Feeling the Truth

Illumina continued to watch Nina over the next few days as they made their way over the flat countryside of the river plain north of the King's City. The Margrave was at times irritable, as the road tended to follow the meanderings of the river and so the journey was almost twice as long as it would be going directly over land. They often found themselves looking back at some landmark that they seemed to have made a complete circuit round.

The Margrave complained once, pointing back over his shoulder, "I've been looking at that tree for the last two days, if we'd ridden straight here we could have saved at least one of them." They eventually came to the point in the road where they turned west and started heading towards the hills and home instead of merely traveling in parallel to them. The people and the animals seemed to take on a similar spirit, animated by the thought of home and being up in the mountains again.

The last night by the river had been particularly somber. The Prince and Nina had joined the Margrave's circle round the fire and, well into the evening, the Margrave called for a story. No one volunteered so he said, "Very well, I will tell one. The story of the wolf man of the forest river," he paused waiting for the attention of the people round the circle. "Up in the west and the north almost on the borders of the lands of the people of the high swamp, there is a Loro village; it sits in a corner of the land squeezed between the high mountains on one side and the Great Green on the other. Some time ago, there lived a childless couple in that village. They had been married for many years, both of them healthy and well-made, known and liked by the other people in the village. The one blight on their lives was the absence of children.

They sought out the wise men and women in all the communities around them but nothing availed them and they remained childless for many years. After a time the man simply gave up, becoming convinced that they would never have children. He devoted himself to the children of other families in the village. The woman did not give up. She pursued any possible path that might end the solitary life they led together.

Finally, in desperation, she decided to seek out the help of the Green Woman, they say on the other side of the Great Green she is called the Lady of the Forest. Some people doubted that she even exists. The man thought the woman had finally taken leave of her senses and would have nothing to do with the scheme. She insisted, they argued and fought over it. One day he woke to find her gone.

He tracked her to the edge of the forest, even tracking her into the forest but when he found her tracks mixed up with those of a pack of wolves he did not have the heart to go on and he turned back home, thinking he would never see her again. But of course he did.

Some months later she turned up again, dressed strangely and acting even stranger. She could not talk and there were bite marks on her arms and legs. She moved back in with the man and they were reconciled despite her silence. Though she did not speak, she seemed content and it soon became apparent that she was carrying a child. Nine months after she returned the child was born. The child was a boy, very much like her and not like him at all. The whole village came to see and wonder at him, thinking that the woman must have found the Green Woman and been helped by her.

The child grew into a boy and the boy into a young man. He was a beautiful child, strong and lean with a beautiful clear voice that as a child was high and loud and as a boy quickly sank into his throat becoming strong and wild. His night singing would bring the people out of their houses to hear him when he sat out in the summer evenings singing under the moon. Always of an evening, the woman would sit with him, holding his hand and listening with him until he grew tired and went to bed.

The bond between the woman and the boy began to gnaw at the man. It worried him and the closer the woman and the boy became, the more worried he became. He began to ask himself where the boy had come from. Why, after all those years, had she suddenly conceived a child? Whose child was he? The man became convinced that he was fathered by another man and the thought of it nagged at him, the double insult of his own inadequacy and the woman's infidelity slowly drove him out of his mind.

He began to persecute the boy; striking him for no reason, driving him out of the house, shouting at him and cursing him. The woman was defenseless; she still could not speak, though she communicated well enough with signs. The only sound she made was when she screamed, a strange hollow creaking sound, not like a person at all. She clung desperately to the boy, not letting him go and the tension between the three of them got worse and worse.

In the autumn, the people would go to the edge of the forest and gather wood for the winter. The man always insisted that the boy come with him, the woman for a long time refused but as he grew older and stronger, it was harder to refuse. The man insisted and she agreed but made him promise to be back before nightfall. Always he kept his promise getting back before the dark though he grumbled about the loss of time and the shortness of the day.

One day in late autumn, the man and the woman had a raging argument and he left taking the boy with him. The woman sat on the steps in the evening, looking down the road, waiting for them to return. The road remained empty and she sat at the door right through the night with no sign of them, though people claimed they heard the boy singing and there were wolves at the edge of the forest.

The next day the boy returned without the man, like the woman he looked strange and people found him difficult to understand, he could still sing but he could not or would not speak. He grew more and more silent as he became older. Eventually the woman died, people said from a mixture of grief and exhaustion. When she died he simply disappeared."

The margrave had been leaning forward staring into the fire as he told the story, now he sat back, a somber look on his face. Illumina spoke, "That doesn't sound like a legend, father you told it like something that actually happened, is it a true story?"

The Margrave looked round the circle of people sitting round the fire. "Look at the people around you. What do they tell you about the truth of the story?" It was typical of him, he expected her to look to the people around her for guidance and for the truth as he believed that people knew a great deal more than they realized and it was possible to see much by looking at others if you were willing to look in the right way.

Illumina did as he suggested and looked at the circle, at her father, at the singers, strangest of all at the Prince and Nina. She realized they were all touched by the story; the Prince and Nina were especially touched in some deeper way than the others. She wondered at it, even getting up and walking round behind them, touching each of them on the shoulder or back, seeing their response, some turned looking at her, some just smiled into the fire or put up a hand, briefly covering hers.

When she came to the Prince, she felt the truth of the story in him. She could sense it in the tension of his response, the way his body stiffened at her touch as though hiding something or trying to get away from something. It was the same with Nina but even more so. Illumina realized that Nina was always tense, always hiding from something and that what she was hiding from was something in the story, maybe even from the story itself, she wasn't sure.

When she got round the circle to her father, he did not turn round but continued to stare into the fire and just asked, "Well?"

She stood silent for a long time considering all the things she had seen and felt, "It is a true story, though I am not sure where the truth lies or even how many truths there are in it, perhaps more than one, no certainly more than one."

The Margrave said nothing but nodded his head. Illumina saw how the story reached into the lives of the people round the circle, each of them seeing it differently, each of them touched by it in some way but Nina and the Prince coming especially close. She stood transfixed by the power of the story, how much it carried of the world around them even though it was just a pattern of words.

Looking down at her father, she saw that for him as well there was real truth in it. The way he told it, the words he chose to use were significant, giving a tone to the story that told the listener a great deal about the implications of it for him. It wasn't even necessary to understanding the words themselves, just the tone and pattern was enough; he deliberately chose not to tell it like a folktale with a traditional beginning and end, with a usual formula in between; there was no doubt in her mind that the story had some significance for him as well.

It was a strange incident for Illumina as it gave her a sense of the narrative that made up Nina's life. It was not that she felt she knew the specifics of the story rather that she now knew there was a story and that there was much in the story that Nina found so painful that she hid it from herself and all those around her. Something in the Margrave's story resonated in Nina's life and there was something of the same resonance in the relationship between Nina and the Prince.

To follow this thread in the story go to: Behind the Cart

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