the Silent Place

The Silent Place

    Wild winds blow from the West. Cold, wet winds. Winds that reek of death and decay. The freezing rivers are swollen as a rotting corpse, throwing themselves recklessly down the mountainside. Down, down and down, until they come to the Silent Place.
    There the waters are black as obsidian, cold as Death, and always dark. They never reflect the sun, the moon or the stars. Rather they swallow up all the light and carry it down to their depths, and there they drown it. This place will leach every hope, every happy thought out of a person, and then eventually their soul, leaving them hollow; a wraith. You are warned of this.
    Go and collect the water for the stew, the clean water not from the ditches. All the streams are frozen. Climb up the steep mountainside where the wild goats live and collect water from the dark lakes in the shadow of the mountain. But do not visit the Silent Place.
    The youngest daughter does as her mother asks her. Usually it is her older sisters who take care of such tasks, for she has been spoilt a little because she is by far the most beautiful. But this time it is she who must make the weary trudge up the stony goat track, up the legs and knees of the mountain until she comes to its lap, wherein gather the lakes fed from the icy springs above. She takes the bronze cooking pot, glinting in the thick light like a second sun. She has spent hours polishing it.
    But to her dismay she finds that the lakes are all frozen- each spread with a sparkling film of ice. Inches thick. But she dare not disappoint her mother and she is used to the cold. She wraps her thin cloak tighter about herself and takes the shadowy track that leads down into the cleft in the mountain, that gaping wound in the earth that will not heal because it is too filled with pus, a dark acidic blood that pretends to be water. It is named the Silent Place. Here she knows the water will not be frozen. It never freezes, it never stirs, and it never reflects the sun. It is always as dark as it seems as she looks upon it for the second time.
    Tentatively, she steps closer to the lake. It rewards her with no portrait of herself on its surface because she is loved by the sun, who rises early sometimes just so he can look upon her and send his gentle, warm fingered rays through her window and through the worn material of her thin nightdress to touch her skin. She kneels and dips her vessel into the dark water and ripples spread across the still surface, loud as a scream in the Silent Place. A summons.
    He stirs in the darkness, too long asleep in the arms of the silt to remember how it feels to wake. Silence is all he has known, and it is no longer silent. Descending, he has left his body behind long ago, his gift to the water which has mothered him. Ascending, she clothes him again in her own hues. Curious, amphibious, child of the Silent Place.
    She screams and drops her pot in fear as a green, mottled head raises itself from beneath the surface of the water. Two pale green eyes devour her with their gaze. Cold, reptilian eyes. Piercing as the knife her numb fingers fumble for.
Knives are no use against the wraiths of the Silent Place, her children, and he is greatest of them all.
    He lifts himself up out of the water. Slowly at first, as if he is unused to his body. A young man, naked, his skin dappled grey and green, reeds plaited into his tangled hair and leathery portions of skin stretched between his fingers and toes. A frightened girl, her hair the colour of the sun, her water vessel lying empty on the grass.

    “What ails you?” Asked he, his voice sweet and grating as water running over pebbles, “you seem so fearful that the mountains themselves would pity you.”
    “ I would wish only to collect water from the lake.” Said she, bold as anything. He threw back his head and laughed; the sound of waterfalls, the sound of whirlpools that sucked you down forever into their depths and drowned you. “And what should I have in return?” he asked, displaying double rows of icicle teeth. “Whatever you will have.” She replied. Laughter, the sound of drowning.
“Then I will have you return tomorrow to collect more.” He told her and took the pot, filling it with water. Cold water, clear water, a vessel made of gold. She took it and ran. She had no intention of returning.
    The next day she sat eating her stew, made with the water she had collected. She had near forgotten the fears of the Silent Place. But then came something creeping at the door, splish splash, splish splash. Cold and amphibious. Jack Frost had come peeping through her window as she undressed and written upon the pane in frost. The mark by which his master should know the house, the mark that sealed her fate.
    “Who is at the door?” Asked her father, “is it perhaps one of the village lads come to steal you away? Is that why you are afraid?”
“Ah, no,” replied she, “it is more fearful than that. It is all the waters of the world come knocking at the door. Cold as the dark, deep as the night. Silent.”
“And what do the waters of the world want with you?”
“I promised the Lord of the Silent Place that in return for the water yesterday I would return today to collect more water.” She turned to her father. Eyes of pity, wide, shiny, amphibious.
“That which you have promised you must perform.” Said he, and opened wide the door.
    In came the waters of the world, the young man, the water wraith, seated in a silver chariot. The silver of the drowned light of the moon and stars, dead silver, the silver of the escariot. Kelpies, beautiful horselike demons of the water, pulled it, hungry for human flesh, slavering over bits of bone, reins woven out of reeds. An animated corpse, decayed in water, drove it, his flesh held together with iron bands. A tide of darkness. Silence. The Lord of the Silent Place come to bring her to his Kingdom, the Kingdom of death, the darkness of the depths of the lake, the odious bowels of the mountains, the lake that was its menstrual blood.
“You were promised.” He said, and snatched her up and into the grotesque carriage. Away he swept, followed by his watery entourage.
    Up the legs of the mountain. Off snapped an iron band from the driver.
“One for your lies!” Cried the water wraith. The weight of all the oceans fell upon her. Up the thighs of the mountain. Another band off the driver. “Two for betrayal!” Cried the water wraith. The chill of all the ice was upon her. The lap of the mountain. The last band off the driver. Driverless, a carriage careering out of control towards the ravine, the great gouge in the earth filled with blood. Kelpies screaming, crying. A carriage breaking as it crashed over the edge, plummeting towards the water.
“Three for my broken heart!” Cried the water wraith, ripping the skin and flesh from his chest with his bare hands. A gaping hole, revealing that internal cavity which held his heart, laid about with silver chains.
    Hands. Cold, webbed, all over her. The darkness that held her, the silt that was her bed. “Here I will lay with you.” Said he. She looked upon him, her eyes curious, amphibious. Lady of the Silent Place.