The Spellcoats

“I’d get to the sea tomorrow, if I could, just to shut you up!” Hern said to him.

Duck became as bad as Hern that day. He sighed sarcastically whenever Gull said we must hurry. He and Hern laughed and fooled about instead of helping us look after Gull. I smacked Duck several times, and I would have smacked Hern too, if I could. I smacked Duck again that night, in spite of Robin shouting at me, when Duck would not let Gull have the Lady.

Duck jumped out on land, hugging the Lady. He was lucky not to fall in the water. We were tied among little brown bushes, with a slope of slimy earth above, where the bank was no bank at all and the River kept slopping our boat into the bushes and away. “She’s mine!” Duck shouted, sliding and scrambling above me. “I need her! Give Gull the One. He’s strongest.”

I was so angry that I tried to climb out after him. But the boat slopped away from the bushes, and Robin caught the back of my rugcoat and hauled me back. “Leave him be, Tanaqui,” she said. “Don’t you be as bad as he is. Let’s try Gull with the One.”

We put the dark glistering One in Gull’s hand, but he cried out and shuddered. “He’s cold. He pulls. Can’t we get on now?”

“Some of us have to sleep, Gull,” I said. I was nearly as cross as Hern. I gave him the Young One instead, but Gull would not have him either. We had a dreadful night.

In the morning, Duck gave Gull the Lady, looking a little ashamed. But by that time Gull was not having the Lady either. Robin could hardly get him to eat. All he wanted was for us to untie the boat and go on.

“Fun and games all the way to the sea,” said Hern. “Then what will he want?”

“I don’t think he should go to the sea,” said Duck.

“Oh, not you now!” said Hern. “Why not?”

“The Lady doesn’t want him to go,” said Duck.

“When did she tell you that?” Hern asked jeeringly.

“She didn’t,” said Duck. “I just had a feeling and knew.”

Most of that morning Hern was jeering at Duck for his feeling. Robin snapped at Hern, and I yelled at Duck. We were very tired.

That was the day we came to the lake. The hills on either side of the River seemed to retire away backwards, and before we were aware, we were out at one end of a long, winding lake. They tell me it is usually a smaller lake than we saw, but because of the floods, it filled a whole valley. We could see it ahead, white with distance, stretching from mountain to mountain. I think they were real mountains. Their tops went so high that grey clouds sat on them, and they were blue and grey and purple as Uncle Kestrel described mountains. We had never seen such a great stretch of water in our lives as that lake. In the ordinary way we would have been interested. Water in such quantity is restless. It is grey and goes in waves, chop, chop, chop, and lines of foam stretch like ribbons back from the way the waves are going. There was a keen wind blowing.

“What a horrible wind!” Duck said. He crouched down in the boat, hugging his precious Lady.

Hern said disgustedly, “There’s miles of it! I hate seeing how far I have to go.”

Maybe I said that, when I think. Hern and I both found the place too large. As for Gull, he struggled up and stared about. “Why have we stopped?” he said.

We had not stopped, but the current ran weaker in such a mass of water, and I think our boat had turned sideways from it as we came out into the lake. I could see beyond us a wrinkling and a lumping in the lake, more yellow than grey, where the River flood rushed through the larger waters.

“Get the sail up,” I said.

“Don’t order me about,” said Hern. “Get up, Duck, and help.”

“Shan’t,” said Duck. You see how angry we all were.

Hern was stepping the mast when Gull said, “What are you doing? Why can’t we get on?”

“I am getting on, you mindless idiot!” said Hern. “I’m putting the sail up. Now shut up!”

I do not think Gull listened, but Robin said, “Hern, can’t you show poor Gull a bit more sympathy?”

“I am sympathetic!” snarled Hern. “But I wouldn’t be honest if I pretended I liked him this way. Tell him to keep his mouth shut, if I worry you.”

Robin did not answer. We got the mast and the sail up, and Duck condescended to let the keel down. The keel is a thought of my father’s, to make a flat riverboat sail well, and it is the best thought he ever had. We raced through the grey waters, leaning. Gull lay quiet in the bottom. Duck sang. When he sings, you know why we call him Duck. Hern told him so. And through their new argument, I noticed Robin still said never a word. She was white and wringing her hands.

“Are you all right?” I said. She annoys me.

“I think we’re going to drown,” said Robin. “It’s so big and so deep! Look at the huge waves!” I would have laughed at her if I had seen the sea then. But the boat did lean, and the water did churn. The shore on both sides was some miles off – too far for swimming – and I thought the lake was deep. I began to be as frightened as Robin. Hern did not say how he felt, but he did not steer near the middle of the lake where the current ran. He kept to one side, and drew nearer to the land there. Shortly we came to a point of land reaching into the lake, with trees on it. The trees grew down to the water’s edge and marched on in. We sailed over the tops of trees right under water. Robin’s eyes went sideways to them, and she gave a squeak at how deep the lake was. Her hand went out to the One, but she was too much in awe of him to pick him up. She fumbled round till she found the Young One. Her hands went white with clinging to him.

We passed more points of land and more submerged trees and came to a wide bay, where the lake had flooded up a side valley. In the distance we could see a green pasture at the edge of the water. It looked a good place to land. Hern steered that way.

Immediately Gull rose up and screamed at him to keep straight on. Hern looked at me expressively, and we sailed on.

There was an island on the far side of the bay, a miserable thing where a tuft of willow trees bent over a marsh. Gull let us land there because it was straight ahead. I think it had always been a marshy place, that island, perhaps a saddle of marsh low on the hillside, because round it in a wide ring we saw the heads of rushes – just their heads – pushing above the water. They were tall tanaqui mostly, bravely trying to flower in the spring. The air was full of their scent as the boat came pushing in among them, disturbing marsh birds every moment.

Hern laughed. “Look! A line of baby brothers!” He pointed to a row of ducklings plodding after their mother among the willows. Duck flounced round with his back to Hern and fell into a deep sulk. Which Hern must have known he would do. My brothers are maddening.

We got out, lit a smoky fire, and ate. Gull would not eat. He just sat with food in his hand. Robin tried thrusting bread in his mouth, but he just sat with it there.

“Oh, I don’t know what to do with you, Gull!” Robin cried out. Soon after that she fell asleep, leaning on a willow with the Young One in her lap and Gull sitting sightlessly beside her. Duck was still sulking. Hern and I got up and wandered over the island, but not together. He was at one end, and I was at the other, and I felt I did not care whether I ever saw him again.

I hated that island. The boughs of the willows rattled in the wind, like teeth chattering. They had bright yellow buds on, and the colour looked thoroughly dreary against the grey water. The grey water went crush, crush, crush, among the tops of the rushes, bringing their scent in ripples. I looked down at the oily sort of peat under my feet, and I looked out across the grey miles of water to the purple line of land beyond, and I felt truly miserable.

Then I thought I heard my mother’s voice behind me. “Tanaqui, for goodness’ sake pull yourself together, child!” she said. “Are you too cross to think?”

Naturally I turned round. There was only the empty grove of willows, with Hern’s back beyond them, and the other purple shore much nearer but quite as melancholy.

And my mother’s voice spoke behind me again, by which I knew I was imagining it, because she would have had to be standing in the water, among the tips of the rushes. “You mustn’t let Gull go to the sea, Tanaqui,” she said. “Can’t you see that? Promise me to stop him.”

I turned round again, and of course there was nothing. “Might as well try to stop the River, the way he carries on,” I said, just in case she could hear me. Then I thought what a fool I was. I did almost cry, but not quite. I went back to the fire instead.

Gull was not there. I was quite horrified for a moment. Then I found he had got back into the boat and was lying there, staring up at the grey sky. “You’d better stay there,” I said to him. I went and looked at Robin, still asleep. I had a feeling, from what Uncle Kestrel said, that my mother had looked a little like Robin. If you look at Robin that way, not just as a person you know very well, she is very pretty. Her face is longish, but round and even, and her eyebrows are quite dark. She always calls her hair yellow and wriggly, but I think that is what people mean when they talk about golden curls. Her eyes are large and blue. Even with her eyes shut, and mauve shadows under them, she was pretty.

She woke up as I looked. “Why are you staring? What’s the matter?”

“Gull’s gone back to the boat,” I said.

“By himself?” said Robin. “Oh, dear, what is the matter with him, Tanaqui?”

“He had a bad time in the wars,” I said.

Duck came marching across from somewhere, carrying the Lady by her head as usual. “No, it isn’t,” he said. “Uncle Kestrel told you. The Heathens put spells on him, and now they want him to go to the sea.”

“I don’t think it’s quite like that, Duck, love,” Robin said, looking worried. “Tanaqui, I had a dream—”

But I have not heard to this day what Robin’s dream was because Hern came rushing back just then, full of brisk talk about getting to the end of the lake by nightfall, and Robin must have forgotten her dream. Whatever it was, it made her happier. She was nothing like so scared of the lake after that.

That lake is huge. We sailed in it all that day and half the next. Beyond the island it became wider yet, until we could barely see the other shore. There were more islands scattered on it, and we learnt not to sail too near them, because our keel got tangled with any trees or bushes that grew at their edges before the floods came. We had one lucky escape from a bush and another from a great torn bough, moving on the flood, which I did not see behind the sail.

I think the banks of the lake must have been quite crowded with people before the Heathen came. We saw planks floating and logs cut for winter, hen coops, barrels and chairs. Duck saw two drowned cats, and I saw a dog. We all saw the corpse except Gull. That was horrible. We came quite near, because Robin insisted the person was alive, until we saw it was only the waves moving her. We thought it was a girl, but she was so small and the clothes so strange that it was hard to be sure. The long hair was browned with the water, but we could see it had been fair and curly.