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The sea road
Wise Child raised her weary head, and cast her eyes forward to look out beyond the prow of Finbar’s ship. The sea was an unceasing expanse of slate grey, mirroring the overcast sky above it. She and Juniper had been travelling for days along the open ocean — so long that she felt that they might never see land again. She’d been shy of Finbar — a friendly stranger she would need to get to know all over again — and exhausted by their frantic flight from the island, but Juniper had kept her distracted with new tales from her seemingly endless hoard of stories. These were of a marine bent, in keeping with their surroundings: stories of seals that were not seals, of otherworldly kingdoms beneath the waves, of encounters on the seashore, and women transformed, and Wise Child was not able to recognise consciously that all were tales of crossing-places and journeys.
She felt wrung out, swept clean, and salt-washed. And so it was that her capacity for observation was weaker than usual, and it took a nudge and a gesture from Juniper to alert her to a change in their surroundings: land, appearing in the distance, like a promise. Wise Child settled back, and let Finbar’s ship carry her closer.
*
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They hugged the coastline for several days more. It seemed to Wise Child that they were travelling with purpose, and that their eventual destination had already been determined by some unspoken agreement between Finbar and Juniper. She questioned her doran mentor, but Juniper’s response was maddeningly vague.
‘We’re travelling to where we are supposed to be right now.’
‘But where?’ asked Wise Child.
‘You’ll know it when we get there,’ was Juniper’s reply.
After the third day with the coast to their east, Finbar brought the ship ashore in a quiet bay. A little port village lay sprawled haphazardly around it, with fishing vessels and lime-washed cottages, and everywhere the briny smell of kelp and shellfish.
‘Is this where we are stopping?’ asked Wise Child, but — after an all too brief farewell to Finbar — Juniper urged her on.
They left the village, and began to climb the headland path behind it. Their walk was steep, and the way was rocky and narrow. Other than sea birds and the occasional flock of sure-footed sheep, they saw no other living things. It had begun to drizzle with rain, and Wise Child’s cloak hung sodden and heavy on her shoulders. She was hungry, and cold, and resentful at being required to walk uphill towards an uncertain destination.
And then, all at once, they ascended the highest point of the headland and the clouds rolled back to reveal a solitary house, nestled at the foot of a gently rolling hill, with the undulating headland unfurling beside it. As they drew closer, Wise Child spotted outbuildings, and fruit trees: apple, pear, plum and hazel, with several rowan trees besides. She heard the burbling sounds of a spring, tumbling down the hill and flowing over the headland into the sea. The entire area seemed devoid of people, but even so, Wise Child was shocked to see Juniper stride up to the house, and throw open the door. With some trepidation, she followed her doran mentor inside.
The house was empty, but it was as if it stood prepared, ready and waiting for them, sparsely furnished and yet full of all the necessities for daily life. There were cooking pots, and a kettle hanging on the unlit stove, and a good store of kindling and peat. There were some chests, which opened to reveal further implements for cooking and eating, and a second room devoted to a little store of food — rye and barley, and a few jars of dried beans and legumes. Another room was filled with equipment for spinning and weaving, and even had some unspun fleece. A loft bedroom completed the space, containing several pallet beds and warm woollen blankets in tones of cream, green and grey. Wise Child felt they matched the landscape.
‘Did you know this house was here, and that it would be empty?’ asked Wise Child, entranced.
Every corner of the house yielded new marvels: carved pieces of driftwood, scatterings of shells and sea glass, and little collections of scraps of metal tied together so that they might chime with music in the sea breeze. She privately felt that this was a house that had belonged to someone like Juniper: filled with the practical implements of everyday labour, but with space made for beauty and ease, as well.
‘I had a sense that there would be a space for us, in this part of the world,’ Juniper replied.
*
The first year
Wise Child’s favourite place in their newfound home was the garden — more than just the scattering of fruit trees, it contained a rather overgrown vegetable patch, and a section which had originally been devoted to herbs. She was surprised that Juniper made no effort to plant new crops, nor to do much in the way of tending to those already there. She knew — from her time back on the island in Juniper’s care — that hard work on the land was necessary to ensure a good store of food for the fallow months.
‘The first year in a new garden should be set aside for watching,’ Juniper explained. ‘You need to learn the land all over again, and give it time to share its secrets with you. We need to see how things grow, and what flourishes here, and what struggles. We’ll be all right: we have food stores, and we have skills we can barter with the people in the village to obtain the bare bones of what we need.’
Even so, it was a lean, hard year. There were many hungry days, and Wise Child worked harder than she had ever before. Much of their diet came from foraging, rather than from things they had grown themselves, and the pair roamed many miles to obtain what they needed. There was generosity, too: fish and kelp for drying, given in exchange for many hours spent helping the village women gut and clean the season’s catch, wheels of sheep’s milk cheese provided in gratitude at Juniper’s care for a sickly child, and — in late spring — a pair of chickens, and the right to fleece from the herd of sheep that roamed the headlands, in exchange for a share of the future yield of spun wool.
Finally, on a crisp May morning, when the sky flushed as pink and rosy as the interior of a new shell, Juniper led Wise Child to one of the storehouses, and revealed a little stash of stored seeds.
‘Some of these I harvested from the garden here in autumn, and from our foraging trips. Some were pressed into my hand in exchange for help with healing in the village. And some I carried with me all the way from the island, like a pocketful of secrets. I had to wait, you see. I had to wait to learn if they would grow.’
Wise Child thought of that other garden, across the sea, home for a brief, bright moment, and now forever out of reach, and tears pricked her eyes as Juniper carefully poured a sprinkling of seeds into her open hands. And then they walked out of the storehouse, and set to work.
*
The second year
The following spring brought a visitor: a stooped older woman who nevertheless made her appearance with a sense of vigour and purpose, blowing in off the headland path with storms in her wake. Wise Child was unsurprised to see that Euny travelled unburdened — a twisted stick in her hand, and a woollen cloak on her back seemed to be all her wild heart required. Wise Child knew that Euny’s journey from Cornwall would have taken her close to the very length of the land, and she was impressed at the older woman’s steely resilience and stamina.
After seeing Euny inside to dry off against the fire, fortified with a fiery tisane of fermented apples and spicy herbs from the garden, however, Wise Child realised that their guest had not come entirely empty-handed.
‘Angharad of the West gave me dyes for your weaving,’ Euny said, shrugging off her sodden cloak to reveal a misshapen pouch beneath.
‘There’s dock and mulberry leaves, for the greens, and a good crop of iris root for blues and rhubarb for those goldish colours. When I spoke to Angharad, and told her where you were, she said that you would probably be all set for pinks, and reds, and the yellows, whites and brown. Madder and lichen are easy enough to come by, walnut, coltsfoot and dandelion grow everywhere, and you’re in the right place for heather and bog myrtle, but she was worried you wouldn’t have a good supply of blues, greens and golds, this far north.’
‘How did you know where we were?’ asked Wise Child.
‘Finbar told Juniper’s brother, of course, and he told me, when I was last in the castle helping some of his armsmen with their sick horses.’
Wise Child had known about Juniper’s childhood, but it was always still such a jolt to be reminded that her mentor’s brother was a king, and that she had grown up a princess. It was hard to think of someone as royal when she had seen them making soap from goose grease, gutting fish, or digging peat on a hillside. Then again, her time with Juniper had taught her of the hidden magic of everyday work, of busy hands and curious minds, and the harmony that came when setting these in motion with the subtle turn of the seasons. Perhaps more princesses should labour as they did, and learn from it.
Euny had brought not only plants for dyeing, but also seeds, dried and preserved from her own garden.
‘Juniper tells me you have a feel for the herbs,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen what’s here already, and it’s pitiful. This will help you get started with your own proper garden, so that you have all the growing things you need to supplement Juniper’s healing work.’
She and Wise Child spent that spring and early summer hard at work, marking out the borders of the intended herb garden — here Euny had to be persuaded, as she was not one for boundaries, and would have preferred, if left to her own devices, to let the plants sprout and grow at will — and sowing seeds. In addition, as the days warmed and the sunlit hours lengthened, she took Wise Child with her as she roamed far and wide, foraging for medicinal roots, leaves, and berries, and harvesting any cutting she deemed a useful addition to the burgeoning herb garden.
Those expeditions were trying times for Wise Child, as Euny used them as an opportunity to teach her herb lore, and observance of the patterns of the weather, and the ebb and flow of plant and animal life in the wild. Unlike Juniper, who usually made it plain when some form of learning was taking place, Euny had a habit of keeping silent — she was a woman of few words — and then suddenly springing complicated questions on Wise Child as they made the final approach back to the house. It was another way of teaching a girl to become a doran, but it did not come naturally to Wise Child, and she always felt overburdened on those foraging journeys with Euny, like an apple tree weighed down by too many ripe fruit.
But the herb garden grew, and Wise Child’s knowledge grew in spite of these difficulties, and by the time Euny came to take her leave, in early autumn, Wise Child felt ready to enjoy the bounty not only of the horticultural world — Juniper had been hard at work in parallel ensuring their vegetable garden was bursting with carrots, turnips, leek, garlic, and all manner of other green and growing things — but also of a kind of harvest of the mind. She still had more to learn, it was true — in some ways she knew she would always be learning from Juniper, from Euny, and from all other people she encountered whose wisdom shone like sunlight on the sparkling sea — but she had a sense she was close to surpassing her doran mentor when it came to knowledge of the medicinal uses of herbs. It was a strange, and wondrous feeling.
*
The third year
The return of spring brought another visitor to Juniper and Wise Child’s seaside haven: Trewyn, laden with packs and parcels, trailed by a trio of village boys in her wake, carrying yet more packs. Wise Child, who had heard Juniper speak of her former sister-doran-in-training, but had never met Trewyn, held back, feeling suddenly shy. Their visitor displayed no such restraint: after greeting Juniper with a chattering cloud of reminiscences, she turned to embrace Wise Child, exclaiming over the girl’s chapped, work-roughened hands. With a gesture, she directed the boys to bring their respective burdens into the house, and followed them in, the flow of her conversation with Juniper never ceasing. Wise Child was at once impressed and daunted by her stamina.
Trewyn brought her own contribution to the blossoming garden: wildflower seeds, seemingly chosen for the beauty of their blooms, which, she assured Wise Child, would flower in a cacophony of colour the following year. These had been gathered, haphazardly, on her travels, for Trewyn’s life was a peripatetic one. She had spent the winter at the court of a fenland king in the eastern part of the land, healing his sick and spinning tales of magic and heroism by the fireside in exchange for her supper. In that watery world, people moved on boats between a series of islands, the land and the brackish water bleeding into one another to such an extent that it was a rarity to spend a full day on solid ground. The year before she’d roamed the length and breadth of Brittany, scarcely spending more than one night under the same roof, and before that, she’d been on the island of Ireland, enjoying several years doing doran work within the hillforts of various regional kings.
‘I learnt something about gardens,’ she told Wise Child, sitting under the apple tree beneath a canopy of pinkish-white blossom.
Wise Child, whose hands were deep in the dirt, dealing with the spring growth of her herbs, was moved to ask for further details.
‘This was very early on when I decided that a life on the road was the right way for me,’ Trewyn explained.
‘I was scarcely older than you are now, and my path had taken me to a friend of Angharad’s, living in the verdant green inland hills in the southwest of this land. Melwynn — that was the friend — had a garden bursting with abundance, and although her work was evident in the neat paths and borders of stones, she had a very particular philosophy when it came to the growing things themselves. From her perspective, the gardener’s hand should never be seen. What she meant by this,’ continued Trewyn, as a stray scattering of apple blossom cascaded past her face, ‘was that although there might be a high degree of deliberate intention on the part of the gardener, selecting and sowing seeds, the appearance of the resulting garden must seem as natural as possible, as if those plants just happened to take root in that specific place, with no human intervention.’
‘Do you mean that a cultivated garden should mimic a wildflower meadow?’ asked Wise Child.
‘That was Melwynn’s understanding, although how she thought that her neat rows of irises set against cow parsley and dock, with fennel and mint growing in the next square of stones over would appear as anything other than deliberately cultivated was baffling to me! There’s no denying that her garden was a veritable cornucopia, however — she did know what she was doing. You should ask Juniper to take you there — unless you plan to stay here forever.’
Wise Child paused to consider a future further than the next turn of the seasons. She felt that she had been so focused on survival — on building, with Juniper, a place that fed them and kept them sheltered from storms both physical and metaphorical — that she had forgotten the existence of a world beyond the bounds of coastline, village, and the spring on the hill behind her. She wondered if Trewyn’s way of being a doran was for her: dining in a king’s hall one night and a farmer’s cottage the next, nothing sure but the ground beneath her feet and the road before her, moving through an unseen network of her fellow dorans connected like the weave on a loom throughout the land, and across oceans. She felt she might like to try that kind of life, for a time.
Trewyn left as abruptly as she’d arrived, boarding a ship south to escape the cold and darkness of the coming winter, the seeds she had brought with her sitting safe in the outbuilding devoted to Wise Child’s herbs, ready to burst into a riot of colour when the sun returned.
*
The fourth year
All throughout that long winter, when the winds beat against the walls of their house, the sea lashed the headlands, and the peat fire burnt almost ceaselessly, filling the rooms with its fragrant scent, Wise Child nurtured and nourished seeds for fruit trees into life. She had selected these carefully: hardy varieties of apples and plums, bartered from passing ships, and a medlar that Finbar — as if he had known her intentions — had brought with him when he stopped by for a visit in late autumn. By the last frosts of spring, she had a collection of sturdy saplings, set on every available surface of the house, stretching their leaves upwards towards every available scrap of light.
She planted them carefully, turning the earth, feeding them patiently with fertiliser made from harvested kelp, trying not to check their progress every time she was in the garden. Juniper, who had taken charge of their yearly crop of vegetables, watched Wise Child working, and said nothing. The existing fruit trees — those that had been mature and flourishing when they’d arrived in the empty house — observed proceedings like a line of sentinels.
It would be years before any of her new saplings would join the existing orchard in their ability to produce fruit. There were many seasons to come before they’d even reach their full height. Wise Child wasn’t even sure she would be present to witness it. Trewyn’s words the previous spring had lit a fire in her mind: perhaps she would spend some time on the road, walking and pausing, learning and giving. She could see herself living on Finbar’s ship for a spell, sailing south, and returning to Juniper with the tides. Perhaps the ease with which she and her mentor had opened up a space for themselves in the community of the little fishing village was more fragile than it seemed, and they would be forced into flight once more.
Whatever the future held, planting new fruit trees was a kind of promise. Not of permanence — Wise Child wasn’t sure she believed in such a thing — but of contribution, and connection. Perhaps she and Juniper would be there, twenty years in the future, eating ripe plums under sunset late summer skies. Perhaps they’d be long gone, the trees feeding only curious village children, whose knowledge of the pair of dorans briefly dwelling in their community’s midst was only of half-remembered stories, treated similarly to legends of selkies transforming into women on secluded shores. Or perhaps her trees would loom as tall as standing stones, breaking through storm clouds to welcome other lost and weary travellers home, and point the way to the unexpected hillside haven.
Wise Child turned her face to the sun, and put her busy hands to work in the warm, rich earth.