For you to be happy, I must die. So it has always been.
I fled, hoping that this time death would come in the cold night and I wouldn’t feel it. I’ve lied to you. Not without reason. Every time I hope the lie will never be unearthed and every time, it buries me. Beneath the realization in your eyes. Sometimes, the lies are yours and you try to hide me. The end is always the same. I die. You weep. You stand tall and go on, carrying me in your heart. I am the match that starts the fire, the battle cry, the treasured memory, the child’s eyes.
I walked alone on a windless moor as dawn rose over an ocean of heather and gorse, humming a marching tune from another tale, in boots bought with money I stole a long time ago. I did not expect to see a horse and rider picking their way through a storm.
She came from the north, out of driving rain and into the star-filled night. One tale falling into another. The air in hers rumbled thick with rage that set the sky in mine alight with red flame. It sucked my breath clean away. Water dripped from her dark cloak. She looked up and brought the horse to a stop right where the storm ceased.
I stumbled, over the heather and down a hole, fell with my skirts caught on the bare spines. That should have been it. Break my leg, crack my head, they’d send you word from the inn and you’d make it just in time. You would have found me happy. Happy despite the sadness in every pore of you. I would have entreated you to smile and kiss me.
My end, when it comes, and it will come soon, will be glorious and I will be glad to meet it. Perhaps we’ll sing.
“Here, take my hand.”
The rider of the horse rode it no longer, but stood over me with her arm outstretched. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. What was the trick here?
“Did you lose your way?” she asked. “It’s so easily done out here, isn’t it.”
I let her help me up, wondering what twist in the tale she would turn out to be, forgetting that rain she’d walked out of even as it ran down to my elbow. There was blood in her fingernails and fury in her dark eyes. A day ago, that twisted hairstyle might have neat.
“Can you ride? I’ll take you to where you need to be.”
“I’m not sure you can,” I told her, brushing dead heather flowers off my petticoats. I needed to be dead. Sometime soon.
“Well, you can come with me for now, until you’ve decided.”
We rode together across the moor and into the cold blue morning. Chimney fires went up from homes we could not see until, at the edge of the moor and overlooking a still river, we found a village painted white. There was a coaching inn by the valley road with thick black window-frames and doors sturdy enough to withstand a siege.
The tale was paused, at that point of flight. My death, for now, postponed.
“We should have some food,” she announced as she handed the horse’s reins over to the stable hand.
I’d fled with a few copper pennies and I thought I should really save them, if this bit was going to last long. Or perhaps I would find something to occupy my time until the story started up again. I could teach, stay with well-meaning, god-fearing older people, or tend sheep. I could pass my time, virtuously hiding my past while knowing it would turn the corner someday, but I’d already done that bit once. That was when we met.
Beneath the whalebones of the churchyard, to the sounds of wedding bells.
She paid for hot broth and rough bread, and sat staring until I ate it. We slept under heavy blankets in a room beneath the eaves. My sleep was broken and fluttered with nightmare because I knew I should go back and take my fate. I sensed it rushing over the gorse towards me. Every cough reminded me of the dozen times or more that coughing took me.
I expected you to find me. You were probably out there, riding without thought, tearing the moors apart and calling my name. Saying it didn’t matter what they said. I could not hear you.
“I’m going,” she said in the morning. “Far, far away from here.”
I didn’t know what that meant, or where here was, but she said it so fiercely that I agreed. “Yes. Far away. That’s where I want to be.”
The road from the inn took us through the village, between two neat greens overhung with trees, and out past the church at the other end. It curved up beside fields and down the valley. Each mile was greener. Each mile I breathed more deeply. The horse kept walking under moon and stars.
One day, she turned to me and said, “Before we go any further, you should know I killed a man.”
I considered this and found I didn’t mind. I was not a man so she was no threat to me.
“I miss mine. I hope he’ll follow me.”
I wanted him to follow me. I ached for it. We had been so happy in our exile from the truth. But I awoke one morning certain of what was to come. The happiness would not last and I would die. There would be a final scene and my voice would echo on the wind and he would go on without me.
With each village we passed through, the certainty fell away.
I tended what I had known that morning when I fled. I could not do it all again. The end of the tale, always an end for me. I did not want to live as a ghost in someone else’s chest. Living like that is exhausting.
There was a farm set back from the cliff-top, with views of a sea the dirty grey of snow clouds. The tenants passed away over the long winter, because they were old and weary, not because of fate or story. We passed it on our way to the salt and, after dipping our toes in the waves, came back and staked our claim.
Every morning I got up to milk the cows, to load the cart, to take the milk along the cliff-top to the town. I looked for him. I watched the horizon waiting for the shape of horse and rider. Each day I watched for less time.
“How many times have you lived?” she asked me one day as we sat sewing a quilt on the big oak table.
“I haven’t counted,” I said. They were all one, like heather fronds on the moor, vanishing into the fog. “They all ended the same.”
She paused with the needle raised. “I always knew they weren’t enough. Every time, I lost something and told myself it was the necessary sacrifice of happiness.”
“Like what?”
“Once, I gave up books. Another time, I had eight children. Only the eighth was a boy you see, and we…he…did so want a boy. I think I gave up my family once. I thought that one would stick, you know, because it felt like a rebellion.”
I nodded. “I burned a house down once, but it burned faster than I thought. They could see it ten miles away.”
Some time, a bomb will fall. Some time, I’ll refuse to join the exodus.
I went into town the next day and bought her a book. We read it together in the firelight.
We walked along the pebble beach every evening, carrying a lantern just in case the darkness fell. It never did. We always saw the sunset over the waves and the sunrise over the hills. She buried a rock, stained with blood, on the cliff edge. One day it would fall into the sea and take her decision to the depths.
I took off the shawl pin he carved for me and used it to hold the string to measure out the earth for planting onions. She knit me a new shawl out of wool the color of heather at the end of summer. We were too far, far away from the moor to see it bloom.
One morning, I awoke and knew my fate was coming for me. I milked the cows. I put on my boots and my shawl of purple lace, and I drove the cart along the cliff-top towards town. All the way I wondered how the end would come. A rut in the road, I thought, would throw me into the sea to drown. She would find me washed up on the beach with my purple shawl and she would take it for comfort in the long winter to come. She would be happy with some lad from the town or a traveler who stopped to rest by the farmyard gate.
I was not the end. I was the way to the end.
There was a church on the cliff above the town, where the road started to descend. I stopped the cart beside it. My endings have found me in churchyards before, alone, in the pouring rain, surrounded by a circle of black-lace mourners. I have sat outside the locked church door in the dead of winter. I have gone inside and prayed and been found at the last minute of my life, knelt in front of the altar and looking up towards heaven. I have seen a hundred yew trees, each as gnarled as the last, and a hundred sanctuary knockers.
It would not be unusual to find my end there between the graves. I almost found it a comfort.
Sometimes, there’s one I’m there to find. The stones are scattered with familiar names. Each one would make sense and as I have before, I found myself drawn to one in particular. There were seven people beneath the earth and most of them shared my surname. I remembered none of them. That was the point of the ending. Their deaths brought me here, to flight, to secrets and to the final, inevitable fact that I could not escape what their deaths long ago had done to me. Tragedy starts early in my story. Every time.
You found me in the sunset, which came quicker than it should. I was wrapped in the heather-purple shawl you made me and fate was creeping between the graves towards me on a raven’s wing.
“Have you been here all day?” you asked. “What about the milk?”
I had crawled from that first grave, of all my dead and blamelessly tragic relatives, to another hidden and cracked in the corner by the field oak. It was my first. I’m buried there. I was mad that time. Mad and running an inn. I haunted it, I think, for seven years. He on that occasion was my brother, condemned to stay there with me. I died twice in that story, first my body and then my ghost.
Everyone was happy after that.
“Come on,” you said. “We should get back before dark.”
“What if he comes?” I barely dared to ask. When had I stopped wanting him to be there?
You took a breath, deep, drawing me in. “I know what to do about men who aren’t worth it. We’ll ask him to leave. There’s two of us and one of him.”
“I must die.” It was a truth a hundred times over. “For you to be happy, I must die.”
You took my hand and put that heavy riders’ cloak around my shoulders. You did not kneel beside me to breath my final breath. You pulled me up and said, “I’m not having that.” Which you must have said, I suppose, when you smashed his skull in with a rock.
You walked me to the lynch gate. We left my fate curled up on the cold hard ground.
“I’m happy now.”
“So am I.”
And so we lived forever.
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Louise Hughes is a speculative fiction writer and time traveler from the north east of England. She enjoys wandering around the hills and dales, fictionally, literally, and preferably with a flask of tea. Her work has also appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Interzone. |
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