said there was not a lot of pressure behind the jet. Hew said, ah, but there would be, he himself was going to follow it back into the mountain, and narrow the passages it came through, so it would be forced higher. And higher. He had planned a sequence of variable spigots to make different gushes and forces of water. Rob took charcoal, and drew a picture of how the tube and the jet could be contained in the body of the woman, and be held in her hand like a bow of water. He drew arrows of water rushing, and hasps and staples, and sketched round them the ghosts of carved flesh, the pure curve of a breast, a hip metamorphosing to a tail, a stony ringlet on a long neck.
Rob said he would need a model. He didn’t have a whole siren in his head. He knew a young girl. She worked in an inn. She was a good girl. She let him—
Hew said he had seen the virgins. The siren would naturally be mother-naked.
Rob said he didn’t know if. He really didn’t know if.
“Sound her, sound her, sound the young woman,” said Sir Tor. “You can have my muniments room for the duration,” he added. “Guaranteed no peeking and prying. She’ll be respected.”
Rob grunted.
He came back a few days later with the girl, whose name, he said, was Corrie. She was younger than the virgins appeared to be, fifteen or sixteen, with a classically regular face, bright ginger hair, held in a snood, and a body wrapped in a heavy skirt and a shawl. She looked vaguely at the two old men, who stood in the hall and considered her.
“We need,” said Sir Tor.
“We need to see the shape,” said Hew, “of the body.”
The young woman wordlessly took off the shawl, and dropped it round her hem. She was wearing a shapeless blouse, but young, uptilted breasts could be seen through the coarse cloth.
Sir Tor said, “And the bum. We need to know about the bum.”
The young woman showed no sign of taking off her skirt, so Rob travelled round and round her, pulling it tight and smoothing it over the solid youthful curve of the buttocks, putting his hands round her waist so that the old men could vaguely see the way the flanks sprang out of it, the way the midriff narrowed. Rob intimated that Corrie might be persuaded to take her boots off. Sir Tor said briskly that there was no need, ankles and feet were quite irrelevant.
“What do you think?” Sir Tor asked Hew.
Hew thought that the virgins were gravely beautiful and that the living face looked vacant. He also thought that since Rob had made the virgins beautiful he could do the same for the siren.
“Very good,” said Hew. “Most excellent. Just what we can use.”
“When can you start?” asked Sir Tor. He was asking the couple. “Don’t matter,” said Corrie. It was the first thing she had said. Monday, said Rob, clearly at random. Done, said Sir Tor.
Over the ensuing winter, many events took place. A block of the golden stone from the hillside was wheeled into the manor on an oxcart. It had been destined to be either a Madonna or a funereal monument, but neither had been required, and it stood, stained with rain, in Rob’s yard. He set to work in the muniments room—whose shelved volumes were draped with bedsheets. A fire was lit, as the winter grew colder, to warm the taciturn Corrie. Sir Tor would go in of an evening, when Rob and Corrie had departed, to see how far the siren had emerged from the rock. It was as though the sculptor was unwrapping a female and a knotted snake from heavy coverings. He chipped and chiselled, and made something like a body in a sack, with stiff folds. After more work, arms and fins could vaguely be seen under a surface covered with tiny runnels, like a knitted mail surcoat, and then like a very thick woollen tunic. After more time, the covering began to be thin, like lawn, and the creature could be seen to have breasts and nipples, a navel and a sinuous scaled lower half. At this stage she had no face, only a rough oval block, over a hideously thick neck, which slowly vanished to reveal lavish tresses on smooth shoulders, and a veiled face, with nose, chin, and mouth. Some days, Sir Tor thought no work had been done, and then found odd patches of fine carving—the beginnings of fine fingers, the detail of the meeting of human flesh and fish. He had imagined her holding her arm, with the jet in it, straight up towards the sky, above her head. But Rob had stretched it in front of her, on an upwards curve, the hand roughly cupped.
As the cutting away of the stone integument gave form to the siren, boatloads of stone were dropped into the carp pond to make an island, above the water, for her to sit on. These invasions of falling blocks and rubble from the unwater disturbed the creature, who had to swim out of their way, and found the water she breathed full of alien dust. She took to curling round the outlet of the jet, which Hew had carefully protected with a leaden rim, so that the fountain should not be accidentally blocked. At first, she had not liked the inflow of cold mountain water. She liked mulch, and organic warmth, and matter transforming into other matter. But something new in her enjoyed wallowing in the spring water. She sipped it, she expanded and contracted in its flow.
Hew was busiest of all. He followed the mountain water back into the hillside, with the help of a water-diviner, an arrogant, smelly man in a hooded robe who talked a deal of nonsense about contact with underground spirits and his own divine gift of sensing their presence with fingertips and forked willow. When Hew found the gullies and pipes the old people had made, he set to work drawing plans to narrow them, to concentrate the flow. The bubbling over the lake, amongst the rubble which surrounded the outlet, grew higher.
Sometimes, coming home in the dusk from his measurings and fittings, Hew stood on the far side of the carp pond, and stared at its glossy black surface for half an hour, or even more. There were now neither dragonflies nor mayflies nor midges. No birds sang in the willows or the sedge. Occasional gaggles of geese landed briefly on their way south, but they never stayed. The unseen fish were sluggish. Hew watched the evening light, shafts of dull rose and peacock, reflected dim and shadowy, on the lucid black. And then the light dimmed, and the black grew blacker and blacker, and something in Hew wanted to lie down and go quietly under and be still. At exactly the same time he thought he had never seen such subtle colour, such resplendent black, he had never been so alive to the complex evanescent movements of air on water. He must come out, he thought, and stand here in moonlight. When he made the attempt, he was near weeping at the silver sphere reflected in the ink, and the snakelets of silver that ran away from the feet of a solitary moorhen. If I had thousands of years, he thought, it would not be enough to understand all this, or even to see it well. Realistically, he supposed, he had maybe five more years. Five by twelve moons, five winters, five springs, five summers. They seemed like ungraspable riches. How interesting it all was.
He was half sorry they had disturbed the centre of the lake, with their crashing and shouting. And then he thought of the stone hand that would hold the water, and he smiled.
There came a day when the siren was pronounced finished. Sir Tor and Hew stood in the muniments room and considered her critically. She had hollow passages, to make space for the water pipes, which would be closed with shaped blocks of the golden stone, like the lids of sarcophagi. Sir Tor looked at these, not quite comprehending. He had seen her already in his mind’s-eye. He said,
“I don’t want the jet coming out of her, you understand. I don’t want her spitting water, or pissing water, or leaking water out of her nipples, or any of that nonsense. I want her holding water.”
Hew and Rob, who had designed the system together, explained that the one fine jet would indeed spring over and above her cupped hands. But her body could be used to conceal and support the jet before it burst free. Its outlet was concealed in the tresses of hair on her shoulders. And from there the water would—if all went well—rise like a spring from waterweed. One hand, holding hair and water, directed the jet up and through the other high hand. As though she was bathing. Water would run down over her hair and body, as well as up and out in the jet. Hew said it might not work, of course. The water pressure had to be just so. He had put in various taps and nozzles along its passage, to change its force.
Sir Tor changed tack. He had really an unbounded confidence in Hew’s capacity to solve difficult problems. The water would flow where it should. He said,
“Also, in my opinion, she looks a bit smug.”
Hew, fearful of artistic temperament, touched his arm and held him back. Corrie said she thought the siren had a nice expression, she was satisfied.
“She should be joyous,” persisted Sir Tor.
Rob took his chisel and began to widen the curve of the siren’s slightly parted stone lips. More of a dark gap appeared between them, almost a grin. It was a tiny adjustment. It changed her expression from smug to gleeful.
“Hey,” said Sir Tor, “a wonderworker.”
Corrie pouted, compressing the fleshy lips as the stone ones curled back.
“You can see she enjoys life,” said Sir Tor. “She’s a muscular brute. Look at the strength in those coils.”
He had won over the number of fishtails the siren possessed. She had two, twisted around each other, ending in flirtatiously perked fins.
In past years, the creature had hibernated. She had no clear memory of this process, but she noticed various promptings in her joints, as the water in the lake cooled, and the light grew cloudier, and the dark times longer. She nuzzled down into the mud, and curled her body round her nose, and waited for sleep, and twitched, and trembled, and did not sleep. It was a mild winter. There was little ice, only the finest wafers of it stiffening and softening, perpetuating a water-wrinkle as a fine line for an evening, and melting away in midmorning. The creature conceded to herself that she was not sleeping, and was restive. She uncurled, and set off on her rippling legs, round the periphery of Hew’s lead circle, running her whiskers along it, snapping up fragments and spitting them out. She had somehow become obsessed with the strong flow of the water from the mountain, which was oxygenated and full of slivers of pricking minerals, which were enlivening. Instead of hibernating she dragged a kind of bed of weed and half-decayed sedge, and tiny frail bones of fish and frogs and newts into the rim of the outlet, so that the bulk of her body rested on a mattress of stuff through which the spring water seeped and bubbled. In it she tasted pure air, which she had never known. Although in the summer it was colder than the still pond water, in winter it was slightly warmer, and certainly livelier. She came restlessly out of her lair and dabbled in the diverted currents she had made, blocking some, strengthening others. She waited for the large creatures from the unwater to recur, as she supposed they must, since she expected them daily. She took more interest in the curve of the underwater horizon, in the rainbow wavings of those things that still moved above and through it, reeds, sinuous bird-necks full of glittering bubbles, webbed feet marking time.
The siren was ready in the spring. She was wheeled on a trolley to the shore, and transferred to a specially-constructed raft, where she lay couchant, her arms rigidly stretched out. There was a bad moment when it looked as though the raft might not float—though the siren was lapped around with webbings and strings so she could be hauled upright on the island, and back from the depth of the pond, if need be. But the raft only settled in the water a little and Sir Tor and Hew paddled their coracle to the pipe that protruded from the inlet, pulling the raft after them, with the surface water lapping brown-green over it, wetting the siren for the first time. Rob and Corrie also went along, in a rowing boat, to help push and shove. Neither could swim, and Corrie had no intention of trying. Rob wore scarlet flannel drawers and the two old men had baggy linen pants, as a concession to the decent female eye. They managed to push and lever the siren onto the new island, and with Hew and Rob half standing, half treading water, to get her more or less upright. Rob had a bucket of rough cement, to hold her to her perch, and Hew had plugs and connexions to direct the jet. But the jet was not flowing as it used to. It appeared to be blocked, and a cloud of dense mud lay around it in the water below.
Hew dived down and his fingers and toes became enmeshed in the tangle of weed over the aperture. He felt that the nozzle he had placed over it had slipped and was missing, so he surfaced, and went down again with a fishing net, into which he bundled handsful of the stems and sediment that had been woven over the outlet. He felt it pulse and wriggle. He surfaced, grasping the net, his lungs bursting, and tipped it over the side of the moving boat. It was in this way that the creature, entangled in her nest, was revealed to the humans, and the humans were revealed to her.
What they saw was snaky chitin and leathery connecting tissue, feebly wavering legs and feelers, and the blunt head with its apparatus of pincers and feelers and its great round dark eyes, honeycombed with lenses.
What she saw was a rocking unstable mass of new colours, and the weird texture of dryness in the unwater—no gloss, no gleam. She saw Hew’s huge finger approach to prod her, smelled the salt of his sweat and the tang of his blood and the residue of plumskin under his fingernail from lunch. She looked up and out and saw the pale unimaginable blue of the spring sky—she had never really seen blue—and the gold light flaming palely from the new green leaves of the trees that rimmed the carp pond. She heard a shrill breathing sound, which was in fact Corrie, screaming that the thing was disgusting, kill it, kill it, it’s a monster. Then she saw a wonder, a pale blue roundel, round a widening black pinhole, fringed with slaty stubs not unlike her fringe of legs. And somehow she saw that this thing was an intelligent eye, bigger than a carp’s eye, and unpleasantly slung in bags of skin, but an eye, that more or less met her eye.
Corrie shrilled on.
Hew hooked his fingers under the creature, and she dangled, twisting, in air. Breathing was hard, but the touch of air was a kind of unimagined bliss, even as it began to dry her armour.
Huw said, “I’ve never seen a monster like this. Maybe the floor of the pool is crawling with them.”
“Kill it,” said Corrie. “It’s nasty.”
“Nonsense,” said Hew. “It’s a living being, with lovely eyes, look at them, like jet, like faceted gems.”
With his other hand he found his lost nozzle in the flung debris of the creature’s nest.
“Come on,” he said to her. “Back down. We’ll fix it.” And holding the creature in one hand and the nozzle in the other, he went down again, in a pillar of bubble and mud. He put the creature down by the fountain, and she backed away between the new stones of the false island, rattling her segments to wetten them, staring at Hew, who was reattaching the nozzle to the pipe where it entered the island. He had arranged various pipes and tributary inlets, to intensify the jet when it was in place, all with their mouths and stopcocks. The creature had investigated them all, during her sleepless winter. She had even attempted to enter those that were temporarily open, not blocked, but they were too narrow.
It took the efforts of both half-naked old men to push the siren into her upright position on the island. There was a ludicrous moment when both were leaning athwart her coiling tails like ancient tritons trying to rape her. They fixed wires, they fixed tubing, they slapped down cement. Up she rose, the two levels of her arms golden against the blue sky, the stone hair spilling over the stony shoulders. Up and up, tremulous, then steady.
The moment came to set the jet in motion. There she sat, the siren, with her gleeful grin, holding a brass spout. Ceremoniously, kneeling on the coils of her tail, Hew opened it. Up came water, in a slow plashing, damping her hands, dripping down over the carp pond. Corrie sniggered. Hew clambered down, and reentered the water, where he adjusted various spigots in his system of pipes. And suddenly up it went, like a fine blade, like a spiralling wire, the high jet, up, up, wavering in the air, breaking, and sprinkling the shoulders of the siren with spray as the jet broke up at its zenith. Hew adjusted the tap in her hand, and the water suddenly rose directly above her, falling now directly on her head, streaming down over eyebrows, nose, and lips, past breasts and into her lap and the swelling of her scaly extremity. Sir Tor sat back on the coracle and waved his arms, which caused him to topple over into the water. He did not surface for some time—Hew went down to drag him up, for the second time—and when he came up he was in the midst of a voluminous nosebleed, so that his skin was glistening with scarlet streaks in the green slime of the water. Below, in the dark, the creature swam into the dissipating smoke of blood, and sipped, and savoured, and was curious.
They had a good summer, contemplating their achievement. They sat at the edge of the pond, with beakers of wine, and stared at the fine water shooting up, wavering, breaking, and descending in blown droplets. We did it, they said to each other, remembering what they had done as one whole thing—the mountain climbing, the cave with its black lake, the bags of dye, the siren emerging from the stone as from rough clothing, and then from fine lawn, the pipes, the spigots, the weak fountain, the high jet. We did it, they said. When Hew said “We did it” his knot of memory, irrelevantly, included the twisting coil of the creature in his fingers, as he returned it to its muddy origin. They congratulated Rob and each other on the amazing height of the jet.
Corrie, tramping back to the village with Rob, said they were daft old creatures, who couldn’t get anything of themselves to stand up or spout out anymore, and had to make do with water. Corrie and Rob, impassioned by the naked stone and warmed by the fires of the muniment room, had touched timidly, clasped passionately, and, over the months, increased their anatomical knowledge and skills exponentially. Corrie was proud and obsessed. Rob was wonderful, the old men were silly, she felt the world from one position. That wouldn’t last. She contained already the curled, fishlike creature who would change her and her world forever. There would be a fierce mouth at those breasts she offered to Rob’s reverent fingers.
Rob didn’t like her sneering at the old men. They were men, they were old, they had made something, and it would be good to be making something at that age and not simply creaking and moaning, Rob thought. Sixty years later he remembered them quite clearly when his own hands were too crippled to wield a chisel, too clumsy to model clay. He invented a way of painting walls with a brush on a pole. He made sweeps of green and gold and blue in intricate patterns, which looked like the weeds and trees in and round the circle of the carp pond, or like the woven order of illuminated manuscripts, done large and from a distance. His grandchildren mixed the paint, and Corrie washed their hands afterwards.
It occurred to Hew that Sir Tor had been living for the moment when the jet went up, and that now that moment was in the past tense. It was true, it went up every day, and that he could cunningly vary its force with his spigots. Sir Tor liked to sit out and watch it, most of all in the evening light, but also at noon, on hot days, when the sun and the water were both at their highest. Hew talked to the old knight, who seemed shrunken in his armchair, about the building of the great cathedrals.
“I think over and over,” he said, “about the masons who made those, about the men who drew up the plans, and the men who quarried, and the men who carved the spouts and the angels and the demons in the towers, and the men who finally stood on the high point and tossed their caps in the air. For they weren’t the same men. There were hundreds of years between the first drawings and the topping-out.”
Sir Tor looked at him speculatively. He did this less and less frequently.
“You are a projector without a project, old friend,” he said. “You don’t like endings.”
Hew nodded, and stared at the water going up.
“I also don’t like to begin what I can’t complete,” said Hew.
“Then you are hard indeed to satisfy,” said Sir Tor. “Maybe you could build a kind of summerhouse, so that an old man could stare at a siren under cover in all weathers. It’s not much of a project,” he added, deprecating. He had not said, “We could build,” Hew noticed.
So Hew drew a shelter, making the plan more complicated than it need be, and adding a ramp as it became clear that Sir Tor was having more and more difficulty with the walk between the manor and the pond. There came a day when the gardener and the stable-hand set him in his great chair on the trolley and rumbled him over the gravel and grass. Hew’s shelter was now foundations. Sir Tor sat in his chair beside the diggings. His face was mottled. He said, “I should like to die here, watching the water go up.” Hew said, “Well, maybe you will have that chance. But not yet, I hope.”
“Soon though,” said Sir Tor in a small voice. His eyes were wet, and to tell the truth (which he didn’t) he saw the whole world through a rainbow haze, like the penumbra of the curve of the jet in the light and the air. He could barely distinguish his high jet from his involuntary tears.
Hew likewise did not tell Sir Tor that when he looked at the jet he saw black forms, coiling lacunae, in the silver rush against the blue. They were like larger projected versions of those strange forms that float or jerk across our eyeballs, causing small children to imagine they see fairies, or magnified microbes, depending on their culture. Hew thought they were the precursors of blindness. They looked like rips in the fabric of things, Hew thought, and were perhaps rips in the jelly of his eye, disintegrations.
He was so sure that Sir Tor would die grandly in his chair, staring out at the siren in her veil of sunlit water, across the dark pond.
But in fact one day Sir Tor turned his face to the wall and would not get up, and began to mutter crossly to himself. And then only his lips moved. He would not turn back, and did not speak again. They moistened his lips with milk and water, and occasionally his tongue crept out and took a little in. He lay curled, face against the wall, for days. And then, between one imperceptible breath and its nonexistent successor, he gave up.
What Hew had seen coiling in the jet was not a space, but a body. It was the creature, who had rippled and whisked on her hundreds of legs round and round the spigot system that had invaded her mud. She needed to investigate and was rebuffed. Until, one day, she found a gap between a tap and its mouth, and with painful effort wound herself into the dark pipe. Once inside, she ran with the water, scraping her segments against the hard tube, moving imperceptibly up, and up, until at a corner she was suddenly swept up very rapidly by the unnatural upwards thrust of the water. She relaxed, as she would in death, she lay limp in the long ribbons of driven wet, and was extruded—somewhat battered—from the high nozzle, to dance in coils on the jet before tumbling in its shower, resting on a stone shoulder and seeing again the incredible blue of the atmosphere of the unwater. She wriggled and slipped down, over what was to her simply stone ledges and crevices, down over the carved fishtails and back into the water, noting the strangeness of surface from the other side.
The odd thing was, that once she was rested, she could not rest until she had repeated the journey, the dark constriction, the rush upwards, the dizzying tumble in air and water, the moment of life in the unliveable atmosphere, the stare at the light, the line of the surface, the reentry.
What was it like, for those first fish with limbs who heaved themselves out of seawater and lay exhausted on mudflats and tidal sands? Were they dissatisfied with the submarine, or hungry, or so curious that they changed body and life to breathe the unbreathable air?
What shall I do, with the strength that is left, Hew asked himself, after the burial of Sir Tor. He decided to take a journey, to see cathedrals he had never seen, designed by men who had never seen them. He needed to go quickly. He was afraid he was going blind. He went to say farewell to their siren, still gleefully smiling at empty air in a curtain of water. He moved all the spigots, narrowed the jet until it was at its full fine force. Up it went, up in the empty air. And there was a black coil in it. Hew blinked. The thing buckled and twisted and Hew saw suddenly that its writhing was a form that no slit in his eye fabric could create, that it was a living thing, in the power of the jet. He saw it tumble and slide down the golden stone, he saw it as it reached the place where fish and woman met, steady itself, use its fringe of legs to cling, to set off under its own control. He could not imagine the pleasure and pain of the buffeting it had taken, as it could not imagine his presence by the unfinished shelter. But he felt the pleasure humans feel in the survival of other creatures. He felt lifted.