The Tower at Stony Wood

Ten

In Stony Wood, the baker lumbered her slow, implacable way down the cobbled street between the bakery and the tavern at the bottom of the half-moon harbor. The fishers tended toward an older, brinier tavern at the end of the pier. There the floorboards were warped from their wet boots, and the only adornment among the scarred tables and benches was a jar in which something scaly green, pale as pearl, with tangled strands of dark moss or hair dimly floated. A mermaid, the tavernkeeper called it. Late at night, her face grew almost visible to those who stayed that long. Then, they would swear, she sometimes turned her head and smiled.

Sel preferred a quieter tavern with no drowned, pickled mermaids in it. She went to a place at the bottom of the harbor, where she could watch the waves scroll across the endless sea before they heaved into the harbor mouth, bringing the boats back with them. In that tavern, the stone sills were littered with odd pebbles and shells. Old fishing nets hung along the windows for curtains. In the distance, on the opposite cliff, she could see the strange stumps of the stone wood, that could take on the dark, silken sheen of mother-of-pearl when the last light touched them.

The baker eased her long, heavy seal’s body onto a bench at her favorite window overlooking both the harbor mouth and the open sea. Her eyes, wide set like a fish’s, were kelp dark, hiding thoughts and stray flecks of color deep in them. Her hair, which was long and wild when she loosed it, hung in a single braid of black and silver. As she watched the sea and drank there, she let old memories stir up from the bottom of her mind like things in the deep unburying themselves, drawn up to light.

“What can I get you, Sel?” Brenna asked her. She was a massive, cheerful, round-faced woman with butter-colored hair and long, graceful hands. Her children had collected the shells and stones in the tavern; they were out on the rocks now, fishing in the incoming tide.

“My youth,” Sel said. “My husband. A spell to get my child out of that tower.”

“What about your usual?”

“My usual,” Sel agreed. Brenna brought her dark ale as bitter as brine. Then she poured one for herself and sat down with Sel, since the place was empty but for them.

“What keeps her up there?” she asked puzzledly. “It’s a dank, solitary thing, standing there in the stone wood.”

“Stories,” Melanthos’s mother said dourly.

“Stories?”

“And magic. She’s caught up in it. It’s like being in love, only with nothing real. And she refuses to see the danger. She thinks it’s all innocent.”

“Well, nothing’s happened,” Brenna said soothingly. “Nothing yet.”

Sel looked at her silently, color flashing unexpectedly in one eye, vague and swiftly gone. She took a sip of ale and answered obliquely. “I hoped that Anyon would be enough to keep her out of it. But no. She’s willful. She prefers mystery to love.”

“Well, sometimes…” Brenna murmured, gazing reminiscently out to sea herself, until a movement caught her eye and she leaned forward to push the casement wider. “Hoi! The baby’s eating your bait!”

“She’s up there all night sometimes. She embroiders pictures, she says. Things she sees in a mirror. But she never shows them to us. They’re gone, like words are gone on the wind as soon as they’re spoken.”

“Have you been up to see?”

Sel shook her head. “I’ve sent Gentian. It won’t let her up. And Anyon has tried.”

Brenna stirred. “Oh, well, Anyon—”

“I know; he hates walls. But he tried, for her. And even he can’t follow her.”

Brenna contemplated her ale, honey brown, sweeter than Sel’s. She smiled suddenly. “They’re a pair.”

“They would be,” Sel said darkly, “but for that tower.”

The door opened. One of Brenna’s froth-haired children came in, one hand carrying a shell, the other dragging the baby. “Look at this—”

“What was she eating?” Brenna asked, dipping two fingers into her ale and wiping the baby’s dirty, sticky face.

“Herring guts. Look at this shell! It’s like the stone wood—so old it turned to stone.”

Brenna took the shell without looking at it, laid it down abruptly. “Then you must go,” she said to Sel. “Go into the tower yourself and see if she’s in danger.”

Sel turned the shell; its delicate ribbing fanned across a stony underside. “It must be as old as the world,” she murmured. “I don’t care for the idea. I don’t have a mind for such things anymore. I don’t know if I could make it up the steps without getting stuck like a slug in a chambered shell, inching into smaller and smaller spaces until I couldn’t go in or out. I don’t know if I remember how to do it.”

“Remember what?” Brenna asked blankly.

Sel gave the shell back to the child. “Pretty. Well. We’ll never get the work done without her. She’s taken lodgings there, it seems. And I have to listen to Anyon complain.”

Brenna snorted back a laugh. “Then you’d better go,” she said.

Sel went back to check her ovens first. She found Gentian wrapping a loaf and a half-dozen currant rolls for old Cray Griven, who after sixty years of fishing smelled like a dried haddock and had about as many teeth. He showed Gentian the ones he had left, grinning at her as he edged out of the door. Then he encountered Sel’s fishy stare and jumped. She snorted at his back, saw his shoulders hunch. Gentian, dropping his coins into a pot, bit back a smile. She checked the baby, who was sleeping in a breadbasket on the counter, then leaned next to it, chin on her hand, looking curiously at her mother.

“Melanthos?” Sel inquired. Gentian shook her head.

“Either in the tower or anywhere in Skye but here. Do you want me to find her?”

“No,” Sel said. “I’ll do it.” She opened an oven door, checked the nut tarts inside, then the fire beneath them. She closed the door gently and stood without moving, part of her mind on the tower in that strange, ancient wood, the other part hearing seagulls and the following tide, and seals barking on the flat rocks out beyond the breakers. Once her small daughters had swum with the seals. She had watched their curly heads above the water, one dark, one light, their paddling hands and small white feet flashing through the foam.

“Mother?” she heard, and blinked at a tall young woman with long copper hair and eyes as lucent as the summer sea.

My children swam away from me, she thought. They left me watching them across the waves. She sighed and turned to the door. “Don’t forget the tarts,” she said. “When they come out of the oven, you can close the shop.”

Gentian’s bright brows twitched together, trying to frown. “Are you sure?” she asked. “If you stand at the tower stairs and call, and she doesn’t answer, then come back here, and I’ll look for her at Anyon’s. I could use a walk.”

Sel nodded. “I’ll come back here,” she said. “But if Melanthos is with Anyon, I’ll let them be.”

She left Gentian still hunched over the counter, watching Sel with a gentle, bemused expression in her eyes.

On the road that ran above the cliffs, Sel made her ponderous way, but not alone. Halfway to the stone wood, Joed surfaced and came with her, or at least one version of her. He wouldn’t know me now, she thought. My grizzled hair, my great, slow body. He had eyes of slate and hair like loam, earth colors, for all he loved the sea. The sea took all of him: his lean, clever hands, the sunburned skin weathered and molded to his bones, his deep, conch-shell voice saying her name. She could hardly blame the sea, the way he looked at it, his other heart, his paramour. She only blamed it, deeply and past reason, for not taking her as well.

She had begun to bake to have her eyes looking at a bowl, a flour bin, an oven, a fire, a face, anything but water. Her hands shaped loaves like scallop shells, like moon shells, like starfish; she ate them as if she ate the sea, to make it part of her, to transform bone to shell and lose herself in it, eyeless, thoughtless, wrapped in memories and anchored on some hoary rock against the currents of the deep.

She walked among the stone trees, the standing stones, that always asked the same riddling questions. Stone or tree? Were we once alive? Or never? The bone-white stumps were stained with pale greens and grays of lichen. The darker stones, touched by light, smoldered with iridescent fires.

She saw the tower at the edge of the cliff. It looked harmless enough, its old stones dreaming under the fading sun, rooted in grasses and ringed with wildflowers. She went to stand beside it on the cliff, watching birds white as foam soar and dive into the waves. On the sand below, children raced after the receding tide, then turned and ran away from it as it foamed toward their heels. She felt something emanate from the weathered stones as she stood feeling as bulky and as weathered beside them. As if, she thought, the tower had looked at her.

“Well,” she said after a while as the sun dipped into the scalloped cloud at the edge of the horizon. “It seems I must enter. You have my spellbound child.”

Light drew back across the face of the sea, a brilliant tide rolling after the sun, breaking against cloud and vanishing. Cloud turned to silver; the sheen on the tower melted like water into sand. Sel felt the warmth drain out of the stones. She put her hand on one, let the sunlight pour out of it into her palm.

She turned, walked around the tower to the open doorway that faced the wood.

The worn, chipped steps were dark beyond the stone. They fanned out from a central core of stone and circled upward. She could not see where they went. She followed them slowly, panting a little, and expecting the stairs to narrow and leave her there, too bulky with memory and age and life to get into its secret heart. But its spells were more subtle. It turned to her the blank, dark, motionless face of death and she shrugged past it; she had seen it before. It warned her of a place without dreams, without hope; she only laughed once, sharply, and the warnings tore apart like spiderweb under a bitter wind. She wound her way up into a blankness like the dark of the moon, where the walls and the stairs seemed to vanish in front of her, and there was no place to step except into nothing. She snorted, stepping into nothing. Do you think I care? she asked the tower. It showed her the steps again, grudgingly, and was silent until she reached the top.

The chamber was empty. She looked around it, surprised, wondering if the tower had somehow made Melanthos invisible. But nothing stirred the dust on the musty pallet. A blanket or two that Anyon had made swirled together in the middle of it. An untidy collection of threads of every color, needles, pieces of linen, lay scattered on the floor beneath the window facing the sea.

She saw her face in the mirror.

It seemed a stranger’s face, for she looked at it as little as possible, and even then scarcely saw it anymore. Now it made her laugh again, at the chips and cracks and hairs on it, the strange, troubled eyes, the silver in the dark brows, in the hair rippling into its braid.

“Who might you be?” she asked. The face in the mirror asked her the same question.

She glanced around her at the other windows. One saw along the cliff road and down to the village. Another looked out across the stone wood to the plains and tors beyond, and farther, to the jagged line of mountain where Skye ended or began, depending.

She poked at the pallet with her foot and sighed. “I made it this far,” she said to herself. “I might as well wait, let her show me what she does. She’ll come eventually…”

She settled herself on the pallet, drew one of Anyon’s blankets over her shoulders, for the mist was blowing in from the sea. She stirred the threads absently with her fingers, as though they were the pelt of some pet animal. She watched the cold gray sky reflected from a far window in the mirror. Her thoughts strayed, fashioned pieces of her life that seemed not soft paintings done in thread and finished with a knot, but more like the pieces of a broken mirror, jagged angles full of color, faces, movement, that did not fit together and could hurt. Joed’s empty boat. Gentian when she was small and wore a cap of copper curls. The cold ovens of the bakery waiting to be warmed when the moon had set and the sky above the sea was black. The stranger’s face she wore, in a life that she barely recognized except in memory.

She was gazing, she realized slowly, at a woman in the mirror.

Above the mirror the stars had been swallowed by the mist. The dark sea crumpled endlessly against the cliffs in distant, dreamy cadences, as if, in that unknown hour of night, the waves traveled beyond time and sang to an older moon. Within the tower in the mirror, a web of light and shadow trembled on the stones from a fire the mirror did not see. The woman sat in the chair, her hands curved motionlessly along the carved wood of its arms. Her fingers, long, slender, pale, were ringed with gold and jewels, as if once they had been considered precious, presented with gifts. Down one side of the circular frame in front of her, unworked linen trailed a line of needles and colored threads. From the other side, bright, finished images flowed onto the floor. On her window ledge, the mirror was a dark moon, disturbed now and then by a fleeting shimmer of firelight, like an indecipherable expression.

The woman sat very still; so did Sel, watching her. Her hands tightened now and then on the chair arms; sapphire, emerald, gold flashed. So abruptly that she startled Sel, she stood up and stepped away from the chair.

Sel still could not see her face. Her head was bowed; her loose, pale, rippling hair hid her profile. She walked; the scene in the mirror shifted. The woman turned her back again, stood facing the fire.

The fireplace was an enormous piece of marble into which a graceful lily opening a bell-shaped mouth had been carved on either side. The woman’s gown, blue gray, embroidered with lilies and white birds, showed no sign of having been worn beyond the moment she had risen: not a crease, a strained seam, a stain.

She stood quietly in front of the fire, her head still bowed. Light shifted in a fluid sheen along her tight sleeves, as if her unseen hands moved, Sel thought, tightening and turning around themselves.

Her head lifted suddenly; she turned, as if she felt eyes on her beyond her tower, beyond her night. Sel saw her face.

She heard herself breathe after a long silence; she heard the sea again. “Once,” she whispered, as if she were telling the woman’s story to herself, “I swam out of the sea and stood on new feet on the shore of the world…”

The mirror blinked like an eye, and shone with all the colors of the sea.