Swan on the Moor

Chapter 8

Aine watched the first of the day's human visitors to the moor whisk past in a large red car, glancing up from magazines to make 'ooh' sounds as their parents pointed our the beauty before them. The younger humans were less interested in beauty and more in running about up and down the hills, chasing the sheep. Aine was unsettled by these small, half-feral creatures, irrational and unthinking – she had never interacted with anyone young in her short life and watching them made her both frightened and angry. Why were they not amazed by the world, the way she was? Had they always been so? They carried small portable games which interested them more than the earth and sky did. Humans puzzled her as much as what she knew of the fae.

She waited in a ditch until the car had swept past and down the hill into the tiny human village in the centre of the moor. The village had little more than a tea room and a few shops, under the watchful branches of a huge spreading horse chestnut, and occasionally Aine secreted herself in a bush or branch to watch the older humans laugh and chat, listen to their conversation. They talked of pottery and farming, of cars, drinks, and things she would never see or understand, like television programmes and politics. All she knew of politics was the laws of the earth around her; the strong beat the weak, life circled on regardless of the laws you tried to impose upon it. It was unspeakably mysterious and achingly desirable to her, such simplicity. Humans tried to make sense of things, make things logical, rational, merciful, as if in the nature of the world mercy and equality were a part of the order of the world. Aine knew only too well that this was not the case.

She closed her eyes and felt herself melt into the world around her, all but invisible to the naked eye. Her mother had been able to fade almost out of sight – it wasn't magic as such, she had explained, more a part of the nature of being fae, of being connected to the earth. The Sithen, where Aine had been born, was just a deeper part of the earth. "Many of the fae forget," her mother had told her in her soft, fluttering voice, "That we are spirits of nature, elemental spirits, and no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise, we are like the trees and animals and oceans, we draw our nourishment from this world and its elements. We are just a deeper part of it." She had shaken her head, and Aine knew she was remembering being driven from her home. "They like to pretend we are higher beings, because humans once saw us as such. We are more powerful, perhaps, naturally, but not higher. Just...different. We do not develop as a race the way humans do, because we do not need to. We just carry on. I often thought...we began to lose our powers because we did not change with the world." Her mother had been the wisest being Aine could imagine, and even though she was talking of things that Aine herself would never see or understand,

she nodded seriously and drank in every word. Even though she now recognised her mother's words were directed more towards people who would not hear them, than Aine herself, she still cherished each one as a memory of her mother. Her mother, who had loved this world enough to bear the child of one of its inhabitants and try to bring her back to her own home, and when this was not possible, had suffered ridicule and spite rather than give up her half-mortal child.

But now she was just dreaming. She planned to spend the day by the River Dart, at Dartmeet, one of the old haunts of magic she occasionally felt. The birds on the river, gull, duck, even the odd swan, felt like kin to her, and she wanted to listen to their songs. Just sometimes, she almost felt she could communicate with them – not the way she communicated with all animals, by body language and intent, but really produce their songs from her throat. She understood birds the most of all animals, and somehow, they seemed to understand her even in her silence, looking at her posture and her eyes. She could truly converse with a bird, albeit in the way of one speaking a foreign language learned by ear, but it came to her with a sort of natural understanding. The birds were never afraid of her, either; they would sit beside her and on her fingers, and she would glean the tones and feelings of their songs and through her movements, express an answer. They were happy times, she and her avian cousins, talking in some arcane way beyond knowledge.

These little journeys around the moor were the times when she was most happy. Any humans who might have caught sight of her would have seen little more than a shadow flitting between the stones and flowers, and she could dance, even sing to herself when she was alone. Some of the songs she remembered her mother crooning to her as a baby, but many of them just flowed out of some hidden place inside her, as if the earth or the river were singing up through her. She liked the feeling of being a conduit to the voice of the earth; something, according to her mother, all the fae should be, once were. Apparently even humans, once, had been able to feel the voice of the earth. Her mother had told Aine that she fell in love with her father because he still could hear the song of the earth. At times like those, she could hardly feel alone, for the whole world was singing with her and she could feel the gentle arms of the earth and sky wrap around her; she felt loved. She liked to imagine her mother had returned to those arms, and was part of the embrace, the everlasting dance of nature, and that way, she was still with Aine, even now. As long as she never let another living soul hear her strange voice, she could pretend it was normal, even if that was no longer believed, if it ever had been. Aine was old enough to know that perhaps her mother's views belonged only to her mother. Otherwise, would someone have not stood up for her at her last day at the Sithen?

The silent river was a heaven on earth. The fast-flowing water glistened in the early light, sweeping around the huge, smoothed stones in the water's flow. Golden light danced on the glorious autumnal leaves, filling the air with shining motes and an almost sunset glow. It was just the kind of scene you could imagine a mermaid leaping from that water for a heartbeat, and the thought made Aine smile. Perhaps once they had, after all. There were a thousand corners where perhaps her own ancestors had danced on the flat rocks across the water, ducked and dived with real birds, sailed regally on the currents. These were the times she loved the best, before the majority of the humans turned up. The ones who tended to be about at this hour were fishermen, ramblers, humans who seemed to tune in to the world around them, who could spend hours watching and waiting, still as a wild creature. She felt almost akin to them, those people to whom she would never speak but merely watched from the opposite bank, somehow connected by the natural world. For the moment, however, she was totally alone, just her and the song of the rippling water, the splashing of small fish and the faint trace of birdsong in the trees.