I’d done all I could. That’s why I did the thing I shouldn’t.
I’d worked hard, broken two fingers on each hand.
I’d spoken soft, brought in every distant cousin and disgruntled neighbour.
I’d begged pious, drowned the greenstones in a flood of prayers and blood from my strong arm.
I’d acted firm, bent the landscape with my mind from all angles and willed it to be as if I were a great holy one from the mornings back when the sun hadn’t yet risen.
And still the triple-fucked tabbas crop was as dead and dry in its soil as a twenty-year-locust husk.
That can get to you, and get you to try things you wouldn’t.
So I sat there at the mallen pool, the damp wet browness at the backwoods that only children could be trusted near, and me a full adult of thirty years and spare, and I spoke to it as a child did.
“It’s all good for nothing,” I said. “Rain falls beside it, around it, and I swear over it, but none of it hits the soil.”
The mallen pool lay there, placid and rotting. Little fish peeked out from under its mossbanks, regaining their courage after the tremors of my arrival.
“And the well’s dead. Eighty foot deep, thirty of which I dug with my own hands. Thirty deeper than the deepest well I’ve ever heard of around here. And the driest. Nothing. It’s like trying to drink from beach-sand.”
A turtle, with slow, insipid grace, fell off a log. The ripples were endless.
“So that’s it,” I said. “I’m done. The fields will die, and so will I. Off to labour in the fields of my cousins or leak my way into the city and find a stray name. No more Vhedder fields. No more Vhedder.”
The water was quiet again. Flies didn’t dare buzz.
“And that’s why I’m trying this,” I said, holding up one fist.
In the cities, I’d heard they used wells for this, deeper ones than I’d ever imagined, shafts you could count to six in before a stone struck splashing.
But that was the problem.
“I wish for a well that works,” I said.
The coin’s ripples took much longer to subside than the turtle’s had. I left not knowing if that was good or bad or just a trick of the lightened and airy imagination of someone with nothing but hope left in their head.
The night was alright. My sleep was neither good nor bad, just absent. The dawn was slow and uneven.
The well was strange: it held a copy of my face down there, bubbling up from underneath. And when I dropped a bucket down it, it broke apart into slaps and smacks and the coolest, cleanest drink I’d had in my life. I dabbed the leftovers on my scales and watched the sun burn them away, tasted the residue with my tongue.
Good. Very good.
Twelve hours per field, twelve hours of careful digging and pouring and planning and painstaking measurement to be sure feast didn’t murder the tabbas as sure as famine would’ve. I didn’t sleep till it was over, I didn’t slow.
I have no idea how the night was after that, or half the day, either. But my sleep was completely fantastic.
The shoots were already vibrant greens when I climbed down from my perch; the air was filled with the smell of growing food. Not as strong and thick as it should’ve been, but a good sign in a place that had been dead of hope or help for far too long. I didn’t agree with everything about the cities; I didn’t want to ever live in the cities; I had never visited the cities. But I did like their notions on wishing.
Come a month and more later and I was starting to turn back my opinions. Six fields isn’t so hard to tend when there’s less and less of each one to worry over every year for a generation. Six fields seething at the seams with foliage, half of which you need to stamp and burn before it bursts, is another thing. Particularly when you’re the only one and your cousins and neighbours have all already – and loudly – said they’ve spent enough time doing you favours this year, thank you very much, and in any case what’s your problem if you’ve got a crop at last, be grateful for your luck, you so-and-so-and-so, and so on and so on.
I knew I was in trouble when I found the first gripseed vine. It was as thick around as my strong arm and three times as truculent from the damp and cold, and I broke my third finger of the year ripping it out and snapping its spine. When I looked around, I knew there’d be more, I just knew it. It had spored. There were going to be more fights like these if I wanted to harvest; a lot more if I wanted to harvest without fear of being strangled with a hoe in my hands.
And when I thought about it, it seemed sensible enough. A lot of life is doing what seems to work over and over, as my mother had told me. And as her advice had, so had this.
“That was my last one,” I told the mallen pool, to the frogs and the insects and the green scum and ferns. “So this’ll have to do instead.”
In went the raging bulk of the gripseed, twitching with impotent fury right until it hit the surface.
“I wish for help with the fields,” I said. And I turned and left before I could watch what happened, and begin to feel doubt.
I climbed down the next morning and found a guest, the first guest I’d seen since I was young. I was so surprised and so embarrassed (in the middle of scraping fungus from my scutes, a child’s habit that’s bad enough manners in a baby) that my apologies swamped his own for a full hour as I found him mash and mug. Only when we’d both mouthed our way through a bigger breakfast than I could afford to have did we start to understand each other.
“Work?” I asked.
His tongue flickered assent.
I measured him up. He was a little small for a man, but not considering his age. “Shouldn’t you be on your mother’s fields?” I asked dubiously. I wanted no runaways. Bad enough to get in a fight over that sort of nonsense, worse still to lose one; I didn’t have half the muscle mass I should’ve this time of year. The field was chewing me raw.
“My sister’s fields,” he said. “And not mine anymore. Too many brothers, and I ate too much, and our well has had troubles with silt and grime, and…”
And you were the youngest and easiest to throw out without a meal or a care, I didn’t say. He heard it just the same, and buried his snout in his mug to hide this.
“They’re rough fields,” I told him.
“I saw,” he said.
“We won’t get much rest,” I told him.
“I know,” he said.
“If either of us gets gripped, we’ll be worse off than we are now,” I told him.
“I won’t,” he said.
“Take a hoe,” I told him.
“Thank you,” he said.
At some point, in between fields five and six and months two and five, I must’ve asked him to marry me. I’m not sure if I was joking or not; I’m not sure if he was either. But I guess that worked out well enough because soon the nest at the top of the tree held eggs for the first time since the mornings of my mother.
The gripseed was throttled back; the tabbas fattened so hard they burst the soil free of their tops; the first shell cracked when the final root had been dried and packed away; the clutch was healthy, noisy, and growing, and this was all completely unacceptable.
Not to me or edder, of course. But I saw the eyes on me when I stood in the market. I heard the click of teeth as I put away my stall, hours ahead of anyone else and already sold-out of all I could carry. I felt the long, slow burn on the back of your head that comes from too many people thinking the wrong sort of thoughts about you.
There’s nothing wrong with success. There’s nothing wrong with generosity. But if you can get ahold of both while everyone else around you is dealing with drought, gripseed, grief and worse, well. People start to wonder.
Sometimes I thought about the mellen pool, and I wondered too. I told edder about it, but he thought I was being strange.
“It can’t be ghost-work,” he said. “Ghosts don’t come into cities. All that cut stone frightens them, makes them worry that they’ll get cut up too if they show their brittle bones. I don’t see anything wrong with what you’ve done.”
“Right,” I told him. “But you aren’t my neighbours.”
edder looked at me with that little face of his. “No,” he said.
“Your sisters are.”
“Yes.”
“And you think…?”
“They don’t see anything wrong with what you’ve done either. But they don’t need to see it.”
And that was three mornings before the mob came by.
It was a hard run. The fields were clear and clean and firmed with the autumn chill, firm under your feet, but that went double for the crowd behind you. Nothing to do but speed up, speed up, keep speeding up and hope you discourage them more than you infuriate them as your stride grows and grows and grows, arms full of not-quite-hatchlings that you’d normally tell off for sitting on you, saying they’re too big for that now. Quiet as death, every single one, and that gave me nightmare thoughts as I went uphill.
We cut through the woods. That slowed us both down, but they had to look for us everywhere, and we just had to look for one path. Which I found, out of habit and instinct, and followed to the end of its length and my muscles.
edder was still there, worn even thinner than me, blood-a-boil with the torpor of a surge gone on for far too long. I let him lean on me, fell over myself.
“They’ll come,” he muttered through a deadened mouth. I shushed him and dragged myself along, scraped belly-flat into the hollow and dipped my teeth into sluggish, cool water, felt the furnace inside sizzle down to something that wouldn’t set my blood alight.
And when my ears were emptied of the inner roars and filling up with angry shouts, I hauled myself half-upright next to the mellen pool, still stirring with the leftover droplets from my muzzle, and I spoke for a minute.
“I’ve got nothing left for you that I can bear to give,” I said. “And I’m about to lose that too. So I’m offering no good trade, just a debt, and those aren’t big enough to leave ripples. But here it is anyways: please help my family.”
Then I sat back and listened to the water, listened to the bellows of the mob, and wondered at how strange it was that even as the calls for our blood got louder, I could still hear the soft lap of the mellen pool as clear as a bell, quiet but insistent, as big as a hill and deeper than my well, rising up and up and up through my feet above my head even as the shrubs were torn under angry feet that slid to a stop and fell silent.
I opened my eyes again. The rage was gone, the words were gone, but the water still splashed. It was seeping, dripping from high above my head, running down crevices of dirt and rot and who-knew-what, a skull of stone with a flesh of loam as big as market square, flatter and longer and toothier than anyone’s should be.
Its eye, its one eye, quivered in that head. Life swarmed and churned as an iris; frogs and minnows and a single confused turtle the size of a grown man. The mallen pool could not blink; it was anchored by its banked lids, its fern lashes. All it could do was stare. And you couldn’t meet that stare, and you couldn’t match that stare, but you couldn’t look away.
There were no words, spoken or silent. There was no message. But there was an understanding that all of us found there, at the mallen pool, looking into the breathing roots that underlay all we lived from. And when it saw this in us, I think that was when it slid back into its den with barely a sigh of soil, traceless and tired.
But the mallen pool was still there, still open. Fish spun, puzzled, in its return to immobility. Scum eddied back into place. Back to normal, but normal wasn’t, maybe, what we’d always thought. Not anymore.
Which was what I told my clutch as they grew. Just to be safe.
And there was something else I told them too. Just to be just.
Pond-wishing still isn’t a universal child’s pastime around here. Somewhere around three in seven have dropped a toy and a hope into the mallen pool, I’d say, and most no more than once. But that’s still pretty good for something that was taught to one clutch a single generation ago. Debts don’t leave ripples, but they should be paid in them.