Only the boy’s mother is too good-natured to have turned entirely against me. She has always considered me some sort of fool whose masculine weakness she ought to indulge. Her humorous affection goes back to my earliest days here, when she tried to teach me the names of the seeds she was sorting; and since she is afraid of the old woman, she is glad of my presence because I am a thorn in the old crone’s side. It is she who brings the water for my little plants. It is, I recognize, the subversive act of one who also exists in this house by a sort of uneasy tolerance and who sees in me another like herself. She comes form a distant village and is of a different race. Her only real hold on this house, now that her husband is dead, is through her son. Or rather, it would be, if Ryzak were not so inordinately fond of her. The old woman, no doubt, puts this down as another mark against him, another of those little softnesses that weaken the structure of things. It is, perhaps, a similar weakness that makes the young woman, despite the old woman’s warnings and her own fear, reach out sometimes and touch the Child as he is stooped over one of his tasks. Softly, and for the merest second, drawn by curiosity, or tenderness, or some impulse to put herself in contact with whatever force it is that is compacted in him, she strokes his hair, starting back the moment he feels her hand. But for that moment, brief as it is, the look on their faces is extraordinary.
I mean to say only that our lives here, even in separation, are alive with tension. And the winter has just begun. All day today there has been that peculiar stillness in the air, that sickly greenish light that promises snow. Huge curdled clouds over the sea. The animals, who have already been brought indoors, are restless in their stalls, stamping and smoking, or shifting together in the dark. The Child too has been unwilling to settle to our tasks. Like any boy of his age, he can be difficult, and is forever on the lookout for excuses - a kingfisher’s wing in the swamp, a grub crawling over a log - to divert my attention. But today it is different. All his muscles remain tense, alert, as if he heard a footfall in the grass behind us. He cannot settle his mind on things, and once or twice he shows little bursts of temper, impatiently pushing my hand away and cocking his head as if the language I am trying to teach him were blocking out another that his ears must be especially sharp to catch. He is often attuned like this to the shifts of weather. He can smell a change of wind hours before the first breath of it shivers the sea or lifts the marram grass of the swamp. I see him abruptly sit upright in the yard, lift his head, as if at a sudden presence, and know that outside the grass-blades will be swaying in the first cool gust of a new wind, or that the first flickers of lightning will be at play far off on the northern skyline.
But today it is the snow, which we have been expecting now for nearly three weeks. In the fort they are making final preparations. All over the flat gray land the stillness vibrates as if a string had been struck. Everything hums in sympathy. Sometimes between midnight and dawn I am woken by a strange light in the room, an unnatural blue that pulses, not at all like moonlight. The door to the hut is open, and the Child’s place in the corner is empty. I get up quickly, and am struck with fear. But he has not run away. In all that dazzle of light off the snow that must have been falling for hours it is so deep, he is standing naked in the yard (he sleeps naked, even now, when the rest of us have to wrap up in fur) and seems to me to be asleep still - he has that remote entranced look of sleepwalkers, who even when they pass you in a corridor, or on stairs, seem untouchably beyond reach, as if they were moving in some other and equally present world that is separated from ours, but not by walls. He stands perfectly still, with his face raised to the sky, which is of an incandescent blueness, neither of night nor of day, a blueness that sings, it is so clear, so pure, so absolutely its own color.
He stands like that, still in the cold, with the light striking up off the snow, for nearly an hour. I am too scared to wake him. Then when the first light flakes begin to fall again, he opens his mouth to them, rubs his face, his shoulders, his torso, then holds his arms out and his head up so that the light falls directly upon them.
I make a little sound, of shuffling perhaps, since I too have been standing still in the cold, afraid to move lest I disturb him. He turns and is suddenly awake. Smiles. Lets out a whoop. And begins leaping about in the snow, throwing handfuls of it into the air. He seems unaware of the cold. His body keeps its color, his hands and feet are unnumbed. When he comes scrambling towards me with a handful of crushed snow I can feel the warmth he is giving out, his body glows, he is a furnace. He shows me the snow as if it were something out of his own world that I might never have seen.
But when I try to draw him back into the room he resists. I have never known him so suddenly recalcitrant. I make the mistake of insisting, and he lashes out at me, spitting, tearing at my cloak, and runs to the wall of the stockade, scratching at the raw timber in his attempt to scale it. When I try to calm him he hurls me off and begins to howl. It is the old howling from his days in the forest. He howls, scratching at the wall like an animal, spitting whenever I approach, showing me his teeth and his hands with all the fingers tense and extended like claws. Behind me, the women. And Ryzak, looking alarmed. And the sleepy boy, with his eyes wide open as if one of the old man’s stories had suddenly come alive in the yard. I am on the edge of tears. There is nothing to be done. I wait, with Ryzak, for the Child to exhaust himself. He sinks against the wall at last, with his nails bloody, and I am filled with pity for him, and with a terrible feeling suddenly of guilt; but I cannot touch him. All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my will, a figure in my dream. Now, as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me. I have no notion of what pain it is he is suffering, what deep sense of loss and deprivation his cries articulate. At last when the howling has subsided to a weak and childlike sobbing, we carry him to his pallet and I huddle at his side, with the door closed, in the dark, till he has sobbed himself asleep. In the morning he seems to have no memory of the night’s events. He watches from his corner while I roll up my bedding, pack my writing materials, my razor and bowl, preparing for a season to abandon this space that is mine - ours - for the common room over the byre. I assure him with gestures that I am not leaving without him and encourage him to get his own things together, such as they are: the rough gown he refuses to wear, his colored ball. But he seems unable to wake properly. He watches wile I sweep out the room and saying good-bye to the spiders, bar the door behind me. By the end of the week snow will have buried our hut, and after that, when it freezes, there will be no getting back inside save through the roof. Slowly, with all our belongings, we climb the ladder inside the byre to the upper room.