The Beguilers

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

When I got back from the drowning pool that night there was no one around apart from Tigo, the chuffie who lives in our yard. When he heard me coming he sat up outside the hen-house door and tried to look vigilant, as though he were actively guarding the place instead of just sleeping there.

There were one or two leaf-lanterns burning in our house. It looked peaceful and inviting, but I didn’t want to go in just yet in case there was someone still awake. The questions would be too awkward and I would need to be ready. I had to spend a bit more time getting myself re-orientated and clearing the dreams from my eyes.

For a while I stood looking back the way I had come, towards the mountain side, but all was dark and still. Tigo made no move towards me. He had learnt not to approach me unless I asked him. I lingered a moment longer, then decided to risk it. I would have to pay with a few sneezes and maybe worse, but I needed to share this with someone and, given the circumstances, only a chuffie would do.

Tigo stuffed his nose into my ear as I sat down beside him. Despite my allergy I like chuffies, always have, but I still wish they wouldn’t do that. I wiped my ear with the end of my shawl and said, ‘I’ve been up beside the lake. I’ve been watching the beguilers.’

I suppose I must have been a bit more dreamy than I realised. Tigo looked worried and slopped around my face with the wettest part of his nose. I pushed him away and got up. ‘The hole is in the back wall of the hen-house, Tigo. There’s no point at all in sleeping beside the door.’

I stayed where I was and waited. The lights didn’t necessarily mean that there was anybody still awake. My family would be sure that I was staying overnight at someone else’s house, but they would still keep a few leaves burning for me and the back door unlatched. It was an old custom, laid down at some time beyond memory when it was still considered safe to go out alone after dark. No one ever did that now. Not unless they were . . .

My chain of thought was conveniently broken by a sneeze and I didn’t return to it. I looked up at the sky, trying to work out what the time was. The moon was still high, still bright. On the mountain slopes there was no more sign of the beguilers. There was no knowing where they might be.

I decided to wait it out a bit longer. It would have done me no harm to have company just then; I could tell that I was still mesmerised and inclined to sink into my own dreams, following the beguilers. I wished that I hadn’t offended Tigo. He wouldn’t hold it against me, chuffies never do, but I couldn’t go crawling after him now.

It all began earlier that night. The moon was full and the village was holding its monthly gathering. For reasons I could never understand, most people looked forward to these meetings; anxious to hear what everyone else was up to and what their latest plans were. I seemed to be almost alone in finding them utterly tedious. And this one, I knew, was likely to be even worse than most. The summer rains had failed, for the fourth year running, and the drought was upon us again.

I could predict, almost down to the last word, what would happen at the meeting. I would have cried off; pretended to be ill, but I knew my mother wouldn’t believe me and would make me pay for it all week with withering glances and stony silence.

It started like any other meeting. I was sitting beside my younger sister, Temma, in the juvenile quarter. I was just about the oldest of the girls in that section. A girl can offer a Great Intention at any time from her fourteenth birthday onwards, which is two years before a boy can. Most of my friends couldn’t wait much beyond their fourteenth birthday. The first Great Intention for a teenager means the beginning of adulthood and, for some reason that I could never quite understand, nearly all of my friends thought they wouldn’t start to live until they had moved over to the next quarter, among the young men and women. But I was in no hurry.

The thing is, there are so few choices. We can’t get out of here. The plains people don’t like us because the way we live is peculiar to them, and the other villages that used to exist in the area have been abandoned because of the way the weather has changed. If it wasn’t for the drowning pool, which provided us with water during the frequent drought, we wouldn’t survive here, either. So you get married and start a family or you get married and don’t start a family. That’s what life amounts to. If you’re unlucky you don’t get married and then you might enter the priesthood. For as long as I could remember, my mind had been bashing against those paltry alternatives like a blue-bottle in a butter-box, but all I could ever come up with was the vague certainty that there had to be more to life than that.

I said it to my father once and it was a great mistake. I should have had more sense. When you’re different anyway it pays to keep quiet and not spell things out for people. Since then I’ve kept my mouth shut, but it made me even more determined not to relent and do the normal thing. My brother Lenko felt a bit the same, I know, although we have always had problems about discussing things honestly together. He’s a boy, after all, and I’m a girl. My parents didn’t say it, but I know they blamed his restlessness on me. They blamed everything that went wrong in our family on me. Me and my allergy.

Anyhow, that night, the night when my life’s adventure began, didn’t seem any different from any other. If anyone was expecting either of us to offer up a Great Intention, they were heading for disappointment. It was warm, so my little sister Temma and I had chosen to sit as far away from the central fire as we could. We were surrounded by the other girls from the village, from the age of nine upwards. Most of them lolled about and leaned against each other, weary from a hard day’s work in the forests or the fields or the kitchen. Temma had been out with two other girls watching the village goats that day, and she was almost asleep where she sat. I had to wake her up when the meeting began.

We were all supposed to be sitting in orderly rows, so that everyone would know when it was their turn, but in fact it never worked out like that and there was often confusion about who should speak next. The Intentions began, with the youngest as usual. The only difference from the ordinary, boring old stuff was the arrival of the drought. Temma’s friend Simka was the first to speak. She stood up and took the old white bone that the priestess handed to her. It was shiny from its passage through the hands of the village population for more years than anyone could remember. The priests held that it was the shinbone of the Great Mother who gave birth to our people a million years ago, but most of us believed that it had once belonged to an ox.

The priestess bowed her head again and passed on. The next to speak should have been the twins’ older sister, Hansa, who is about nine months younger than me, but she declined to take the bone and I knew why. She was going to offer a Great Intention, and I was fairly certain what it would be. A little further around the hall, my cousin Bick was nervously rolling and unrolling his shawl. He also intended to offer a Great Intention. Those two would speak when all the others had said their piece, along with anyone else who had a major announcement to make.

Great Intentions are made rarely in life. Once a young member of the community has come of age, they are expected to come up with one over the next year or two. It doesn’t have to be marriage, of course, although it usually is. But it has to be something that is fundamental in life, a major change, probably the biggest step that a person has ever taken. It’s a serious matter to offer a Great Intention, and if it fails it can cast a shadow over the rest of your life.

The bone was handed on. In strict order of age it was passed around the juvenile section and every voice repeated the same, monotonous intention. I fell into a moody reverie, and the sound of the meeting grew distant and echoey. And then, suddenly, it was my turn to stand and spout.

‘I have failed in my last Intention,’ I said. Usually people give an excuse of some kind when they fail, but I never bother. I knew that my parents didn’t like it. I could feel their discomfort from the other side of the hall. I didn’t know it then, but it was nothing compared to the discomfort they were going to feel in another few minutes.

I went on. ‘I had intended to read and understand Chapter 17 of the Books and speak to our priests about it. My Intention for this month . . .’ I stopped. I hadn’t given it any thought, but the idea of blithely repeating what everyone had said was repugnant to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help with the crisis. I did. I just couldn’t say the same words.

It was something I had thought about a lot in the past. The system we had worked all right, but it was highly labour intensive and inefficient. I was sure there had to be a better way. Sometimes my mind would manufacture strange devices, with levers and wheels and tubes. I had a theory about gravitational pull, and once I had come close to working out a system of clay pipes and sluices that I was almost sure would work. I was convinced that, with a bit more time, I could have come up with a working model. But if I had thought about it, I would never have dared to say it.

An oppressive silence fell over the hall. I handed the bone forward to the youngest of the boys in our section. It was taken from my hand, but no one spoke. The priests were still glaring at me, and so was everyone else in the congregation.

What could I do? I shouldn’t have said it, I know. The traditions of the village are sacred and change is resisted rather than welcomed. And when it does happen, it is always at the behest of the elders. It is never, never instigated by the young.

If there had been a convenient hole, I would have bolted down it. But there was nowhere to hide. I was punished by the hard glare of public disapproval until I squirmed in my seat, and it wasn’t until I hung my head in shame that I was released and the Intentions moved on. The boys took up from where the girls had left off. There were a lot of promises of ditch clearance, as well as more water-bearing; more conformity.

It all washed over me. My face burned with humiliation. It was highly likely that the priests would take me to one side when the meeting was over and give me a lecture; perhaps even a punishment of some kind. I tried to imagine what form it might take. A meditational penance, perhaps? Or some arduous educational task, like learning one of the ancient Epic Poems by heart?

The boys’ intentions were over. Beside me, one of the younger women was promising to go up and stay with the men, to cook for them while they worked. Afterwards a series of men offered to take the oxen up to the drowning pool and spend their nights in the byre that had been built up there, and to draw water from first light until midday. It was gruelling for the men and many times worse for the beasts. We usually lost at least one ox during the drought, and sometimes more.

Without a word to anyone, I slipped quietly from my seat and made my way around the back of the hall to one of the side doors. There was a pause in the Intentions, and I knew that everyone was watching me. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to wait around to be castigated.

Outside the streets were empty and bright with moonlight. Above the village the mountainside looked oddly enticing and I scanned the shining darkness for signs of beguilers. The nights of the village meetings were the only times we ever went out after dark. The beguilers never came around the village when there was a full moon. No one knew why. But occasionally we would see them up among the hills as we were making our way home, dancing above the trees like huge sparks from a bonfire. It was safe to watch them then, but never at any other time of the month.

I could hear the drone of voices emerging from the hall, and it filled me with misery to think of the same old routine, the same small fulfilments and failures going round and round and round. The sound, and the thoughts that came with it, began to draw me back towards the old conundrum of what to do with my life. In an effort to shrug it all off I found myself taking the track that led out of the village and up towards the forest.

I’m still not sure whether fate is something that happens to a person or something we create for ourselves as we go along. But that night, with the full moon hanging in a cloudless sky, it seemed to me that there was nothing else in the world that I could do or that I would want to do. Despite the endless warnings that had filled my childhood nights with dread, I had no fear as I wandered up the track. It’s almost as though there was something calling me and I certainly had no desire to try and resist it. I suppose that’s what people mean when they talk about being summoned by fate.

That night, when I walked up the mountain on my own, I saw three beguilers gathering on the deep lake that lies about a mile above the village. I had no warning of their presence before I saw them; they weren’t keening the way they do when they come around the houses at night. They made no sound at all. One minute I was alone in the moonlight and the next minute they were there, shining out like torches in the sky.

The local wisdom is that the beguilers lose their power under the full moon. Even so, people never come out of the village at night, and the presence of the three creatures made me anxious. I turned my face away from them and walked on along the path. I wasn’t far from the beginning of the forest, and my first thought was to keep going until I was safely within the trees. Then I wouldn’t be tempted to look and they would forget about me. But they flew across the path in front of me and wheeled around above my head for a while before they turned again and headed back towards the lake.

There are puffberry bushes between the village and the forest, hundreds of them. When they’re in fruit all the children come up at dawn every morning to pick as many as they can before the birds get to them. It’s one of the best times of the year as far as I’m concerned. I’d eat puffberries until they came out of my ears. One of the best Intentions I ever thought of was to go up to that patch of hill-side every day for a month to weed out the creeping spinescutch which was growing between the bushes, choking them and making it difficult to pick the fruit. The following month several other people joined me and we had a great time working together up there. We brought all the cut creepers down to the village and made a central pile for people to use as kindling. My parents almost thought I was normal when I did that. They used to remind me of it from time to time, especially when they were particularly worried about my mood or the way I was behaving, but I think it was as much to reassure themselves as me. I had come to terms with my allergy and the way it had separated me from the other members of the community. It was they that hadn’t.

But that night, when I was out walking on my own, I had no thoughts of sameness or difference, and I had no thought of puffberries, either. All I knew was that I had to take cover and refuse to see those beings that were dancing around in my path.

Beguilers. No one really knows exactly what they are because no one has ever caught one. They are around during the day but you can’t see them because they have the same quality as the daylight. Occasionally, if you’re up on the mountain slopes, you might see a shadow pass through the air like a wafer of ice floating on water; not quite substantial enough to be sure that it’s really there. But at dusk they become visible, and at night they are as bright and vivid as huge fireflies.

Some people say that they are demons drawn down from the cloud mountain to feed on human souls. Others say that they are the earth-bound spirits of wayfarers who lost their lives in the mountains and who need to lead another soul to a similar death before they can be freed from their torment. Because tormented they certainly are. The sound of their moaning, howling voices floating through the village streets in the darkness would freeze the blood in your heart. However hot the night might be, we close our shutters when we hear them coming and wrap our shawls around our ears.

We are warned never to peep out at them from the first day we can understand the words. We are told that they are beautiful, so beautiful that people become mesmerised by them and get led astray. There are endless stories about them; of people who succumbed to the lure of their haunted voices and walked out into the night, never to be seen again; or got caught in the darkness between one place and another and didn’t return home. Every accident that happens on the mountain is blamed on the beguilers. Every time a traveller is lost on the road or falls down a precipice, the elders tell us that it was because they were following a beguiler. Our people live in terror of darkness; after nightfall we are prisoners in our own homes, waiting for the haunting voices to draw us from our sleep. It is one of the reasons that we are so isolated. Apart from the porters who have to pass through our village, carrying goods across the mountains to the coastal communities on the other side, we have no regular visitors at all.

I suppose I never really believed the stories. The beguilers are eerie all right; they’re eerie to look at and eerie to hear, but aside from that I had never heard any real evidence that they interacted with people at all. They were a convenient excuse, though, for the fears that people have of the darkness. I always thought that if it wasn’t beguilers it’d be something else, another kind of spook designed to keep children at home in bed. There hadn’t been an accident in all the time that I was alive, or at least not one that could realistically be attributed to a beguiler. I had always had a secret fascination for the night and chafed against the customs of the village. But now, alone on the mountain with those strange and silent creatures, I wasn’t so sure.

I lay down on my stomach among the puffberry bushes and put my hands over my eyes. I couldn’t hear them, but I could sense them some other way, still flitting about above my head. At least, I believed I could. There was no question of my being in any danger unless I looked at them; of that I was sure. The legends say that it is only when you look into the eyes of a beguiler they become a danger to you. Even so, I was afraid. There’s no sense in pretending that I wasn’t.

I kept my eyes covered for as long as I could. With my head there close to the ground I thought at first that the world was filled with some enormous noise, appropriate to the fear that I was experiencing. But before long I realised that the sound I was hearing was the sound of fear itself. My heart was pounding, causing the blood to roar in my ears, and my rapid breathing was amplified because my face was pressed against the ground. When I relaxed for a moment and held my breath, I found that the world was almost silent.

I became aware of the night insects in the grass among the bushes, and a stray creeper of spinescutch was pricking into my stomach. I moved a hand to pull it away and saw only darkness all around. Carefully I looked up. The beguilers were gone. Slowly, cautiously, I got to my feet and looked out. Far below, the soft lights of the village were visible but that was all.