In tangents to her orbit - Story by Unferth

… in tangents to her orbit…

They said this sort of morning happened about five hundred years: the full moon setting in a blue- green western sky just as the sun painted the east orange. It was as if the world, suspended in space between the two of them, stood poised at a fulcrum at the start of spring. The croaking call of a distant ptarmigan, mingled with the continuous chatter of the stream and its tributaries as they tumbled together down the mountainside, seemed to be conjuring light from the night. He wondered if the bird, or one of its ancestors, had carried the berries up here: in the valley below the stream vanished into a mass of blackthorn, foaming white with blossom. He walked briskly down towards it, anxious to keep warm.

There were tracks amongst the bushes: perhaps red deer hid here, or ate the leaves in the summer. The path led him in, amongst the sickly-sweet scent of the bushes with their white froth of buds and flowers, which hid from his sight the young river. But the streams’ song seemed louder as he walked. He followed the track as it plunged unexpectedly down a muddy gully between scarps of rock into a halflight that still waited the dawn.

Then he saw why the stream seemed loud. The water poured over a lip of grey limestone, glowing gold in the first rays of the rising sun, and then falling as a mass of white, surging and frothing in the plunge pool below. Despite the cold he stopped. His journey, started in the cold predawn light an hour ago, could wait for a moment in such a place.

The boulders strewn at the edge of the pool were cold: carved into smooth flowing curves by years of frost and flowing stream, and tattooed by the fossils of shells from prehistoric seas. This one – half in, half out of the water – curved inwards like a bone, with a mat of brown-dry ferns overhanging the pool. It seemed natural to kick his boots off, sit with one leg either side and refresh his feet in the ice-cold stream and suddenly, she was alive: sporting, frolicking in the foam, the stream surging around her arms and her thighs, her back ice-slippery with streamwater. She sprang from stone to stone, not seeming to notice his weight, then splashed deeper, beneath the waterfall, the cold of the water, fresh from the snows above, stabbing him like a knife. His hands fumbled for hair – soft hair now, and not the harshness of dead vegetation - trying to keep his balance against the power of the falling water and the ferocity of her frisking in the waves. Then she turned to the deeper water, towards the outlet of the plunge pool, standing up so her stone-hard, cold muscular body pressed cold against him, yet his fingers felt her flesh burn from her exertion. She dropped again to her hands and knees to play in the sandy shallows at the far side of the pool, then suddenly twisted round, and galloped – there was no other word – back beneath the force of the waterfall, writhing in the whirling water until he lost his balance, and lay breathless in the cold river…

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There was no breeze to disturb the summer heat in the valley. He’d been hoping this last couple of hours - as he’d walked, the forested hillside to his left had grown less - that his journey was at last taking him out of the mountains. But another horizon, more wood-wreathed peaks, had appeared beyond; beyond, he assumed another valley with another river, and the sun continued to rise higher in the sky, its brightness penetrating even the tall pines to bake the forest floor.

So it must have been nigh-on noon when he arrived at this other river. There had been streams to cross before, sometimes cut deep into the soil before now: usually a jump, sometimes to a convenient rock or islet in the middle of a stream. But the river that came down from the left was almost as wide as the one he was following – perhaps seven or ten paces to the other side. He followed it down the hillside, hoping there would be an easier crossing at the confluence. The pines gave way to blackthorn bushes: interlaced branches, full leafed and laden with green berries. Here, at least, was shade. And then the bushes gave way to bright, burning sunshine, and, at the end of an emerald green sliver of grass, the merging of the two rivers.

He walked out, into the sunshine, between the brown, limpid pools of the two rivers, and then jumped down onto the sandy continuation of the crest between them. The river that blocked his way here was narrow, but deep. He would have to wade. The wet sand gave slightly as he sat astride the ridge to roll up his leggings and take off his boots. This movement was not of the sand – although her goosebumped flesh beneath his palms still had the texture of the sand. The current seemed blessedly cool as she slipped into the muscle of water formed at the meeting of the flows. She turned to the right, stood up in the main current of the river so that the flesh of her back pressed against him; he gripped her hips tightly with his thighs, and his hands slipped under her arms to her breasts. Swift and smooth, she cut a swathe through a mat of floating pine needles, leaving them bobbing and dancing in her wake before crossing to the shallows at the far side of the tributary river, and returning to her hands and knees, and waited one with the damp sandbank again, for him to dismount. He hesitated one moment, indented the ridge of sand with his fingertips, expecting it to spring back again like flesh….

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A month ago these woods would have been perfumed. Perfumed with honeysuckle, and glowing emerald green with oak leaves. Now they smelled of the musk of the waning of the year: yet they still glowed: glowed with the bronze of oak leaves, flickering in the failing sunlight as the breeze disturbed the branches, or scrunching under his boots. The honeysuckle berries glowed too: he knew better than to eat those, but there’d been plenty of haw and sloe to sustain him as he journeyed. The hunger of spring was well behind him in this fruitful autumn.

The sun, too, was falling into a mass of colour. Soon it would be dark, and he’d have to find a place to light his fire, and to make his bivouac for the night. Ahead of him the valley – already broad and shallow became yet wider. Wraiths of mist rose ahead of him, glowing gold and red as they caught the setting sun’s rays.

Here was a stand of bushes, overhanging the river bank, and ripe with fruit. He picked his way around, enjoying the tartness of the berries as he followed the edge of the stand into the wood, and then back, down and round where the mists rose from the river. The river seemed wider, the opposite bank invisible in the fog, as if his journeying with the river had brought him to the edge of a lake. Perhaps tomorrow he’d see how big it was: in any case, tomorrow he’d continue his journey round the perimeter, whether that took an hour or a month.

Just downstream of the bushes an oak tree had fallen. He found himself wondering what storm could have brought it down; the trunk, supported in the river by four branches, seemed to be washed smooth, with detritus – grass, old leaves and twigs – from the storms of last week still clinging to it and to the twists of honeysuckle stalk. Yet the branches, well above the waterline, still held coppergold leaves. He could see them, still shining in the sun above the rivermist. He would sleep tonight in the scar left by the tree roots. He would harvest the straight blackthorn shoots for a shelter, and light fire – the first since the start of his journey – against the rising moistness in the air, and against the white light of the full moon.

But first he sat astride the fallen trunk, shuffled and leapfrogged along until he could peer into the river; perhaps there would be trout in the shadow of the branches that he could tickle for his supper. It was as if the sap still in her remembered the storm that brought her down: swaying and rocking from side to side, backwards and forwards. His hands fumbled for the honeysuckle stem that twisted around her – not that he needed a bridle to stay seated: whatever wind had brought her down here, kept alive in her thoughts, she contained in her own strength. Nor did the bridle give him any control. Her memory of the storm dictated her movements. Even the mists swirled around her, pricking his skin, yet she stayed, anchored to the lakebank as she reared and plunged, sometimes out of the water, sometimes almost completely submerged, soaking him to the waist in the cold river. Her moving became increasingly violent, imagining, no doubt, the building up of the storm, until at last he could grip the smooth skin no more, and he found himself, still clinging to the honeysuckle, in the water beside her…

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Cold. The fire glowed still, all but dead, but still the only colour in this world of white. It had been a long enough job on this shortest of days to collect firewood amongst the salt-marshes. His hands still bled from the thorns. And he had not collected enough for warmth through this night. Snow, driven by an ice-cold wind, stung his flesh. He stood up. The sky was scattered with stars, like frozen shards of ice. The blowing snow was just spindrift, a thin layer of biting ice particles, swirling angrily in the gale, yet no more than waist- high, piling into drifts around any irregularity in the ground. Yet, standing up, he could see the dim shapes of the hills he had journeyed down, and the other way the sea, flickering with reflected starlight. Here his journey would stop.

He was glad of that. He’d already lost the river, which had split into a morass of creeks, mudbanks and tidal rivulets. Some were frozen, so the scrambling down and across, although exhausting was easy. But others, more frequent as he neared the sea and salt, had not been: he was filthy with stinking mud, and the shrieking laughter of the seagulls had accompanied each fall. He’d found himself wondering if he could trap and roast one over his fire.

The pond he’d bivouacked near had been frozen. The wind had whipped the ice clear of snow, except for one drift. Even as he watched, he could see it move as the wind blew its load of spindrift across the crest.

And so he mounted her pure-white back, and felt her anger surge within her. Not anger at him: anger at the cold that froze her so. She punched at the ice, ineffectually, then reared, brought both fist smashing onto, through, the ice of the pond. She surged forward, pounding the frozen surface. His feet and knees, soaked from her splashing, numbed as he pressed, as tight as he could into her waist: he tried to dig his fingers into the flesh of her shoulders, and saw with alarm the cuts to his hands, made as he gathered firewood earlier, open up and bleed. And still she moved into the water, pummelling, rearing and plunging to shatter the ice that bound the river. Her own fists were bleeding: the blood swirled in the water and splattered the snow as she advanced. He leaned forward, lying flat across her back, wrapping his legs around her, and gripping her wrists as they plunged again and again into the numbingly cold water. And suddenly she stopped.

He had never controlled her. Yet she stopped. Watched as the two bloods – his and hers mingled, then flowed under the ice in some current through the centre of the pond. Then she turned, and bore him gently back to the riverbank.

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