The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

(What is a river but an open throat; what is water but a voice?)

Children muttering over their schoolbooks today think little of grammar. Grammar is tedious, difficult, slow; grammar is a shackle placed on language, correcting who into whom, can I into may I. Grammar and grammarians are constables, sternly watching while you split infinitives, narrowing their eyes at spliced commas while smacking semi-coloned truncheons against their palms. But that is not the truth of grammar. There was a time when grammar was wild—when it shifted shapes and unleashed new forms out of old. Grammar, like gramarye, like grimoire. What is magic but a change in the world? What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another? She runs; she ran; she will run again.

Those shifting, shimmering lands stopped at an assemblage of standing stones folk called the Refrain; beyond it was Faerie, and everyone knew it, even if no one spoke in words so plain. No one looks directly at the sun, for all it illuminates the world, and Faerie being the source of so much grammar made folk apt to speak of it in a kind of translation. They called it Arcadia, the Beautiful Country, the Land Beyond, Antiquity. And if they sometimes meant things less pretty than those names suggested, well, there are always things lost in translation, and curious things gained.

But a foolhardy few, armed with willow-bark nets and shallow baskets of tight willow weave, crept carefully beyond the Professors’ roots to pan for raw, unfiltered grammar. Carefully they combed the water to catch at small, thick chunks of enchantment, taking great pains not to wet their own skin. If they caught so much as a single undissolved gram, they could make a small fortune—even after subtracting the king’s duties in Thistleford—by selling them to grammarians for conjugation. Grammarians tended to clump together like clauses at the universities of the east and north, breaking language into their meanings, and received grammar for their projects only once it had been refined and made regular; few ventured into Grammarye towns, and then only grudgingly, like potters with a disdain for mud. Middlemen thrived in the trade.

They cherished the Professors in particular, for their height and their shade and the sound of the wind rustling through their leaves like chimes—but they loved even more the stories told of them, of how the Professors came to bow their leafy heads together over the River Liss. Their father told them that the Professors loved each other in a forbidden love, and they were driven from their homes into the river, and conjugated into trees; their mother said they’d made some great sacrifice for the good of their families, given themselves to the river in exchange for a secret gift. But whatever details blurred and shifted in the telling, the fact that the Professors had been and still were lovers never came into dispute; they had professed their love, hence the name.

Rin looked amused; it pleased them to be only one of Esther’s several passions, on roughly equal footing with damson jam and the patterns in riddle songs.

“There are two ways to answer these riddles,” said Esther, drawing her hands back to gesture with them. “With the past, or with the future. We think of the cherry or the chicken as unchangeable things, and the song pokes at those assumptions. How is a cherry not a cherry? Well, when it’s a flower. How is a chicken not a chicken? Well, when it’s an egg. The song says, this thing you are used to, it has a past, and that past is part of it; what the cherry was before the cherry is part of the cherry. All right?” Rin nodded solemnly. “All right.” “But that’s only one set of answers,” said Esther, picking up a pebble to illustrate her argument. “The answer to what was the cherry before the cherry? And that’s one version of the song. But there’s another version of the song, with different answers—the answers to the question, what is the cherry after the cherry?” Rin lifted an eyebrow. “A second cherry?” Esther punched them lightly on the shoulder, and they laughed. “My apologies, please go on.” Esther rolled her eyes, but smiled, and did so. “The cherry that’s baked in a pie, for instance, has no stone. The chicken that’s stewed in a pot, it has no bone. The song says, this thing you are used to, it has a future, and the future is part of it, too.”

If you’ve ever looked into running water at midday and been mesmerised by the play of shadows over stones, and how even the sound of the water running seems, somehow, to have absorbed sunshine scattered through lines of leaves and grasses—if you’ve ever stood on a moor in the west country and watched daylight flash and vanish over the green and granite of the land—you might have a sense of how Rin looked as they listened to Esther, hope and anguish rippling through and around each other on the high pale planes of their face.

Before them stood an older woman (children, it should be said, are not reliable readers of age—but neither is Arcadia). She was stout and tanned, wore trousers and sturdy boots, and kept her dark hair swept untidily into a bun that glinted here and there with wisps of silver. She had a pack strapped to her back, a walking stick in one hand, and their wayward chicken nestled peacefully in the crook of her arm. Esther was suddenly shy; her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Before she could answer, Ysabel peeked out from behind her and said, “Are you a witch?” The woman laughed—longer and more delightedly than Ysabel’s words seemed to warrant, as if she’d told an excellent joke. “From the mouths of babes! Well, why not, after all. If that word keeps chasing me down perhaps it has something important to tell me.”

Shortly was right; moments later, clouds troubled the light. A thunderhead brewed up in the distance; the wind changed direction and turned cold, blowing in from the north, spreading frost beneath it like lace. WHERE IS SHE, whipped a voice in the wind. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER, WITCH? “Fished her out of my millrace, if you must know,” said Agnes, crossly. “Rowan’s looking after her. Climb down out of your air and darkness if you want to have a conversation.” The wind howled, spun around the mill three times, then whirled down into an icy-looking Rin, a head taller than Agnes, looming over her. Their eyebrows and hair were rimed stiff; their eyes were wholly black, and their whole aspect was of a vicious blown snow, the kind of dry, cutting powder that billows in the wind like sand and cuts cold and hard against the skin of anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in it.

Most music is the result of some intimacy with an instrument. One wraps one’s mouth around a whistle and pours one’s breath into it; one all but lays one’s cheek against a violin; and skin to skin is holy drummer’s kiss. But a harp is played most like a lover: you learn to lean its body against your breast, find those places of deepest, stiffest tension with your hands and finger them into quivering release. You rock together, forward and back; your left hand keeps a base rhythm while your right weaves a melody through it, and they flutter past each other as the music becomes more complex, swells, breaks, shakes the body of your instrument in joy and grief alike, in the wild, wonderful grammar of being alive.

It is impossible for me to think of my childhood in Lebanon without thinking of the children there now; the children murdered, displaced, orphaned, trapped. It is impossible not to think of the children my parents were when they lived there; the children my grandparents were. It is impossible not to reflect, and to try to make you, dear reader, understand, that every generation of my family in living memory has been shaped or defined by imperial war. As I write this, Israel is carpet-bombing Lebanon in an expansion of its yearlong genocidal campaign in Gaza. Canada and the US are callously failing to evacuate their own citizens from Lebanon, leaving them to endure bombardment perpetrated with weapons they’ve sold to Israel, or whose sale they’ve facilitated. Right-wing talk show hosts are claiming that Israel can’t be invading Lebanon because Lebanon isn’t a country, echoing the decades of Zionist rhetoric that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian”—rhetoric that claims the millions of people indigenous to the region, the thousands slaughtered and the millions displaced, are insubstantial, ephemeral. It’s not wholly unlike seeing people talk about Faerie. I wrote and revised this book under the mental duress of seeing horrific war crimes against my people denied, excused, laundered, in the same language I use to tell stories. I couldn’t have borne this without the support of true friends and the grace of new fellowships emerging from a shared urgency in confronting that...