[story] to the lakeside
author: hacy morris
We had been in the forest for only three hours and were only at the bare edges but already the leaf canopy was thick enough that the noon sun failed to reach us. It seemed like permanent twilight. The jeep trail was long behind us, and even the path we were following had disappeared. I was irrationally afraid that even the compass wouldn't work, and checked it again and again.
Beside me, Ayen had his own nervous tic: he kept tugging at the left sleeve of his coat, trying to ensure that nothing of his left arm could be seen. His clothes were all made with special modifications to the left sleeve, wide enough to cover what he didn't want seen, but he remained self-conscious about it whenever he was outside. He was seven years older than me, twenty-five to my eighteen, but there were times when he felt younger than me.
"Will you stop that?" I said when I saw Ayen tugging at his sleeve again.
Ayen's hand dropped away and shrank inside his coat.
I swallowed with the realisation of my audacity. "I'm sorry. It's just that-" I waved a hand to make my point, then realised it might be too insensitive, and slipped my hand into my own coat. "Nothing."
"Just what?"
I gave a start to hear him speak; he had been so quiet since we started walking. "What?"
"You were about to say something. What was it?"
"Oh." I started to lift my arm, and let it drop again. "You know," I said, deciding that I might as well elaborate. "There are only the two of us in this forest. And I've seen... it. Before. It's all right. I don't mind."
There was a long pause. "Maybe I mind," Ayen said.
"Oh," I said in a very soft voice. I didn't say anything else as we stepped over damp undergrowth and slipped between trees. We were in a part of the forest where most people seldom ventured. If it weren't for satellite photos, I might not have even known where to start. Now I could only hope we had the right lake.
It was eerily quiet; no birds sang and there was no chitter of the famous red squirrels that my country was known for. The air smelt of ice. Now and then a gust of wind wove through the dense forest, like circling air currents. I imagined them to be ravening ghosts in search of victims, and shivered even though I was sweating from the exertion of the hike.
I stole a glance at Ayen; he seemed unconcerned and placed one foot ahead of the other without hesitation. The pace he set was quick, as though it was a familiar path he had walked before. The thought came to my mind: Didn't he fly...?
"Let's stop for lunch," Ayen said.
I realised that it was already long past noon. I don't mind admitting that my stomach rumbled as though in response to the thought of lunch. I thought I saw Ayen's lips twitch at the sound, but it could have been a trick of the light, for he had his usual neutral expression again while we searched out a marginally drier spot to sit down at.
After lunch we walked again. The light under the trees was so poor that it became impossible to see by four in the afternoon. We searched for a clearing, ate dinner and pitched a tent. We had passed by a stream earlier and filled our water bottles, but there was insufficient water for washing so I satisfied myself by wiping the dirt and sweat off with a damp flannel.
Ayen was still seated outside watching the dying embers of the campfire when I went to sleep, but he was asleep beside me in the morning. I blinked to see that sometime in the middle of the night, the left sleeve of his shirt had ridden up when he pulled his arm towards his face, and a large, white, feather-covered limb covered half of his body. Oh.
Very quietly, I slipped out of the tent and went to find a stream.
It took more than ten minutes of searching, I estimated, before I found one. The icy water made me gasp, but I scrubbed my face in it vigorously, wishing I could regain my composure. My bravado yesterday came back to haunt me. I didn't mind, I had said. I had thought that just because I had caught glimpses of it now and then, I was used to it. But seeing it up close was a shock that made my head spin.
This was real; this was why we had ventured into the forest. I glanced upwards, catching bits of blue sky between the trees.
The land we lived in was surrounded by forest and even the most experienced hunters seldom ventured far, especially not in the direction we were going. We were a landlocked country, but news from afar did reach us, on satellite dishes and through fibre-optic wires, and though some of the older folks still drove the old Soviet-made tractors, the rest of us were zipping around on Toyotas and Hondas. We were in the twenty-first century. It was ridiculous to think that the creatures named in stories actually existed.
(Well, except for the yeti.)
And then there was Ayen. By birth, I was his half-brother, but I wouldn't say that too loudly in his presence - or in the presence of any of my other half-brothers. I couldn't blame them.
I don't remember how old I was when I first learnt about the circumstances of my own birth. Sometimes it feels like I've known since I was born. But I had always known that one day, I was going to go on this journey. Quest. The only problem had been figuring out where my destination was.
Unfortunately, the only person who had been there was my half-sister, and she had been too young to provide us with any identifying features - and of course, my half-brothers were of no use in this; swans have different memories from humans, after all. All I had to go on were estimations of how long it took to walk from the edge of the city to the lake. "Three days and three nights," my half-sister had said, but she was twelve then, burdened and hungry and guided by no better than swans who were learning to fly. All we knew was that it was in the forest.
And I was now in the forest. I drank the water from the stream from my cupped hands, so cold that I could barely tell if it were sweet or bitter, morbidly wondering if it would poison me. Or make me invisible. Or turn me into a dragon, as in the stories.
Have you ever heard the story of the king's sons who were turned into swans by their evil stepmother, and whose sister took a vow of silence as she wove shirts made of nettle to return them to their human shapes? Of course you have. Sometimes the swans were ravens, or even geese. Sometimes it was three sons, or five. Sometimes they returned to their human shapes by night.
In the stories, the sister never finishes making one of the shirts. The last one is always missing a sleeve, and it is that arm that remains a bird's wing. Everyone is happy at the breaking of the spell, but they never think about what happens to the brother who had a wing instead of an arm.
I was born during their exile. After my half-brothers were returned to their human shapes, Ayen had spent most of his time cloistered indoors, too afraid to see others and to be seen. I would bet that this expedition was the first time he had been outside for years.
I drank my fill, had a quick wash by the side of the steam and found my way back to the campsite.
Ayen was awake and had already packed the tent; I half-wondered how he had managed it by himself, but saw him tugging at his left sleeve again, and said nothing. We had breakfast, I told him of the stream and waited until he came back with filled water bottles. Then we resumed our journey.
On the fifth day we found the lake. We'd seen glimpses of it on the second day, as we came down from a hill, its waters glittering through the trees, like a treasure lying under the sun. Excited, we made haste, barely stopping for lunch, but however quickly we moved, it still seemed far away. We continued into night, relying on what moonlight there was sliding through the trees, but finally we simply leant against a tree and sat down, too exhausted to carry on. We must have fallen asleep like that: in the morning, I opened my eyes to see his wing spread out over us as though in protection.
It was big - almost bigger than the first morning I had seen it, wide enough to cover both of us. The feathers on it were silvery white, almost glossy. I tracked the length of it from the tip upwards to Ayen's left shoulder, which in comparison to the right seemed almost grotesque, for it was where the wing met his body. I must have made a sound; the wing fluttered; and I was staring into Ayen's horrified face.
In the blink of an eye he had stood up, tugging down the out-sized sleeve of his coat to cover the wing, hunched away as though to divorce himself from the scene.
I brushed imaginary dirt off myself and stood up as well. "I can see the lake from here," I realised, pointing. And rather than the glitter of sunshine on water, I could see the grey-blue waters.
Ayen turned around that that. "It's the one," he said after a moment, and began running towards it, wing/arm tucked close to his body.
"W-wait for me," I said, too late, but I headed in that direction too. If Ayen recognised the lake, it meant it was the same one, right?
I nearly ran into the lake, before I found my shoes dipping into soggy puddles and retreated, looking for a safe place to dump my pack. "Ayen!" I shouted, but I couldn't see him anywhere. But the lake was there, and I almost forgot about Ayen when I gazed at it. It seemed almost alive; it was hard to look away.
If I stood at the every edge of the water and kept my attention on the hypnotic lap-lap-lap of the waves, it almost felt as though I was flying. The morning air was cold and I exhaled shallowly, not wanting my breath to mist into white clouds that would almost certainly break the illusion. What trees there were at the edge of my vision were black with damp, while the sky was blue with white wisps, impossibly far away. I slitted my eyes, feeling my body growing lighter and lighter.
"Get away from the shore," Ayen said.
The suddenness of that order gave me me such a start that I would have tumbled in that very minute, but for the way I was suddenly caught by a warm, petal-soft clasp that nevertheless closed itself firmly around my wrist. I drew in breath sharply, my feet finding grip beneath me, before I looked down at where our... limbs, were connected.
The soft clasp loosened and retreated; a feather shook itself loose as Ayen shrugged back. A breeze rose, and I watched it drift upwards into the air, over the lake, until it could no longer be seen.
"Right," I said brightly. "I should start looking-"
"Breakfast," Ayen said.
"Oh." We started a fire, boiled water for coffee and chewed on bread. We still had a few days' rations; I hoped aloud that we had enough.
"I remember flying here," Ayen said suddenly. "And there are fish in the lake."
I swallowed my mouthful of coffee, choked, and tried to stifle my coughs as it occurred to me that he had eaten the fish raw and whole when he was a swan. "R-right," I managed to say. "That's g-good to know." Well, fish would be a good change.
Finished with breakfast, we searched the vegetation beside the lake. My one fear was that that variety of nettle no longer grew, but after an hour Ayen came to me with a handful of nettles. He held them out to me with his right hand. "This is it," he said.
"Oh." I guess he would know. "Thanks," I said, taking it. "But this is too little..."
"There isn't much. We have to go around the lake to find more."
We spent the next two days circumnavigating the lake, looking for nettles. Or rather, Ayen did; he seemed to have a special sense for them, zeroing on clumps of them when I was still trying to keep my shoes out of the muddy shoreline.
Then I was crushing the nettles and soaking them in water to get usable fibres from it, then drying it and carding it and spinning it with my portable spinning wheel into long, thin yarn. Ayen stared hungrily as I spun; I could only imagine how my half-sister had done it the first time, without tools or instruments.
We finished our rations and fished for more.
I wove the yarn into coarse cloth with my portable loom, barely looking up as Ayen went for treks around the lake. At night we slept together and he always extended his wing over the two of us, protecting me from the chilly winds that came off the lake at night. This was how he had protected my half-sister all those years ago, I thought.
When the shirt was finally done, sleeves and all, we packed up the temporary camp we had made and he finally pull off his shirt. I watched the way he flexed his wing inwards and outwards, a one-winged man attempting to fly.
"This is it," I said, and suddenly uncertain, I went on in a rush, "You know that this might not work, right? I mean, I can only go by what Mother said-"
His eyes darkened at the mention of my mother, who had put the spell on him and his brothers in the first place.
"-but you never know, it could all be a trick and this could be her last revenge," I babbled. "It might make things worse, what if-"
Ayen shook his head. "Little brother. I trust you."
And it hit me how he had trusted me to come so far with me to this place, without any bodyguards, to chase a solution that seemed right out of fairytales. Maybe because it was his last hope, but I was glad that he had agreed.
I threw the nettle shirt over him.
the end
We had been in the forest for only three hours and were only at the bare edges but already the leaf canopy was thick enough that the noon sun failed to reach us. It seemed like permanent twilight. The jeep trail was long behind us, and even the path we were following had disappeared. I was irrationally afraid that even the compass wouldn't work, and checked it again and again.
Beside me, Ayen had his own nervous tic: he kept tugging at the left sleeve of his coat, trying to ensure that nothing of his left arm could be seen. His clothes were all made with special modifications to the left sleeve, wide enough to cover what he didn't want seen, but he remained self-conscious about it whenever he was outside. He was seven years older than me, twenty-five to my eighteen, but there were times when he felt younger than me.
"Will you stop that?" I said when I saw Ayen tugging at his sleeve again.
Ayen's hand dropped away and shrank inside his coat.
I swallowed with the realisation of my audacity. "I'm sorry. It's just that-" I waved a hand to make my point, then realised it might be too insensitive, and slipped my hand into my own coat. "Nothing."
"Just what?"
I gave a start to hear him speak; he had been so quiet since we started walking. "What?"
"You were about to say something. What was it?"
"Oh." I started to lift my arm, and let it drop again. "You know," I said, deciding that I might as well elaborate. "There are only the two of us in this forest. And I've seen... it. Before. It's all right. I don't mind."
There was a long pause. "Maybe I mind," Ayen said.
"Oh," I said in a very soft voice. I didn't say anything else as we stepped over damp undergrowth and slipped between trees. We were in a part of the forest where most people seldom ventured. If it weren't for satellite photos, I might not have even known where to start. Now I could only hope we had the right lake.
It was eerily quiet; no birds sang and there was no chitter of the famous red squirrels that my country was known for. The air smelt of ice. Now and then a gust of wind wove through the dense forest, like circling air currents. I imagined them to be ravening ghosts in search of victims, and shivered even though I was sweating from the exertion of the hike.
I stole a glance at Ayen; he seemed unconcerned and placed one foot ahead of the other without hesitation. The pace he set was quick, as though it was a familiar path he had walked before. The thought came to my mind: Didn't he fly...?
"Let's stop for lunch," Ayen said.
I realised that it was already long past noon. I don't mind admitting that my stomach rumbled as though in response to the thought of lunch. I thought I saw Ayen's lips twitch at the sound, but it could have been a trick of the light, for he had his usual neutral expression again while we searched out a marginally drier spot to sit down at.
After lunch we walked again. The light under the trees was so poor that it became impossible to see by four in the afternoon. We searched for a clearing, ate dinner and pitched a tent. We had passed by a stream earlier and filled our water bottles, but there was insufficient water for washing so I satisfied myself by wiping the dirt and sweat off with a damp flannel.
Ayen was still seated outside watching the dying embers of the campfire when I went to sleep, but he was asleep beside me in the morning. I blinked to see that sometime in the middle of the night, the left sleeve of his shirt had ridden up when he pulled his arm towards his face, and a large, white, feather-covered limb covered half of his body. Oh.
Very quietly, I slipped out of the tent and went to find a stream.
It took more than ten minutes of searching, I estimated, before I found one. The icy water made me gasp, but I scrubbed my face in it vigorously, wishing I could regain my composure. My bravado yesterday came back to haunt me. I didn't mind, I had said. I had thought that just because I had caught glimpses of it now and then, I was used to it. But seeing it up close was a shock that made my head spin.
This was real; this was why we had ventured into the forest. I glanced upwards, catching bits of blue sky between the trees.
The land we lived in was surrounded by forest and even the most experienced hunters seldom ventured far, especially not in the direction we were going. We were a landlocked country, but news from afar did reach us, on satellite dishes and through fibre-optic wires, and though some of the older folks still drove the old Soviet-made tractors, the rest of us were zipping around on Toyotas and Hondas. We were in the twenty-first century. It was ridiculous to think that the creatures named in stories actually existed.
(Well, except for the yeti.)
And then there was Ayen. By birth, I was his half-brother, but I wouldn't say that too loudly in his presence - or in the presence of any of my other half-brothers. I couldn't blame them.
I don't remember how old I was when I first learnt about the circumstances of my own birth. Sometimes it feels like I've known since I was born. But I had always known that one day, I was going to go on this journey. Quest. The only problem had been figuring out where my destination was.
Unfortunately, the only person who had been there was my half-sister, and she had been too young to provide us with any identifying features - and of course, my half-brothers were of no use in this; swans have different memories from humans, after all. All I had to go on were estimations of how long it took to walk from the edge of the city to the lake. "Three days and three nights," my half-sister had said, but she was twelve then, burdened and hungry and guided by no better than swans who were learning to fly. All we knew was that it was in the forest.
And I was now in the forest. I drank the water from the stream from my cupped hands, so cold that I could barely tell if it were sweet or bitter, morbidly wondering if it would poison me. Or make me invisible. Or turn me into a dragon, as in the stories.
Have you ever heard the story of the king's sons who were turned into swans by their evil stepmother, and whose sister took a vow of silence as she wove shirts made of nettle to return them to their human shapes? Of course you have. Sometimes the swans were ravens, or even geese. Sometimes it was three sons, or five. Sometimes they returned to their human shapes by night.
In the stories, the sister never finishes making one of the shirts. The last one is always missing a sleeve, and it is that arm that remains a bird's wing. Everyone is happy at the breaking of the spell, but they never think about what happens to the brother who had a wing instead of an arm.
I was born during their exile. After my half-brothers were returned to their human shapes, Ayen had spent most of his time cloistered indoors, too afraid to see others and to be seen. I would bet that this expedition was the first time he had been outside for years.
I drank my fill, had a quick wash by the side of the steam and found my way back to the campsite.
Ayen was awake and had already packed the tent; I half-wondered how he had managed it by himself, but saw him tugging at his left sleeve again, and said nothing. We had breakfast, I told him of the stream and waited until he came back with filled water bottles. Then we resumed our journey.
On the fifth day we found the lake. We'd seen glimpses of it on the second day, as we came down from a hill, its waters glittering through the trees, like a treasure lying under the sun. Excited, we made haste, barely stopping for lunch, but however quickly we moved, it still seemed far away. We continued into night, relying on what moonlight there was sliding through the trees, but finally we simply leant against a tree and sat down, too exhausted to carry on. We must have fallen asleep like that: in the morning, I opened my eyes to see his wing spread out over us as though in protection.
It was big - almost bigger than the first morning I had seen it, wide enough to cover both of us. The feathers on it were silvery white, almost glossy. I tracked the length of it from the tip upwards to Ayen's left shoulder, which in comparison to the right seemed almost grotesque, for it was where the wing met his body. I must have made a sound; the wing fluttered; and I was staring into Ayen's horrified face.
In the blink of an eye he had stood up, tugging down the out-sized sleeve of his coat to cover the wing, hunched away as though to divorce himself from the scene.
I brushed imaginary dirt off myself and stood up as well. "I can see the lake from here," I realised, pointing. And rather than the glitter of sunshine on water, I could see the grey-blue waters.
Ayen turned around that that. "It's the one," he said after a moment, and began running towards it, wing/arm tucked close to his body.
"W-wait for me," I said, too late, but I headed in that direction too. If Ayen recognised the lake, it meant it was the same one, right?
I nearly ran into the lake, before I found my shoes dipping into soggy puddles and retreated, looking for a safe place to dump my pack. "Ayen!" I shouted, but I couldn't see him anywhere. But the lake was there, and I almost forgot about Ayen when I gazed at it. It seemed almost alive; it was hard to look away.
If I stood at the every edge of the water and kept my attention on the hypnotic lap-lap-lap of the waves, it almost felt as though I was flying. The morning air was cold and I exhaled shallowly, not wanting my breath to mist into white clouds that would almost certainly break the illusion. What trees there were at the edge of my vision were black with damp, while the sky was blue with white wisps, impossibly far away. I slitted my eyes, feeling my body growing lighter and lighter.
"Get away from the shore," Ayen said.
The suddenness of that order gave me me such a start that I would have tumbled in that very minute, but for the way I was suddenly caught by a warm, petal-soft clasp that nevertheless closed itself firmly around my wrist. I drew in breath sharply, my feet finding grip beneath me, before I looked down at where our... limbs, were connected.
The soft clasp loosened and retreated; a feather shook itself loose as Ayen shrugged back. A breeze rose, and I watched it drift upwards into the air, over the lake, until it could no longer be seen.
"Right," I said brightly. "I should start looking-"
"Breakfast," Ayen said.
"Oh." We started a fire, boiled water for coffee and chewed on bread. We still had a few days' rations; I hoped aloud that we had enough.
"I remember flying here," Ayen said suddenly. "And there are fish in the lake."
I swallowed my mouthful of coffee, choked, and tried to stifle my coughs as it occurred to me that he had eaten the fish raw and whole when he was a swan. "R-right," I managed to say. "That's g-good to know." Well, fish would be a good change.
Finished with breakfast, we searched the vegetation beside the lake. My one fear was that that variety of nettle no longer grew, but after an hour Ayen came to me with a handful of nettles. He held them out to me with his right hand. "This is it," he said.
"Oh." I guess he would know. "Thanks," I said, taking it. "But this is too little..."
"There isn't much. We have to go around the lake to find more."
We spent the next two days circumnavigating the lake, looking for nettles. Or rather, Ayen did; he seemed to have a special sense for them, zeroing on clumps of them when I was still trying to keep my shoes out of the muddy shoreline.
Then I was crushing the nettles and soaking them in water to get usable fibres from it, then drying it and carding it and spinning it with my portable spinning wheel into long, thin yarn. Ayen stared hungrily as I spun; I could only imagine how my half-sister had done it the first time, without tools or instruments.
We finished our rations and fished for more.
I wove the yarn into coarse cloth with my portable loom, barely looking up as Ayen went for treks around the lake. At night we slept together and he always extended his wing over the two of us, protecting me from the chilly winds that came off the lake at night. This was how he had protected my half-sister all those years ago, I thought.
When the shirt was finally done, sleeves and all, we packed up the temporary camp we had made and he finally pull off his shirt. I watched the way he flexed his wing inwards and outwards, a one-winged man attempting to fly.
"This is it," I said, and suddenly uncertain, I went on in a rush, "You know that this might not work, right? I mean, I can only go by what Mother said-"
His eyes darkened at the mention of my mother, who had put the spell on him and his brothers in the first place.
"-but you never know, it could all be a trick and this could be her last revenge," I babbled. "It might make things worse, what if-"
Ayen shook his head. "Little brother. I trust you."
And it hit me how he had trusted me to come so far with me to this place, without any bodyguards, to chase a solution that seemed right out of fairytales. Maybe because it was his last hope, but I was glad that he had agreed.
I threw the nettle shirt over him.
the end