The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

The River Liss runs north to south, and its waters brim with grammar. From its secret sources in Arcadia it rushes, conjugating as it flows into the lands we think we know. The rocks over which it tumbles shiver into jewels of many colours. Along its banks nod flowers and grasses, but out of all season or sense: spring bluebells mix with autumn asters, and towering cattails scatter frosted seeds over beds of blooming marigolds. Sometimes the river bends like an elbow, and sometimes it stretches broad and straight as a shadow. So long as you can hear the waters, everything seems possible: that the sun is the moon, that a star is a cloud, that dusk is dawn, and everything is both hallowed and haunted at the same time. Until, that is, the river meets the willows. Two tremendous trees, taller and thicker than any willow you’ve ever seen, stand on either side of the River Liss, and they bend towards each other like dancers, or lovers, reaching out to clasp each other. Their roots knobble the water’s surface from beneath, twist together into a braided sort of bridge; their branches above tangle and pleach into a vast, vaulting canopy. Willows are great grammarians. Their roots are uncommon thirsty; like tightly woven nets they sift gram after gram of bucking wildness from the water and pull it into their bodies. The river may conjugate everything it touches, but the willows translate its grammar into their growth, and hold it slow and steady in their bark.

But if you were to stand and behold those first two trees—if you were a stranger to the land, and unaccustomed to the sight—you might hear a kind of hum in the air, or feel it as a thickness in your chest. You might think that something about the shape of those trunks, the sweep of their twisted crowns, reminds you of something, or someone, you’ve lost—something, or someone, you would break the world to have again. Something, you might think, happened here, long, long ago; something, you might think, is on the cusp of happening again. But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will.

Ysabel rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. What do you think they like best?” Esther looked at the trees thoughtfully. “Travelling songs, like their hymn. Sea songs. Songs that bring news from away.” “So, Miss Hawthorn,” Ysabel said, raising an eyebrow and deepening her voice into a pitch-perfect mimicry of an insufferable headmaster from their school days, “it is your contention that people must in fact most ardently desire that which they cannot have? You don’t think that songs of travel are liable to sadden those rooted into the earth? Besides”—she smiled, reaching up to touch one’s trunk—“surely the river brings them all the news worth telling.” “Only from one direction,” said Esther, watching the water flow. “That’s just it; I think they’d welcome news of mortal lands, mortal work. And there’s no singing in Arcadia.”

Esther hesitated, then threw up her hands. “Look, why should I have to marry anyone? Why can’t we just live here, like this, together, you and me, taking lovers as we like and raising children together and teaching them to sing to the trees? Why should marriage mean me leaving or someone else staying? I don’t know, Bel,” she said, sighing. “You’re all the family I need.” “But,” said Ysabel, “I’m not all the family you want.”

There are lands that are near to us geographically but far from us temporally: London is not Londinium, though it’s built from its bones. There are lands that are near to us temporally but far from us geographically: we can be certain that at this moment, in Italy, someone is sitting down to their breakfast with a newspaper dated roughly the same as ours, though we cannot expect to reach them in time to join them for the meal.

Moments like this, Esther was jealous of her own voice. She wanted to make Rin look that way with her touch, with her kisses, but only her singing produced this kind of dissolved and aching bliss in her lover. Esther didn’t think her voice was anything special without Ysabel’s—she had a good ear, certainly, and her voice came clear and strong, but singing without Ysabel’s harmonies made her feel like a candle without a wick. Unless Rin was listening. Then she felt like an angel, or a queen.

“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.” “The country after the country,” said Rin, thoughtfully. “The country that’s surrendered.” “Yes, exactly! And I think it’s all right, as answers go. But I got there because I thought, what is a country before a country? And I thought ...

“Come home with me. Marry me. Be known as Rin Hawthorn for as long as I’m alive.” 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. “I thought you might want children,” they said, gently. “Ysabel wants children. I want you.” “I thought you might want more than fifty years with me,” they said, a tremble in the width of their mouth. “I want the rest of my brief life with you,” she said, “but here. Here, where I can still sing to the willows, and help my sister raise her children, and look after my parents as they age. Here, where my store of memories is small but sharp, and bright. I can’t leave them for Arcadia—but for you, it would be an eyeblink, wouldn’t it? A holiday. And I’d sing to you every day, with no distance to bridge between us.” Rin closed their eyes. “There is so much sorrow here, Esther. There is so much cruelty in all your beautiful songs. Every one of them is a kind of fishhook in the heart, cold and piercing. There is so much I don’t understand of your life in this world. It is an ins...

Rin dried them thoroughly in the soft linens of their shirt before offering one to Esther; she placed it on Rin’s finger, and they placed one on hers. Esther gazed at her hand, and wondered at the grammar of it—not the shift of hair to jewels, but of woman to wife, so quickly, so gently.

“You made her so happy, you know, but I hated whenever you visited her, because…” She tried to laugh, but what came out was strangled. “I was so afraid of losing her to Arcadia! Ever since we were small, ever since that time we fell in—the way she looked at everything around us, I knew her heart was set on it. Everywhere she looked she saw a whole hidden world of riddles to solve—except when she looked at me. It was as if … if it weren’t for me, she would be on an adventure. But she was my whole world, so I made her promise never to leave me—so childish, so selfish!” She stroked the crown of the harp, gently. “But she found a way to keep that promise, you see? She kept it. She came back to me, even though she died.”

Rin might have said, The way is a riddle. How would Esther solve it? They might have said, You sang your way out of Arcadia once; sing your way back in. Or Rin might have said, If the river has roots, it has branches, too; learn to climb them, and find your sister. It all returns to grammar. There is the grammar of a sentence, which can mean an arrangement of subjects and verbs, or can mean transformation into a tree that bleeds red where it’s cut. There is the grammar of grammarians, refined and removed from its source, and the grammar of witches, daily conjugating water into bread. There is grammar that is ruled like a kingdom, and grammar that is ruled like a composition book, and there is always, always the wild, unruly grammar of ballads and riddles, and this is the grammar of Arcadia, which breaks the real into the true.