NaNoWriMo 2006

(No title yet. Poetry provided by my wordsmith daugher.)

Harry Brock was a man on whom Fortune always smiled. He had started off life in a happy family on a prosperous farm and he had grown up hale and hearty despite coming into the world wrong-end-first. True, he was not at all clever of speech and this was a great failing among a people who esteemed wit and spent their evenings inventing riddles and songs on the spot. But the fact remained that whatever Harry set his hand to sooner or later prospered under it. In his youth he had mastered both his father's way with animals and crops, and his mother's secret of producing the finest blue cloths anyone in the shire had ever seen.

Her woad was the same that every other woman in the village used, so the other women never understood why her blues had such a richness and liveliness that they never could achieve, but his mother told Harry that the secret was the wonderfully soft water that flowed into their lake and the fine earth that she took from a certain spot beside a certain spring in their woods. Bessie Brock's blues were so famous, in fact, that three years ago Lord Rockwell had sent miles of finest silk, which he had somehow procured for his daughter's wedding gown, to Brockton Farm to be dyed a pale, celestial blue, and he was so pleased with the result that he gave the Brockton Farm family the perpetual right to hunt boar in all his lands.

It was boar-hunting that brought Harry and his little black dog out this early morning. The scent of the coming frost had been on the air last evening as Harry had made his way, singing gaily, to the cottage from the new barn after finishing the chores. Sniffing the air and eyeing the lake, Harry had decided to put off till another day the task of finding out why it had sunk so low this summer in spite of plentiful rains. He simply could not miss hunting on the most propitious day of the year. The moon was just beyond full and hung brightly above the chimney top as he set off, three hours before sunrise, crunching over the hoarfrost with Keeran at his heels, his quiver slung over his left shoulder and his boar spear in his right hand.

Briskly he walked down the east-facing slope upon which his house stood, and past the lake shore, around the north side of the new barn, heading for the upper branch of the stream that fed the lake, found his path and struck out into the woods. Harry knew just the spot where he would watch for the boar he wanted. There was a sounder living along the lower branch of the stream and Harry intended to come at them from the woods to the north of the clearing nearest the stream, walking silently and waiting for the boar that would certainly come before dawn, seeking a mate. It was a dangerous business, hunting boar alone, and with only his small Keeran rather than a pack of ferocious hunting dogs like the earl’s. But Keeran’s heart was as stout as a lion’s and Fortune always smiled upon Harry’s endeavors.

He circled through the woodland for only two hours before hearing the grunting of the boar. Noiselessly, the hunter stepped toward the grunts, and the dog quivered all over, but held its tongue.

Suddenly the silence was broken by the twang of Harry’s bow and the squeal of the boar, stricken, as it raced away, crashing through the underbrush. Harry whooped and Keeran bayed joyously as they ran after the boar, between the trees and around the gorse and over the stones and on and on, wildly this way and that, for half a mile at least.

At the stream’s bank, Harry let off another arrow, strong and true, and the boar raged and tossed its tusks and ran blindly till it stopped short and wheeled about. It was on top of a rock jutting above a spring and could go no further, so it turned to face its adversary, but Harry’s muscles were as stern as his will and the rising sun found Keeran sleeping beside his master and the boar skin laid on the grass while Harry placed the meat onto it, to bundle it up and carry it home.

He sang softly as he worked and maybe this is why he never noticed the strange silence in the woods.

Grandfather has been heard to say
that the fairies stole his life away
for the fairies truly love to play
and they seldom care who they harm.

They took it away and they hid it well
covered with water and cold and a spell…

The spring shoud have been gurgling merrily below the rock beside which Harry worked. This was the very spring that yielded the fine earth used to dye his mother’s cloth, but Harry hadn’t been up this way since before Easter, when he’d collected the lastest batch of it for his mother. Now that his work was done, he stood and stretched and smiled up at the clear sky. And then he noticed the silence.

Curiously, Harry walked down the slope behind the rock’s shoulder and around the great oak that grew there, and stopped, staring at this marvel. The spring was frozen. From the point midway up the rock where it gushed out, down to the pool where it splashed below, out past the oak’s roots where it tumbled about, as far he could see into the woods, the spring was frozen solid, in the very acts of gushing, splashing, tumbling, and flowing.

Harry knelt down beside the spring and Keeran sniffed the ice.

The birds were singing their morning songs. The breeze was sighing in the branches that were only just beginning to lose their leaves. The sun was coming up warm and soft and the first frost of the year was melting away before its gaze. But still the spring stood, frozen and silent.

Harry reached out and laid his bare hand upon the edge of the small stream where it lay against the bank.

“Whatever has happened to you?” he said quietly.

“Ffffnnnnchsssss…” came a soft sigh from the ice.

Harry leaned back on his heels and considered. He looked up at the top of the rock and his eyes followed the line of boar’s blood that had run down the rock’s face, until it fell onto the spring. There wasn’t much of it. It had puddled at the top of the cataract, and was drying brown.

Stepping over the tree’s roots, Harry held onto a branch and stretched out to touch the drying puddle of blood. No, it wasn’t frozen. It wasn’t any cooler than it would have been if it had been lying in a puddle on the ground.

Harry cleaned the blood off of his fingers on the grass.

Now, you may think that Harry should have been startled upon hearing the ice trying to speak, but it often happened that Harry felt he knew what the trees were saying amongst themselves, and what the lake said to the bank as it splashed gently, and what the clouds said to the grass as their shadows sailed by. It was the knack he’d inherited from his father, though he hadn’t heard it so often lately, now that his father had passed on and Harry himself had stepped into manhood. But there it was. The spring was calling to him for help.

“Keer, me lad, what do you make of this?” he said, laying his hand upon the dog’s head and stroking his fine, long ears.

The dog snuffled and shook his head, sending his ears flying, flappity-flap.

“Hmph,” said Harry. “Well, it wants warming up, I reckon.”

Saying this, he stood up and began picking up fallen twigs and branches and leaves. He decided to build the fire next to the spot that yielded the fine earth.

“I’ve never seen you frozen over before,” he said to the spring. “Even in the Hard Winter five years ago, you only got a little ice at your edges.”

This spring was usually warm, and oddly enough its water was very soft – even softer than rainwater, his mother always said.

Harry chatted amicably to his dog as he worked, and when the pile was made, he took out his tinder box, and kneeling beside the pile, arranged the tow and made his fire.

“There now, that should do it,” he said, and went back to his song.

They took it away and they hid it well
covered with water and cold and a spell
curled in a ball in an oyster’s shell
kept safe and far from all harm.

Grandfather went down on Midwinter Day
to the place where the sun shines ever so gay
and tore the spell set by fairies so fey
that was sure to do him harm.

Stopping, Harry eyed the spring quizzically. “Is it working yet? Now see, if I were as clever as my old Gaffer I’d make up a song just for you and then you couldn’t help warming up again.”

He took a branch, blazing on one end, from the fire and held it out over the ice where he’d first laid his hand on it.

“But all I have are the Gaffer’s songs, not his wit, so they’ll have to do for you.”

Almost he thought he saw a smiling face in the ice – he certainly felt a smile coming from it.

“So it is working!” he said with a smile of his own.

Looking up towards the crevice in the rock from which the water sprang, he saw the water tremble, and the now-wet blood sank down into it, and then the water surged and gave a leap and went tumbling merrily on its way as though it had never been stopped.

The dog began yipping and Harry turned around to see the watery form of a girl lifting her head and shoulders from the stream by the fire.

Now Harry was taken aback by this, but he only laid one hand soothingly on the dog’s head, and took off his hat with his other hand.

“Thank you,” said the tinkling, chuckling water-girl. “I always did like that song.”

Harry stood, tongue-tied, but managed graceful bow.

“I was there when your great-grandfather’s great-grandfather first made it, you know.” The girl, who appeared to be made of the spring's water, surged and flowed with it as she spoke.

“Were you?” said Harry, still standing stupidly.

“Oh yes, I was. You may not have his gift of song, but you are far kinder than he ever was.”

And so saying, she slipped down under the water’s surface. Harry could just make out her form as it flowed up the stream, up the cataract, and into the crevice.

“Well, then -” Harry said at last. “Well, I’m blowed.”

He walked slowly back around the rock and picked up the bundle of boar meat, the dog following close behind, and, gathering his weapons, his swung the bundle onto his back and set off for home.

“But I do wish she’d told me how she got all froze up like that,” he said as they walked out of the woods into the pasture behind the barn.



All day his mother noticed his unusual silence, but didn’t say anything until after supper when they were sitting by the fire. She was sewing and he was fletching a new set of arrows, and she decided to try to draw him out.

“It was good hunting today,” she said.

“Oh, yes, very good,” Harry replied absently.

“I’m in the mood for a story, Harry. Tell me how it went.”

So Harry told her how the hoarfrost lay on the ground when he set out, and told how he’d heard the boar and given chase. He hadn’t made up his mind at first whether he ought to tell her about the spring, so when he came to that part he said, “You’ve known that spring a long time, haven’t you, Mum?”

“Well, ever since I married your father,” she replied. “I never was there before then, you know. Why do you ask?”

“I wondered if you knew any stories about it. It’s an odd spring, being so soft and all.”

Bessie Brock laid down her sewing and looked at her son carefully. He’d been quite fanciful as a child, always telling what the daisies said to the grass and that sort of thing. He’d reminded her of his father’s Great Aunt Cecilia, whom they’d cared for when she became too old to look after herself. Cecilia had never married and hadn’t any other family besides her brother’s grandson, and in the last years of her life she’d become quite fanciful, too.

“Great Aunt Cecilia told me a story about that spring once, just before she died.”

“Tell me, then, Mum.”

Bessie picked up her work again and said, “I wonder if you’d believe it, or if you’d think she was telling me about a dream she had…” and she told him about how Great Aunt Cecilia used to play with a water-girl by the spring when she was a child.

“I believe she said the girl’s name was Naiad. Such a strange, outlandish name,” Bessie concluded. And though Harry often thought of the water-girl, nothing more was ever said of her.



~*~ ~*~ ~*~



Brockton Farm had been in charge of Harry’s family since before the birth of his ancestor, Brice FitzRock, the natural son of Bully Russell, the 13th Earl of Rockwell. The farm had been given rent-free to the young mother’s father by way of providing for the child-to-be, along with the pledge that so long as the child or his descendents lived there, they should be allowed to raise geese for Rockwell’s annual midsummer festival, as well as take in the wash and have the preferment in all the labor needed at the Big House.

It was a happy arrangement for all, and the Brocks prospered for many generations. But on the first day of Autumn in Harry's twenty-first year, the unthinkable happened. The present Lord Rockwell had died without a son to inherit his estate, and all of his holdings, including Brockton Farm, had passed to his distant cousin, Sir Brant Bigtalk, a vulgar man with neither taste nor regard for tradition.

On that first morning of Autumn, a fortnight exactly after Harry’s boar hunt, a messenger arrived, saying that Harry and the Widow Brock had two days to remove themselves from the premises, adding that his Lordship was so kind as to allow Harry and his mother to carry away with them whatever they chose, so long as it all fit into the farm’s push-cart.