This short story was originally published in Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women by Sharon Blackie. It is illustrated by Helen Nicholson and published by September Publishing.
Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground.
Meister Eckhart
‘When I was a young lass,’ the old woman mutters to herself, as she closes the red-painted front door of the cottage behind her, ‘the ocean was a forest, full of trees.’ She has long white hair, is small and stooped, and mutters to herself quite a bit, these days. You can call her the Cailleach, though she’s had many other names over the centuries. Beira, Buí, Garravogue, Cally Berry, the Old Woman of Beare. And when she was a young lass, the ocean was a forest, full of trees.
She’s out and about in this newly hatched month of May before the sun has risen, though the fullness of the moon offers her just enough light to see by. Even though her eyes are failing now. Failing, but the blue of them is as bright as ever. Blue as lapis lazuli; blue as a Connemara lake on a clear, crisp winter’s day. Some things don’t change, even when you’re old. Though mostly, things do. Yes, there’s just enough light to pick her way down to the lake before the sun begins to rise, and the dog who lives with the old shepherd on its northern shore sets up his usual barking. If the dog barks before she gets herself into the lake, it’ll all be over. And she’s running a little bit late, this morning. Her old joints aren’t what they were, and last night before she went to bed, she forgot to bank up the old Stanley range with turf. So the fire had gone out and she’d been slower than usual to dress herself, all a-shiver in the still-chilly spring air.
It’s hard, being old – but it’s not as if that’s anything new to her. Being old is something she’s done often enough before. Every hundred years, to be precise. Down all the long aeons of her existence. She counts her age not by the turnings of the sun, but by the geological upheavals of this ever-changing planet. And every hundred years, just at the point where she feels so desperately decrepit that she can’t possibly go on, the time comes around once more. To grow young again – to renew herself, transform herself. The time to go down and bathe herself in the lake. On Bealtaine morn, before the sun rises and before the first dog barks. Otherwise, she’s dead.
It’s hard enough being old, but dead? She’s been alive so long that she can’t imagine what that might be. Has no idea what it might entail, for a being such as her. She’s not entirely sure that she can die at all, if the truth be told. Though increasingly she’s been wondering. If it wouldn’t be a relief, after all. These are difficult days. She’s seen difficult days before, but somehow these feel different. They feel like the end days – though she’s seen those before, too. She remembers the Great Flood as if it were yesterday. Not that the Flood had presented any problem for her. In those times, she’d walked the land as a giantess, and the ocean’s flood-waters had simply come up to her waist – rather than, as usual, to her knees. But she’s diminished now, as well as old. She’s not sure she’d have the stamina to wait out another Flood. Her strength has faded, along with human belief. And belief in her has been dwindling for centuries; so few now even remember her name. Even fewer can pronounce it. So she wonders whether it isn’t time to abandon her long vigil – for, anyway, what could possibly be done now to hold back the tide of men? These days, if truth be told, she feels powerless. Powerless to prevent their growing atrocities, to insist that they restrain themselves and hold to the balance, as once she could.
She treads carefully down the rocky track to the valley below: if she were to fall now and fracture a leg, she’d be done for. She loves this valley; it’s a garden of great stones. Stones whose unfoldings and flowerings have taken place not in the space of a solar year, but over the long geological ages of the Earth. Rocks uprooted and rerooted by the passage of time, and the movement of great glaciers. And she is this Earth’s gardener. A rock gardener, a stone teller, a stone tender. She knows these rocks, every one of them; they’re her people, her children, her tribe. Each one has its own unique character; each one its own particular way of expressing the essence of stone. She has known them through all their long metamor- phoses, seen them born from pressure, torn from fire. Yes, she has stood firm as the ground shifted around her through all the long ages. As plates swivelled and continents drifted; as volcanoes erupted and meteors fell from the sky. She’s seen glaciations and desertifications, seen forests wither and die, and peat form from their ancient bones. She’s strode along the glacier paths, sat on the highest summits and watched the burning deaths of a million stars.
But she fears that the stones’ voices are fading these days, dissolving into ever-longer stretches of sleep. For who is there to keep them awake, now? To sit with them, and talk to them; to rest in their lichen-covered arms like a lover? Who will listen any more to their long, slow songs; who understands the language of stones? Not these people, for sure. They don’t even know that the stones are alive. And the stones’ sleep is uneasy now; their dreams are fractured and torn. It’s all she can do to wake them up, sometimes; it’s all too much for her to do alone. Yes, it’s powerlessness that squats in the heart of her now. She’s powerless to shore up the bedrock of the land, to strengthen it against the ever-increasing violations.
This land, she sighs; this beautiful, singing land. This carefully drawn map, this sculpted reflection of her own strong body. She does not remember a mother of her own, but she has been mother to mountains, dreaming them into being through the first fiery eras of the Earth. She can feel their growing anger now, their grim desperation, as dark as the looming storm-clouds they gather around themselves each day. She senses them shifting at their roots; she feels their longing to erupt. There is little she could do, now, to stop them.
She turns the corner, and there it is: all a-glimmer through the trees, its mirror-like surface reflecting the fading light of the stars. Even the stars aren’t as bright as they used to be – though here, in these wild and little-populated hills of Connemara, they’re as bright as they’re ever going to get. She pauses for a moment to catch her breath; she nods to the Great She-Bear and slips a wink to the Pleiades. Sweet little sisters; she remembers the night sky without them. She was walking this Earth long before they were even born.
To the human eye it wouldn’t look like a particularly splendid lake, and, besides, lakes are ten a penny in this wild, western waterworld. But it’s a long lake, and deep. Deep and bright, and its waters so clear that it was teeming with sleek- backed serpents, back in the day. Yes, back in the day. When she was a force to be reckoned with, when she danced across mountain-tops and leapt across continents. When a pack of wild wolves ran alongside her, and rich was the milk that flowed from her fine herd of deer.
But she’s old now, and much reduced. Moss and lichen gather in the folds of her apron. A hundred years have passed since last she came down to this lake and made herself young and beautiful again. Young and beautiful and strong. And now the time has come around once more. To lower herself carefully into the smooth, calm waters; to transform herself, and take up the mantle of life again.
Ah, but she’s tired, now. She’s exhausted at the thought of doing it all over. Exhausted by the responsibility, by the long slow ages without rest. She is old, and tired, and forgetful. She chuckles for a moment as she stumbles down the path; she’s had some fine moments of forgetfulness in her old-woman years, before. The best of them was that time when she left the lid off the well – the one where she’d water her cattle when she took them with her to graze awhile in the green hills of Beara. When she went back to tend to the stones in that land she’d once inhabited. Just one of the many places she’d lived in over the years. A fistful of her centuries she’d spent out east, and a scattering of them up north. A handful across the sea in Scotland; a precious few on Manannan’s Isle. She has left her traces in those places. Her giant footprints etched forever in the rock for those with eyes to see them; carvings of her own silhouette in hills and sharp-faced sea cliffs.
But anyway: the well. A grand old well it was, too – right there on the hillside which looked out to the island. Oileán Baoi: the Island of Buí. That was the name she took then; that was her name, in that place. There was a great stone lid on that free-flowing well, and as soon as she arrived there in the mornings she would lift off that lid and let the cows at the water for a drink. And she knew all right that if she didn’t place the great stone lid back onto the well before the sun went down, the waters would flow out of it and it would flood the whole world. It would pour out of the well and cover the whole world with a flood. Well, she was there one time, when she was growing old and weak, just like she is now. When it was getting close to the time to renew herself. And so, when she sat down next to the well, she found herself tired, and began to nod off. But something shook her awake with a start. The water was roaring out of the well and the sun was just coming down. She sprang up and she shoved the great stone lid back down onto that well, and she saved the whole world from being flooded a second time. But a new lake was born in the fair county of Cork at that time. A lake that hadn’t been there before the well had overflowed. She chuckles at the memory, and a sudden swift wind tumbles down the valley and whips around her knees as if to laugh along with her. She looks behind her, back up at the mountains, and sighs. Yes, she was mother to these mountains; she made them, as she’s made so many more. Carried the great rocks in her apron, let them fall, and land then where they chose. But the mountains are restless now, and the old god hasn’t been heard of for a while. They think he’s dead, the folk around here; the only stories they tell of him are the ones which say that St Patrick killed him. Threw him into his own dark mountain lake, along with his beautiful white bull. Drowned him, they say: the dark old crooked one gone for good. It’s all stuff and nonsense, of course; that silly little man couldn’t have killed a fly. A hopeless creature he was, Patrick; but a meddler and mischief-maker all the same. She can’t imagine why they placed him on such a pedestal.
Yes, she met Patrick, of course, back in the day. Met them all. All of them came looking for her, sooner or later. And all of them challenged her – every last one. She’s heard all the stories about how they killed the old Cailleach. St Caitarin, down in Beara, who chased her across the rocks, they say, after she snatched away his Bible while he was dozing in the sun. There’s even a carved stone there, put up by the authorities. Says that he killed her for her audacity. And just beyond the inscription, a fiercely weathered rock which they say is the stone into which he turned her. A fine man he would have been to have had a chance at it! Well, it was St Brendan who killed her down in Dingle, they say, and it was Patrick who killed her here in Connaught. She cackles a little to herself; the rumours of her death have been greatly exaggerated, over the years. But where are those funny little men now? Where have they been all this time, while she’s been tending the mountains and rocks of Gaeldom? She doesn’t believe she’s met a single saint for a millennium or more. Time was, they were ten a penny. Now, they’ve been driven to extinction – along with everything else.
The old woman shakes her head; they tried so hard to stamp out her memory, those black-frocked Christian men. Like that funny little man they sent, one time: that old priest she made count the ox-bones in her attic. Thought himself a clever one; pretended not to know who she was. Looked her up and down with his hard, black eyes and decided she was far too old to be dangerous. And then he asked her just how old she was, precisely. For every bone you find up there in that attic, she’d said to him, you can add a year of my life. Well, he’d counted the ox-bones for a day and a night and still he couldn’t make a dent in them. His hands were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.
Now the only bones she minds are her own. Brittle and fragile, like the rest of her. Like the sharp contours of her face, skin stretched tight over cheekbones sharp as a mountain ridge; like her knobbly kneecaps and scraggly, thin arms.
Her arms have held kings.
There are no more kings.
Yes, she’s had her sadnesses, that old Cailleach, and they’re all flowing back to her now. The ebb tide of memory turning to flood. Sadnesses rushing over her as they always do, when it’s coming to the time to make herself over again. Like those long, cold centuries on the lower cliffs, staring out to the desolate sea. Waiting for the return of that faithless old bodach her so-called husband, Manannán mac Lir. Some husband he was; he ran off with some pale-haired fairy woman, in the end. She waited, but he never came back. There was a time when she thought she might not survive that particular heart- break. She’d had so many, over the long relentless millennia. So many, and they accrue. She’d had so many kings; she was the mother of tribes. But there had been something about Manannán which pierced right to the heart of her. When she met him first, she had been young and beautiful. But he could not love her when he saw her grow old.
She stops for a second to wipe a tear from her fossilised face; an early blackbird comes to perch on her head. Gently, she brushes it away. Almost there, now; almost there. Just this one small wood to cross. The wide old oak forests are gone now, the great strong heart-trees cut long ago for the making of English ships. This thin, scrubby little wood is all that’s left. But it’s lovely enough, in its way. There’s birch, the slender silver lady of the woods; there’s fairy hawthorn and witch- willow. There are still some ash trees here; the die-back hasn’t reached them yet. It’s a lovely little copse, so, but her heart yearns for the vast oak forests. Destroyed, like so much else. Destroyed, for greed or sport.
The leaves of the strong ash trees are only just beginning to unfurl, just as she herself is coming to a new unfurling. Round it all goes; round, and around. Nothing ever really dies; she knows that better than most. And yet it can still be gone from you. She’s faced so many losses; so many things loved and passed. Humans and their so-called gods; animals and plants and trees. She’s seen the disembowelling of mountains, and the concrete dams which stem the flow of the Earth’s lifeblood through its ancient veins. Her old knees have buckled at the tremors which surge through the Earth from their fracking fields and their tar sands. She’s watched and wept as cement has spread like cancer over living land. These memories aren’t good for her – but ebb tide has turned, nevertheless, to flood. And even she cannot hold back the tide. You have to harden yourself against the memories, in the end. If you don’t harden yourself, you will go mad. And gardener of stones she might be, but she herself is nevertheless no stone. She is the Cailleach, the oldest of the old, and she has seen too much. Sometimes, she thinks it would be better to go mad.
She grits her ground-down teeth and shakes her tired head; finally, she glimpses the farthest edge of the still-gloomy wood. Just a few more minutes, and she’ll be home safe. After the wood, only that gently sloping sweep of grass to cross, and then she’ll come to her launching spot: the long, flat rock which leans down gently into the water like a slipway, tailor- made for an old woman’s fumbling descent into the lake. The water will be cold, but clear; she will lower herself in and say the words. And a ray of the Bealtaine sun will rear up over the hills like a blessing as she rises up out of the water, renewed.
She is old, and she has done this more times than she can remember; it doesn’t always go according to plan. The time the shepherd forgot to lock the dog up the night before, and him starting down the hill like an angel of death just as she got one foot into the lake. The time when her morning alarm failed her, and she hurtled down the track in her nightgown, feet bleeding and raw by the time she reached the water’s edge. No, it doesn’t always go according to plan, and this Trickster morning has something more in store. She smells it before she sees it; smells the blood, as she’s smelled it so often before. Smells it, and then she sees it: a flash of fire-coloured fur at the farthest edge of the wood.
She closes her eyes, and feels her lips begin to move; the instinct is ancient, but futile. For who can the gods possibly pray to when their own courage fails them? Who might be there to hear them, when they themselves grow old and afraid? And besides, she has no time now. She is rapidly running out of time. She opens her eyes again and straightens her bowed back as best she can; she slowly picks her way through broken branches and mossy stones. And at the base of a crumbling old willow, nestled between two gnarly roots as if cradled in an old woman’s arms, she finds the fox. Dead, and its fragile, furred thigh caught tight in a gin trap.
The old woman’s breath catches in her throat, and tears erupt like lava from stony old eyes as they follow the length of soft russet fur. ‘Oh, fox,’ she whispers. ‘Beautiful, brave fox.’ But the fox cannot hear her; the fox will never hear again. Not the nasal squeak of a ripe young grouse as the night wind ruffles its feathers; not the harsh screech of a willing vixen calling from the depths of the wood. He had been an old fox, but a handsome one. He would have taken a vixen or two in his time; he would have eaten his share of grouse. But now, his delicate face is contorted still in pain; his golden eyes are tightly closed. Blood is pooled like thick, dark tar around his back paws. The Cailleach has seen so many things die, and grieved for them all, in her way. Buried the bodies of dead dogs, made land art from the bones of dead sheep. She has witnessed and mourned the passing of many beauties, great and small. But here and now a fox is dead – and who can ever know what will succeed in breaking us, after all? What will break us, at the end, after standing strong and steadfast for so many years. She sinks to the grass by the tree and strokes his dead body; her shaking hand hovers over his mangled leg. There is too much blood; the smell of it turns her shrivelled old stomach.
She has no time to pause here; she is running out of time. But time seems nothing to her now; she cannot find the heart to go. She cannot bear to leave the fox’s body here, cold in the wood, and alone. And she cannot bear to see another creature slaughtered in this way. Another badger butchered on the roads, another hare mown down in the fields by their fume-spewing farming machines. She is old, and tired, and sick at heart. She cannot go on in such a world. She cannot; it is enough.
She will let go now, she thinks; it’s time to let it all go. This is no country for old women. For old women who have seen too much, who have cared too much and loved too much and who find themselves loving too much, still. How can it be that still she loves so much? This is no country for wild things. No country for foxes, for the fine red deer who linger still in the mountains. Her laughing wolves are long gone, and with them her fine, bold bears. Gone are the bright, fierce eagles, and the bands of wild pigs that would run beside her across the wintered hills.
Her head sags forward on aching shoulders, and she raises her hands to cover her wet face. She cannot face another hundred years of this. The last time she renewed herself, the Great War had just ended, and there was hope. Who’d have imagined they’d do it all again? Who’d have thought, in just one hundred years, they’d have caused so much carnage? What could they do in another century, with all their implacable power?
No, she will let go. There’s nothing she can do here: not any more. She cannot hold back the relentless tides of men; she is powerless in the face of them. She cannot protect the wild things from them; she cannot shore up the rock. She cannot hold the balance of the world against such hate.
The Cailleach lowers herself to the ground, and gently rests her head on the fox’s slender back. She will let go; she will go with the fox. She will follow his fiery spirit into the mist. She’ll lie here with his body for a while; she’ll wait for the old dog across the lake to bark. And then she’ll be done with it. Once she was young and beautiful; now she is old, and tired. She has been tired before, and old, but she has never learned how to die. And what is old age for, if you never can use it to learn how to die? She knows everything, except how to die. She plans to learn it well.
A small sigh escapes her, and a small sigh in reply from the fox beneath. The very faintest of sighs, and the small- est twitch of his chest. Startled, the Cailleach lifts her head. Could this old fox possibly still be alive? But even if he is, he has no chance; there is too much blood in the grass around his feet. The damage is too great; the fox’s strength is gone. Well then, she will sit with him here, and let him teach her how to die. She will die with him; she will keep him company on his journey. There will be no lake for her; no lake this fine May morning. No lake for her, ever again. No new transformation, no more renewal . . .
‘Renewal,’ she whispers to herself – ‘renewal.’ She heaves herself up into a sitting position, face clouded with thought. If she were to take the fox into the lake with her, would her powers of renewal reach to him too? Is it possible she might be able to save the fox? To save just one more bright and shining creature from the claws of this gods-forsaken world? Would it be worth it, to save just one more wild thing? One more bright, fierce beauty flashing through the fields. Would she do it all again, for the life of this one fine fox? Could she do it – one more turn of this relentless, endless wheel?
The old woman briefly closes her eyes, then opens them again with a shuddering sigh. She reaches out to the trap. She has no tool to prise open the powerful jaws; has only the strength of her own stiff, ageing hands. This Cailleach has now grown old, but she is the Cailleach nevertheless. The strength of stone threads through her bones still; a rock’s resolution drums in her faltering heart. She is the Cailleach, and she will not fail in the face of such atrocity. She takes one steel jaw in each hand; she musters all the strength in her arms; she begins to prise it open. Grits her teeth as the trap’s teeth bite into the soft pads of her fingers, as blood trickles down her arms and pools in the sagging hollow made by the crook of her elbows. She cries out as finally the trap springs open, as her hands fall to the ground and her own blood seeps into it and mixes with the blood of the fox.
Slowly, painfully, she clambers to her feet. She braces herself for one final effort, and with a groan, she gently lifts the fox out of its bloody bed of moss and twig. She shuffles slowly out of the wood and on through the dew-covered grass, cradling his broken body in her tired arms. Arms that have held kings, and now hold a fox. Quickly now, quickly; it’s late. Soon the sun will stretch its long arms over the hills to the east. Quickly – but as she lifts her eyes from the uneven ground and raises her face beseechingly to the sky, she sees that it’s already too late.
The dog has reached the lake in advance of her. The dog, in advance of her. He’s getting old now, like her. But he stands firm on the shore with his tail erect, with his teeth bared and his upper lip slowly curling into a growl. Was the dog going to bark? Of course the dog was going to bark. The old woman closes her eyes in defeat; tears well up again in her eyes. She lowers her head to her chest, and whispers ‘I’m sorry’ to the fox. The dog growls again, and sprints suddenly towards her with his mouth open, ready to shout. Then, all at once, the dog catches sight of the fox. The dead fox, snuggled tight in her arms like a baby; sees the tears and blood which streak the old woman’s face. The dog tilts his head to one side – then he whines quietly and swiftly lowers his tail.
The dog closes the mouth which he had opened, ready to bark; he bows his head to that old Cailleach, and gives way.
*
The water is clear, and cold. By the time it reaches her waist she is shivering convulsively, but she will not let go of the fox. ‘Let it live,’ she whispers. ‘Just this one. Just one more beautiful, wild thing. Let it live.’ And down she goes then, down into the water. Down into the bright, clear water with the fox. The lake takes them both, laps around them, soothes them and sings to them. Seeps through her skin and into her old bones; seeps through her ribcage and into her tired old heart. Seeps into her cells and mingles with the blood in her veins. She sings the old words and everything is singing, now; everything is alive. All you have to do is remember. Long ages unfold their wings and fly away out of her; the flood tide of her memory turns to ebb. And when finally she lifts herself out of the sun- spangled water, her body is young again, and strong.
Her ears are open again; she can hear them all now. All the new voices, calling to her. The eldering woman in the fields of Offaly who makes paintings of her; the young woman on the Kerry coast who writes poems about her. Two sisters from the land across the ocean leave flowers on her chair at Loughcrew; a middle-aged woman from the country across the sea leaves a bracelet at the Hag’s Rock in Beara. Her ears are open again, and everything is new. The waters of the world are awakening, and the mountains murmur love songs in the west. Maybe it’s not all lost. Maybe it’s not all lost, after all.
She shakes the shining droplets from her hair, for it’s time to go home, now – there is work to do. She will go first to the Pass of the Birds, and she will raise up the serpent that Patrick cast into the deep, dark waters at its peak. She will bring out the old god’s white bull, too. She will roar in the ear of that dark, crooked god till he wakens, and the fire in their ancient hearts will set the world alight again.
She knows about stone; she is the Cailleach. Rock-solid and as old as time. She’s a stone-shifter, a rock-reaver; she’s the mother of worlds. She will walk through the prison walls they have built to contain her; she’ll bring them down around their knees, if she must. She will gather together the ones who long for her; she’ll show them the ways in which the needed work should be done. Tending the bedrock, tending the wild things. Tending the soul of the land. More than any other living being, she knows there are never guarantees. But maybe it’ll be enough.
Something stirs in the water at her feet. The Cailleach looks down, and laughs at the sodden little fox. He is young again too, and strong. His soft fur glows like fire in the first rays of the Bealtaine sun, and his amber eyes are bright with life. ‘Madra rua,’ she whispers; ‘madra rua beag.’ Little fox, little red dog. And as she steps out of the water with the fox trotting along beside her, the old dog’s excited yapping echoes through the valley.
The hills that are gathered around it answer back.