Generous House

Follow this back to: Too Exposed

They stepped into the darkness. There was little light coming into the lower part of the house. There were four steps down; the lower floor was below ground level at the front of the house and completely underground at the back, where the house was set into the hill. The space had obviously been used for keeping animals.

On the right, as they went in, Manueline could make out a spiral staircase that led to an upper floor. Pulling Wals along with her, she made for the staircase and started to climb, calling out softly, "Is there anyone there?" She knew the answer but felt compelled to announce herself to the house. She hesitated, three steps up the staircase, and then tugged at Wals and went up the remaining steps without stopping, pulling him along with her.

The upper room was the same size as the lower one but had four windows covered in something that let much of the light through, though it was opaque, making it impossible to see out. Manueline had heard of glass but never seen any and wondered if she was looking at some now, somehow she doubted it. The windows had heavy shutters, two of them had the shutters closed the others were open, the windows themselves evidently opened and she let go of Wals and walked over, opening one of the windows.

She stood looking out over the valley, struck that she was seeing it as someone else had seen it. She was transfixed for a moment by the vision of another and a sense of their presence, looking and listening out over the valley below. She turned, looking at Wals, realizing he was stirring; something was waking in him; something had made him look up and look around him. Then he blanked out again and sat down beside the hearth in the center of the room, clearly exhausted.

There was a chimney that went up the center of the house with a hearth both below and above. There was even some firewood stacked beside it so Manueline quickly made up a fire. She gave Wals some water from the bottle she had carried all the way from the river and a little more of the honey cakes, persuading him to eat, kneeling down in front of him where he slumped by the hearth, offering him morsels of food and the water. The room was low and quite small and soon warmed appreciably. Wals stopped shivering and sat still looking at nothing at all. Manueline realized she was desperately hungry and set out to explore the house, thinking there might be the remains of a winter store.

Again, the house was generous. She found a large store of grain. She was sure she recognized some of it as a variety grown by her village. There was dried fruit, and in a large earthen bin downstairs, she found a supply of roots that could easily see the two of them through the winter. Food, at least, would not be a problem.

Manueline looked through the roots, surprised both at how much there was and how well preserved they were. She guessed much of the store must be from the previous winter, yet they still looked fresh with no sign of mould or any other form of blight on them. She spent some time turning them over and looking carefully at them to make sure there was nothing in the bin that would infect the rest of the store. After a while, she went back upstairs.

Wals was asleep, curled up next to the fire. She stoked up the fire a little and put some of the roots in a pot with a little water; she put a lid on it and put it in the fire. She considered waking Wals to tell him where she was going but thought better of it and left him. She went downstairs and out the door. She was tired but she felt the need to see back along the path.

She was worried that something might be drawn to the empty path, seeing it as a way into the world she had found and she wanted it closed off. She walked quickly up the path. It was steep and the climb was hard but something drove her on, right up to and over the top and the point on the path where she could look out over the country to the north of the river and see where she had come from. She stood there for a long time, watching the village and the river.

At one point, she saw a boat heading back up river towards the village. Whether it signified anything, she could not make out. By the time it got to the village, it was too far off for her to make anything out about the people in it or where they went. She stood and watched and she listened to the path until well into the afternoon but nothing came and she saw nothing more.

Manueline made her way back down the hill. The path now seemed familiar to her as though she had traveled it many times or could imagine someone like herself traveling it many times. There was something poignant about the realization, for something told her that she and Wals could not stay there forever. They would be driven out. Driven by whom or what she did not know but it was in her mind that they would be driven, by the village, by the Lady, or perhaps by themselves.

The house was hard to see from the path though it seemed odd to her, as she was sure it was possible to see the path from the house and she was not sure how it was possible for both things to be true. She came to the house suddenly as though it sprung out of the ground and she was shocked to see Wals sitting outside the door, a look of utter misery on his face. He was weeping his body heaving with the misery that consumed it, consuming him and shutting him off from the world around him.

Manueline stood for a moment unable to understand what she saw, looking for some explanation of how Wals could have come to be sitting, weeping outside the door of the house. Then she gave up looking and ran to him, bending over him and taking him in her arms, asking him what the matter was.

She was quite sure he did not understand what she said but she felt a response in him and he spoke using words she did not understand. All she could make out was, "Mab, Mab", the rest was incomprehensible. Manueline knelt beside him, holding him away from her so she could look at him, and asked again, "Wals, what's the matter, why are you crying?" He looked at her, looking confused at seeing her face, he looked beyond her at the valley and spoke again, clearly asking a question, using the word, "Mab" again.

Manueline had an idea that Mab might be a person. She asked but he didn't understand. She picked up a stick and started drawing in the dust.

Then Wals frightened her. He grabbed the stick, broke it and threw it away, and then he pushed her out the way, bent down and frantically erased the marks she had begun to make in the dust.

Manueline remembered the procession she had drawn for him to explain the older women and the children and saw the association in his mind between her summoning them and what she might summon now and she understood how it might frightened him. "I'm sorry Wals, but if I can't show you something how can I talk to you?"

He just sat looking at her, shaking his head. They sat outside the door for a long time, at first looking at each other and then looking out over the valley. Wals began to shiver again and Manueline took him into the house.

The fire had died down; she built it up again. The roots were cooked and she added some greens she had gathered on the walk up the hill. Manueline took the pot off the hearth and lifted the lid, protecting her hand with the fringe of her cloth as she did so. She broke up the greens and dropped them into the pot and then found herself at a loss how to stir them in or how to eat what was in the pot.

Then an odd thing happened, Wals got up, walked over to what she had thought was another window and opened it, revealing a cupboard with bowls and spoons. He brought them over and silently put them down in front of her. She asked him, "How did you know those were there?" It occurred to her he may have explored the house before he came and sat outside but it seemed unlikely. She thought back over the events of the day and how Wals reacted to the house and coming into the valley and she was sure that he had been there before. He remembered it and remembered someone in this place and it saddened him. Why, she could not imagine but she was sure that he had been there before. She would just have to be patient and try to bring him round, get him Hto talk and try to find out what had happened to him here. She was suddenly sure that the events here would be a key to his recovery from what happened to him in the village, or at least that he would be unable to unravel one without first dealing with the other.

In the village he had come close to death, it had almost touched him, almost enveloped him. Death, for Wals, had been the end of memory; the end of his time in the world. Not remembering anything of it, he was no longer in it and it no longer touched him. Manueline looked at him over the food between them and recognized she would have to bring him back. Somehow, she would have to give him back his memory. It might be the memory of a time to come or an acceptance of the time when he met her in the village or something she had no knowledge of, like the time he lived here before with the Lady of the Forest. He could not know her without his memory and she knew that it mattered a great deal to her that he should know who she was. Like him, she was lost to the world she used to know and, like him, somehow she would have to find her way back to a place she could live in and be at peace.

To follow this thread in the story go to: Simply Watched

The next section to read is: Choosing to Sing

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