Cassiolta - 1

I used to imagine that I was in love with him.

A strange target for a young girl to choose. We who are supposed to set our sights on handsome princes and bold knights; our men should be graceful and gallant, airy and elegant. They should ride horses, fight dragons; they should not be expected to put a foot wrong on the dance floor.

But not me. Instead, I have to fall for the wild man who comes stumbling out of the woods babbling nonsense and searching around for a friend or brother, calling a name out: Kinsom! Kinsom! Kinsom! The name echoing around in the trees, bouncing off the hills. His face bloody, overgrown; his clothing torn.

There could hardly be a less appropriate subject for an eight-year-old’s crush.

But there you have it. He was mine.

And perhaps it is because I was the one to find him. I was sent to fetch the pigs. I knew where they’d go, indulging down in the little gully where the oak tree and plum trees grew, fruit and acorns layering the ground. More fruit than we could eat or sell or dry, the tree bursting, sagging. I was prone to heading down there to indulge myself as well.

I heard him before I saw him. And I hesitated, frozen in place. There were rumours at the time about outlaws, and my mother had warned me not to stray to far and not to speak to strange men if I saw them. And this man – once I saw him - was as strange as any: his ragged beard all snagged with twigs and insects, his dull-straw hair growing long to his shoulders, there were cuts all across his face, beads of new and old blood. He was stumbling around, calling that name – a friend, a brother, a beloved?

He was every inch the madman.

Still, I approached him. I’m not sure if you would call what I was fearless – just the thoughtless curiosity of a child who doesn’t know better. “Are you lost?” I asked him.

He looked around, kept looking, his head darting and dipping all over the place like a pecking hen. He didn’t seem to notice me at first, and then, when the fact that I’d spoken finally reached him, he stared at me as if he’d never seen a barefoot village girl before.

“Are you lost?” I asked it again, because I didn’t know what else to say.

He said, “Yes,” and looked around again, confusion all over his face. “Can you tell me where we are?”

“Bridda Back.”

“I don’t… I don’t know that. Where is it near?”

“Stapleton.”

“I don’t…”

“The biggest town about is Nonderra.”

“Yes…”

“The biggest city is Ashelmarring.”

He nodded. Taking in familiar words. “But Kinsom. Where is Kinsom?”

A place? A person?

“My friend. Kinsom.”

“I… I don’t know.”

“I have to go back for him. I can’t leave him there. I have to turn around.” But he turned in full circles, about six of them, looking all ways frantically.

“What are you looking for?”

“The rainbow.”

“There’s no rainbow. There’s been no rain.”

“There’s always… it’s always there. Just beneath.” He dropped to the ground on his hands and knees, raking the grass. “Beneath.” And then he looked up at me. “But it’s gone, it’s been gone for days. Or maybe months. Or worse. You see, I don’t remember, I can’t remember so many things. I didn’t used to be like this. I was untainted. But I’ve lost him. I’ve lost him.”

“What’s your name, friend?” It didn’t hurt to assume cordial relations.

“Dreok. Or… I think that must be it. Dreok.” He tested it in his mouth as if he could taste it. What does Dreok taste like? A name like wine? Or like roasted beef? Or bad mushrooms. “I think that’s what it is.”

And so I took him home.

#

My mother was unhappy with me, so was my father.

But he was a vagrant, a lost and hurt and hungry man. It would have been wrong, and ill luck besides, to have turned him away.

“But he might have been any manner of madman,” my father warned me. “He might have chosen to hurt you.”

“He’s not that kind of mad,” I said, overconfident with my smattering of years.

“Maybe not, but you weren’t to know that. And now we’ll have to feed him and clean him up before we can send him on his way.”

#

But it didn’t happen.

Well, the cleaning up did. My mother got the laundry tub out and put in on the firepit. We all had to lug water from the well to fill it – and if I looked tired or slowed, she’d frown at me and remind me that I’d brought this on myself.  We didn’t have much soap, but we gave him what we could; and once he was clean my mother cut away his beard and most of his hair, before my father leant him a razor so he could shave. My father’s clothes were a little wide for him and not quite tall enough; but by the time he was cleaned and dried and had them on, he looked like an ordinary man – a younger one that I had guessed, maybe only in his twenties.

“Thank you,” he took the broth my sister offered him with a grateful smile. “I don’t mean to put you out so. This is kind.”

“We are all neighbours, one way or another,” my father said, “and all men are distant family.” A thing his mother and hers before her had always been inclined to say.

He told his story. Though it made little sense. He couldn’t put anything in the right order. All I could really understand was that he’d got lost in the forest, been frightened, perhaps attacked by animals, injured by a falling tree, he’d been with a friend, but his friend was gone, and Dreok feared for his safety. He believed his friend was in danger, but insisted that he couldn’t simply be found by walking into the woods, “No you’d have to walk the exact path, the exact, perfect steps. And I don’t think those steps are there anymore.”

Besides, he believed he’d been lost just a few days past Deercott, which would put he and his friend some five-hundred miles from where we were now.

“You haven’t walked that far,” my mother soothed him.

“Further,” he told her, with that feral light coming into his eyes, “further, at least further. But I don’t know how to go back. I can’t… I can’t… remember.”

#

The sending him on his way was never to come about.

I think my parents both intended to feed him up, tidy him up, maybe give him a couple of copper gradings and some oat biscuit for the road. But instead, he helped us out in the fields. Then my father had a ditch that needed digging out, and he helped us with that as well. One day, then the next day, then the day after that, until it became a pattern.

I asked him if he had a home.

“I think so. High in the mountains.”

“Why don’t you want to go home?”

“I do,” he told me, “I just don’t know where it is.”

“Oh.”

“In the mountains. Up amongst the snow. That’s all I know.”

“The mountains go on forever.”

“So they do,” he sighed, returning his attention to the thistles we were pulling, “that’s the trouble.”

#

So, all we really knew about Dreok was his name. That he had lost a friend. And a high home. He had uncertain memories of his family. He told me once, “I had a sister. I think she was a sister. I’m not even sure what she looked like. When I see you, I remember that much, but no more.”

“What about a wife? Or children?”

“I don’t think… I hope not. If I have them, then I’ve abandoned them, and I don’t want to think that I’d do such a thing.”

He knew he’d been travelling, but not the reason for it. That he’d been with a friend, but not what had happened to him. He had flashes of something more, but these were fleeting, and he couldn’t make sense of them himself.

He told us stories, sometimes fantastic, but admitted that he didn’t know how much was true and how much embroidery. Some of this had happened to him, the rest he was just stringing together and embellishing for our entertainment.

I imagined growing up and marrying him.

He had nightmares. And these were terrible. We weren’t a wealthy family, not be any stretch of the imagination, so we all slept in the same room, a straw-packed bedroom sandwiched between the living room and the barn. It was small enough to be warm, packed with all us bodies: me, my sister, my brothers, my mother and father. On those nights when Dreok had bad dreams, the whole household would be wakened. I was the first though. For one thing, I always liked to sleep near him, and positioned myself each night accordingly. For another, I was a light sleeper, always with one eye not quite closed, keeping watch for danger or excitement – a bit like the bony ginger cat who lived on the edge of the forest near the well.

On those nights when Dreok’s dreams to turned to nightmares, I would first hear the change in his breathing, then see him twitching, and start to hear him muttering things. They wouldn’t be words to begin with, but would become words as he kept going, he’d chew at his lip and his fists would curl up. Then he’d start thumping the ground with his palms, or slapping at his head. Then screaming and sweating. Then his eyes flashing open, huge and white, horrified.

“They’re coming for us…” he’d whisper it, “they’re coming.”

Later, calmer, he’d try to explain, to say there’d been trees, rotten and full of insects, but they’d come lurching after him. It didn’t matter where he was, dreaming of a forest, a village, a city, even an ocean – these trees, whether in their domain, whether drowned, or urbanized, they would stagger into the foreground, dream after dream, hunting him down. Sometimes there were animals too. One moment they’d appear. The next moment they’d be on top of him, reaching their diseased bark into his mouth, his eyes, piercing his skin.

“But it was only a dream,” he’d say.  And: “I’m sorry. To have disturbed you all.” He was polite, my Dreok, always polite.

And for the record:  I didn’t believe for a moment that they were just dreams. I don’t think he did either, though he said so. I think they were memories. I still think…

But then. Then we were happy. In spite of the dreams, and even if some people whispered about us taking in this stray, we must have spent a near two seasons in happiness and harmony. With Dreok working in the fields, me helping where I could, me following him around, asking silly questions, sometimes singing a song for him, or picking him a flower. I fantasised about telling him I loved him. I fantasised about being fully grown and standing beneath the oak to marry him, of the two of us living in a cottage we’d build in the far east field, a little trail of children following us as we set off once a year for the Nonderra fair. I lived in a dream world. But I was young. And healthy. And happy.

Until she came.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work