The Girl Who Loved Mountains Read online

  "I'll stop in and visit you on my way back, then?" I didn't have time to say more, or even to hear his reply; just then, the men came trooping back into the village, only to find women waiting for them at every doorstep. I was seized by the women and dragged along with them, and all I caught was a glimpse of Su's back, with his bedroll on his shoulders, as he turned away.

  "And now," Meham said, "we Shake Out for real."

  She laughed. There was a sparkle of girlish delight in her eyes. I found myself at the edge of a group composed of Meham and her friends. The men were herded indoors with much laughter and teasing, whereupon the women barricaded them in with rain barrels, wheelbarrows, and anything else that was handy.

  Men, especially young men, leaned out of windows and catcalled the girls, who flipped their skirts from ankle to knee, laughing and teasing. I caught a lot of "No!" in the cheery cries from the young women. The men had brought back the last of the autumn wildflowers from the fields, and these were thrown to the girls from the windows. For the most part the flowers fell unwanted and littered the street, but some of the girls caught them and tucked them into their hair, pushing back their scarves to do so.

  "Come, come," Meham urged, pulling on my arm. Her scarf was down around her neck, the first time I'd seen her outside the house without it, and her hair was decked with yellow and blue flowers. A mass of embroidered cloth was draped over her arm.

  "What are we doing?" I asked, swept along with the rest. My notebook was still in the house; I'd meant to go back for it, but now it was too late.

  "We dance!" Meham called over her shoulder.

  Dusk was falling. I had been caught out plenty of times on my travels, but I'd been so long in the village by now that I'd picked up the women's almost superstitious fear of staying out after dark, and I felt the weight of the darkening sky pressing on me. But none of the women seemed afraid. They had built up great bonfires just outside the village, piling on wood and straw and whatever else would burn. This, too, was like Closing Night. All the women in the village were out here, it seemed, from the eldest being helped along by their daughters and daughters-in-law, to the smallest babes in arms. And every one of them who was old enough to walk had a great swatch of embroidered weaving slung over her arm.

  I had seen the girls working on their aprons, but now I got a better look. They were more like girdles, really—a long band of intricately woven and embroidered cloth that wrapped twice around the waist and hung down in front and back. There was a curtain of tremendously long tassels hanging from each end. It wasn't until I saw the way it swished around their legs that I realized what it reminded me of.

  "In my village, brides wear these for weddings," I said to Meham. "We say Goat Woman wove the first one, and she made it thus because looms were so narrow in those days that a piece of cloth could only be as wide as two hands. And so we make them that way still."

  I think I lost her somewhere in the explanation, but she held hers out to me, draped over both arms with the tassels trailing the ground. "You try?"

  I tried to refuse, but now the other women got into the act, urging me on. I couldn't explain that among my people, it was not proper for an unmarried woman like myself to wear something like this. But then, I wasn't among my people, was I? Here things were different. I tried to think of it as playing dress-up, the way my girl cousins and I would make little marriage-girdles from rags or plaited straw mats, pretending they were real and making our boy-cousins and other girls dance with us.

  Meham helped me wind it. I was startled by its weight and heft, and lifted the edge to find small iron weights woven into the hem. Heavy beads on the tassels made them swing and clatter when I moved. I twirled experimentally, and the apron stood out from me. Some of the women clapped and shouted encouragement.

  "You wear now," Meham encouraged me. "I wear later." She laughed. "Old lady, tired ankles, no more dance all night."

  She wasn't actually that much older than me. I hadn't realized until tonight, because she was always so busy, her face drawn with lines of care. But Liss, her eldest, was barely sixteen. Had I married, rather than leaving my village to go to the city and get an education, I might have had children almost that old now.

  The girdle felt even more like a sham to me now, a pretense of something I had not earned. Still, all the women were wearing them, and I felt less naked with it than without. The tassels swishing around my legs, I mingled with the crowd around the bonfire. Someone handed me a birchbark cup of warm, powerfully alcoholic cider. Someone else gave me a fruit-filled little cake.

  The women were bringing out musical instruments now. I had often heard people sing as they worked, but this was the first time I'd seen anyone in the village play music. They were ordinary rural instruments, reed flutes and drums made of hollow logs, and took me straight back to my childhood at the first skirling note.

  Girls raced past us, their tasseled aprons trailing behind them, using whips made of broomstraw or supple young branches to chase the few boys who'd been out watching the flocks (and, I suspected, hoping to watch the dancing girls) back to the village and their elders. Some of the girls and women were dancing now, in pairs or threes or fours, an energetic dance that involved a lot of spinning to make the aprons stand out from their waists. Others, especially the young girls, ran here and there beating at the bushes and grass with willow-whips, shrieking at the top of their lungs. They ranged farther and farther, all around the village and out in the pasture. Up and down the mountainside, the night rang with their cries.

  "Why are they doing that?" I asked Meham.

  It was only something that was done, she said. When I pressed for more, wishing I had my notebook with me, she explained it was to keep things away. "Bad things." She broke into a sudden laugh and added, "Boys maybe."

  No, I thought, looking up at the clear cold stars above. Not boys—or, at least, not only boys. No more than we sang so loudly on Closing Night just because we liked the sounds of the songs. No more than the wooden idols were put up, in their village and mine, just to stand there and have flowers draped on them.

  It was easy to forget these things in the city, where there were always people close by. It wasn't even, I thought, that the city's Night Watch or the neighbors were only a cry for help away. No, it was the sheer mass of people, crowding out the old terrors of the night—the strange and fey and wild things, the beasts that stalked the land, the creatures out of legend with interests and concerns of their own and little care for human lives, human worries.

  But the countryside was still mostly wild, a place of isolated villages and scattered herders' huts. I thought how many of our games and festivals had, at their heart, the aim of building up a human bulwark against the dark things in the night. We had our bonfires and songs; we shook out the linens and chased away the shadows that stalked us. In the end it was really only to build walls around our small places of safety. The night was still out there, dark and wild.

  The night wore on; the stars wheeled dawnward. Small children were laid down to sleep on folded coats and blankets. I took a turn dancing, then went back, breathless and weary, to the fire. I wanted to ask Meham if she'd like her girdle back, but she was out with the beaters somewhere. I could still hear their distant cries as they ranged all across the meadows and mountainside, everywhere that people grazed their flocks or cut wood. In this way they drew the village's boundaries anew, and made this space safe for all in the upcoming year, as the men did with their strange and frightening idols. Every so often a group of red-faced, panting women and girls stumbled back to the fire to refresh themselves with sweet cakes and a cup of cider or ale.

  It was beginning to bother me that I hadn't seen Liss since early in the evening. I told myself she was probably out with her friends somewhere. Even the most overprotective mothers were giving their daughters free rein on this night. Still, when I saw a little group of Liss's friends rewrapping their brush-snagged girdles in the firelight, I went over to them. "Liss?" I ask
ed. "Liss—where?"

  I got shrugs and confused looks. I asked a few of the older women and received a similarly baffled reaction. I wanted to shake them. Do girls never go astray during Shaking Out? If a girl overcome with ale and high spirits should fall over a cliff, do you expect her to lie there with two broken legs until you all regain your senses at dawn?

  Do you not know there are still dangers in the dark?

  I felt a little foolish as I ventured out into the dark pasture, following the cries of the beaters to one group after another. I knew I was worrying for nothing. Maybe she felt ill and had gone to lie down. Most likely she was with one or another group of other young women and girls. In the festival frenzy, I could search until dawn without stumbling upon her.

  But then I thought of mountain roads and high places, and the way she stood at night looking up toward the peak above the village. During the day, she was too busy to slip away; at night, she would be missed, since all mothers kept a close eye on their daughters after dark. This night, though, was the one night of the year when a young girl could come and go freely, with none to care. If she did have a lover she was meeting out in the darkness, Su or someone else, this would be the night when she could go to him without fear of discovery.

  I left the bonfires behind and went into the village. This was the first time I'd seen it by night, and it was like a different place, quiet and very still under the light of a quarter moon. I followed a path of trampled flowers through the middle of the village. All the shutters were closed, though at an isolated house or two, I caught a glow of candlelight through the cracks. Away from the bonfire the night was very cold, and ice glistened in the puddles in the lanes. Most fences had linens still draped over them, freezing in the night's chill.

  My steps slowed when I passed Meham's house. It was a long shot, but ... I went up the path and removed a wheelbarrow so I could knock on the door.

  After some time, I heard the latch being drawn back and the door opened a crack; I glimpsed Meham's husband. He said something that sounded startled and very disapproving. I would have to ask Meham later if it was bad luck for men to see women on this night. At the very least, he clearly did not like it at all.

  "Wait," I said as he started to close the door, and wedged my boot in it. "Liss. Here? Liss?"

  "No," he said, and tried to push me out of the way.

  "Su? Here?"

  "No." He closed the door firmly in my face.

  I paused to take a stout stick from the woodpile, cudgel-sized and solid in my hand. Carefully, I latched the gate behind me, and went up the street. In the poor light I had to hunt around until I found the path to the mill, which was also closed up tight. I oriented myself by the idols moldering away in the brush behind it, and found the steps leading to the upper, ruined mill site.

  I wasn't looking forward to confronting the idols by night, but to my surprise they were much less unnerving by night than by day. Maybe it was just that I couldn't see them very well. But it also seemed that the sense of presence to them, which so bothered me at times, was not there. They were no more than moldering wood, as fearsome as a tree branch.

  Maybe, I thought, whatever usually lived in them walked abroad this night.

  Because this was a night of magic; there was no doubt in my mind about that. The air was thick with it. The world is thin at the turn of the year, I remembered my aunts saying. Things come through. Sometimes the unwary go back with them.

  I found the narrow logging road up the side of the mountain with less trouble than I expected. And there in a patch of half-frozen mud were a set of clear small tracks, pointed upward. They were so fresh that the ice was broken in them and only beginning to reform. And there were no tracks coming back down. I saw no other tracks of any sort, in fact. Just those small prints, exactly the size of a girl coming into her first flower of womanhood.

  I hefted my cudgel and began to climb.

  This was lonely and wild country. Maybe a herder might stray here occasionally, pursuing a lost goat; maybe a hunter now and then came up to these heights when chasing game from the valley. But, aside from the rough and narrow road under my feet, bruised through the brush by rope-dragged logs, I felt as if I had truly gone beyond the reaches of humankind. I was into another world now, and it was no part of me or mine.

  The trees were thin and low up here. Sometimes, when the road angled the right way, I could see the glimmer of the bonfires far below, tiny sparks in the darkness. The beaters' cries came to me when the wind blew the right way.

  Driving out the bad things. And chasing them up here, I thought.

  Su had left the village, too. Had left as if he could not stay the night; had struck out into the wilderness rather than stay in the village as the women performed a very old protection rite upon it.

  Foolish, I told myself. Foolish. You listen too credulously to the stories you collect.

  It seemed to take much longer than I expected, between the darkness and my growing worry, to reach the standing stones. The other day when I'd climbed the road by accident, I hadn't realized how high above the village I'd actually come. I could no longer hear the beaters' voices, and only occasionally caught a glimpse of the pinpricks of bonfire light far below me. The only sound was the keening of the wind through the rocks, and from long-ingrained childhood habit, I tried to shut my ears to the ululations that could almost be voices in its mournful ebb and flow.

  Above me, the brilliant stars seemed close enough to touch.

  The last time I'd been up here, dread had stopped me from passing between the stones. This time, I hesitated only a moment before plunging through—and I felt nothing, neither fear nor elation. They were only rocks, after all.

  Reckless now with concern, I scrambled down the track to the open place beside the narrow, racing creek. All around me, fresh bark shavings from the men's labors glistened in the moonlight. "Liss!" I shouted. The wind caught my words and threw them back to me in ghostly snatches from the mountainside. Liss ... Liss ...

  I stood still and listened, but as the echoes died away I could hear nothing but the rushing creek and the sobbing wind.

  Where would she have gone from here?

  I tipped my head back and regarded the dark blot of the peak, humped against the stars. In the way of mountains, now that I was upon its slopes, it seemed a different shape than it did from the village. The pointed heights were hidden by its folds, and I almost fancied I could see the dome of a head, the rounded lumps of shoulders to each side.

  They say the Old Man will catch them.

  "Liss!" I called.

  No girl's voice answered me. I cast around for something to point me after her. I was no tracker, but I had a village girl's experience at following lost lambs. The trampled ground, layered with wood chips from years gone by, offered nothing to guide me, but the moonlight was bright enough to reveal the gleam of broken twigs and crimped grass at the edge of the clearing.

  Following these small traces, I found an old track at the water's edge. It seemed nothing but a deer trail at first, but as I followed it, encouraged by the occasional snapped branch or flattening of grass under a small shoe, I soon realized that I was following some kind of old road. Where the mountainside grew steep, there were steps, hacked into the mountainside and flagged with flat stones from the creek. In other places, like the passage between the standing stones, it had been worn down a foot or two below the level of the surrounding ground, wide enough for three people to easily walk abreast.

  Or perhaps two people carrying something between them. As I scrambled up the overgrown steps on a particularly steep stretch, with the stream crashing somewhere to my left, I thought of the pole idols we'd carved in my youth and the way they were carried through the village on the shoulders of willing men and women. Perhaps the small idols of this valley were larger once; perhaps they were carried up the mountainside for rites now forgotten.

  On the more overgrown sections, I had to pause every few steps to untangle Meham
's girdle from the brush. I was cursing the thing now, as well as regretting greatly that I hadn't thought to give it back to her before I went and got it tattered and muddy. It was going to be in a sorry state by the night's end. I thought about leaving it alongside the path and picking it up on my way back, but I wasn't sure if I'd be coming back down this way. I was hoping that wherever this went, there might be a more direct way back down to the village.

  As even the brush grew sparser—the ground was very rocky now—the road became harder to see. Here there were rock cairns to mark it, as high as my knee, crusted with moss and lichen. I crossed back and forth over the stream a few times as the road switchbacked to maintain a less punishing grade. Though broad and deep enough in the village to power the mill, up here the little creek was so narrow that I could step across it easily without getting wet.

  And then I came at last to the road's end: a broad, flat tableland with a grand view of the entire valley. It was too flat to be natural, I thought, though now there was a snarl of brush and low, wind-stunted trees growing on it; but I was fairly sure it had been built up around the edges, basket after basket of earth, to give it the smoothness of river bottomland.

  Near the edge, a sort of table had been made from a single large stone slab, placed flat on other rocks to raise it above waist height. At some point in the long-distant past, it had cracked unevenly across the middle, so the two halves canted at different angles. And Liss was standing on it, the tassels of her girdle fluttering in the wind.

  "Liss!" I cried, and ran toward her.

  She looked around with drowsy slowness. As I scrambled up beside her, I couldn't help wondering if she'd been drugged. "Liss," I said, giving her a firm shake. "What are you doing here? Are you hurt?"

  "I don't know," she said, sounding small and tired.

  I checked her all over, but she was in no worse shape than I was, with twigs in her hair and loose threads trailing from the once-fine embroidery on her girdle. She was not, however, wearing a coat, and her hands were icy. I took off my own coat and wrapped it around her shoulders.