The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Grammarians tended to clump together like clauses at the universities of the east and north, breaking language into their meanings,

What the town of Thistleford gained from its proximity to Faerie was obvious: prosperity, merriment, uncommonly good weather. What it lost was negligible—the cost of doing business.

Just as beekeepers tell their hives all the news in thanks for honey, the Hawthorns sang to their trees in thanks for their translations.

From their earliest days, Esther and Ysabel never shirked their duty, singing the required hymn with great solemnity at the changing of every season. Strange to tell, it wasn’t in English; they couldn’t say what language it was, only that the shape of the words fit so differently into their mouths that they felt their voices shift in deference to it. Their mother told them that her parents had thought it was Welsh, until the day a Levantine woodworker staying with the family had said it sounded to her like Arabic, but a dialect she’d never heard. Either it was older than her, or from a place she’d never travelled (“or,” their mother said, ruefully, “my accent was too atrocious to understand and she was too polite to say so”).

If you were ever in danger of forgetting how to sing, I would simply have to come and remind you.” Esther chuckled, but Ysabel went on, teasing. “Every other week. You’ll come here, then I’ll go there, and there won’t be a week we don’t see each other, and sing together. I don’t care how golden and honeyed Arcadia is, I won’t let you forget a single word of ‘Tam Lin.’”

Esther didn’t know what to do with Rin. She knew what she wanted to do—she knew this with great enthusiasm and precision—but she couldn’t grasp a future with them any more than she could grasp the river water in her bare hands.

But people sometimes left offerings in the Modal Lands, and Esther had been taught from her earliest childhood not to disturb them; it wouldn’t do to pick up other folks’ hopes and dreams, however accidentally.

She began to feel the grammar of a story circling her, the grammar of two out of three.

Their voice made Esther think of weather, of winter, of woodsmoke: something cold but bright, burning and fragrant, curling into the air before vanishing.

She thought about how the gift forced a bond on her that was awkward and difficult to refuse, and how payment could dispel that, could break the bond. There was a grammar, too, to gifts.

Their work wasn’t the finest available, but it had an undeniable potency, and the sisters themselves were charming, with an eye for beauty and a knack for patter that drew them reliable custom.

“He’s only ever been kind to us. And I know you hate his poems, but I think it might be nice, you know. To have someone write poems about me. To be … seen, I suppose, like that. Like an angel, or a queen.” There are a great many songs written about sisters, and a great many stories, too, and most often they turn on jealousy, on pettiness, on spite. Just as often as there are cruel stepmothers in ballads there are older sisters jealous of the younger, coveting their looks, their lands, their lovers. Esther looked at her sister—her beautiful, brilliant sister, talented and generous and funny and kind—and felt her fingers curling into fists at the thought that all the summer sunshine of her could dim for want of being seen by the likes of Samuel Pollard. “Bel,” she said helplessly, around the fire in her throat. “Queen of ducks and angels. You shall have poems written to you with a quill on fire. You shall have songs sung to you by enchanted harps. Whole branches of grammar will be invented only to praise you.”

“Ysabel Hawthorn,” she said, and she could not keep the heat from her voice, “demand better than to be worshipped by a crumb.”

“Friend,” she said, quietly, “have you travelled far today?” This was the traditional way to address one who might have come by the Antique Lands. It was sometimes a gamble; folk who knew the custom took offense at being so mistaken, and locals sometimes said it in jests of varying cruelty when one’s behaviour was at odds with Thistleford norms. Though there was only one question, there were many replies, and the egg vendor inclined their head and gave one of them. “I’ve travelled light, I’ve travelled dark, and I’m still on my way,” they said quietly.

I can think of no other craft that is so nobly cross-eyed as yours, with one eye gazing into the past, and another into the future.”

she didn’t sound angry at all, only sad, as she said, “when did you get so wise?” “Oh, just this morning,” said Ysabel, smiling, relieved. “Mama poured some wisdom into my oats.”

It is well known that folk journey into and out of Arcadia, just as it’s well known that people travel into and out of the Levant. But it’s not done regularly, reliably, or particularly safely; one understands that one’s life is about to irrevocably change by having embarked on the journey, by the rigours of the journey itself, and by all the mysteries attendant on arrival. 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. When Arcadia overlaps with the lands we know, it takes years to journey into it; when Arcadia is some distance away, it is possible to conceive of it as contemporary. It is always both at a remove and always immediate; always near to hand and very far away.

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.”

“What is a gift that comes at a cost?” “Hopefully more than what’s been lost,” said Rin,

“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.

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.

“I’m not a complete dolt; I know you don’t care a fig for me. But we’re very alike, you know. We’re both family-minded people; we’re both stubborn, persistent—” “Stubborn!” Esther snapped. “If the one I wanted had said no to me, I’d have nursed a broken heart, not whined at them like a puppy until they petted me!”

Ysabel’s eyes widened, then brimmed with tears. She had never been so far from her parents that her voice couldn’t reach them. “Esther, are we lost?” Esther looked around, at the twisting, thick-limbed trees and the dewy green light. She felt some stirring in her heart that cautioned her against answering the question; lost felt like a shifting, chancy word, a dangerous word to apply to oneself in Arcadia. More than that: she understood that she needed to be brave for Ysabel. “I’m sure we can find our way back, Bel,” said Esther, firmly.

Children are not reliable keepers of time, but neither is Arcadia. Who, then, can say whether the girls spent hours or minutes in that enchanted wood? To them, it felt endless—they marked the time by how long it took their clasped hands to sweat, then parted only as long as it took to dry them on their clothes before holding each other again.

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.”

Well, I’d walk you out, but it’ll take me a month or so out of my way—” “A month?” Esther gasped. “We can’t have been gone a month—” “Hush, child, nor have you. You’re small—your names and lives sit lightly on you, and you can trip in and out of all manner of places whether you’re careful or carefree. I’m on a different path, and differently burdened, and have an appointment to keep; the mill is anxious to receive me, and its heart would break if I bent my feet away from it now.

It hurt Ysabel that Esther kept wanting to go back to that place that had so frightened them; it hurt Esther that Ysabel wanted nothing more to do with the most interesting thing that had ever happened to them.

“I don’t even know what I want. No, it’s—more that I want … something I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want what I do know, and you’re what I know best, Bel.”

They made up their song in secret. They made it the way children sometimes make up a language to hide from adults, all invented vocabulary tacked on to borrowed syntaxes, when they know, but cannot yet explain, what grammar is.

Every mill is necessarily the site of complex translations: water becomes the movement of stones; the movement of stones crushes grain into flour; flour, in and of itself, is a substance made to undergo further transformations, most often by mixing with the very water that ground it before being baked into bread. As such a mill is peculiarly attuned to grammar,

A swan’s language is a swirl of currents, in water and air: a swan’s body reads a kind of literature in the waves and clouds before launching herself between their lines.

Think back, what’s the first rule of grammar?” Rowan thought. “Every conjugation is also a translation,” she recited dutifully. “But not every translation conjugates. Transformation implies movement, but things can move without being transformed.” “Yes. And so every conjugation has a logic, a pattern—a road along which to move.”

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.

“Now,” murmured Agnes, lifting her willow wand, “hold her, Rin, and don’t let go, whatever shapes she passes through.” Rin tightened their grip, and braced. The swan became fire, then snow; the snow became lightning, then thorns. Rin held the burning, scorching, stabbing shapes of her closer and closer, winced and bled the bright, clear blood of Arcadians over her, while Agnes muttered grammar forwards and backwards, coaxing the truth of the woman back into memory and flesh. Then, there she was—naked and nameless in the arms of her lover, save for a silver ring, but otherwise all herself.

The drowned woman stared at them. She stared at her hands, her arms—paler than they had been, closer to Rin’s colouring now, and with a rainbow sheen to them, like oil.

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.

Demand better.

Days and nights in the lands we know proceed at a regular, repeatable pace; one can count them like coins, line them up in denominations.

“Friend,” said Ysabel’s father, standing. “Have you travelled far today?” “Half a candle’s breadth I roam,” said Rin, sadly, “with just enough to light me home.”

everyone tasted grammar on the air like honey and salt,

“Arcadians can’t sing. Esther told me that.” Her voice caught on the thorn of her sister’s name, and tore. She swallowed around the pain

“Esther and I had a song we made up together when we were small. No one else knows it. It’s a riddle song.” Ysabel drew a deep breath, lifted her chin, and sang. Oh what is longer than the way? And Esther replied, The time from you I’ve spent away. Ysabel’s eyes brimmed, and she took a step closer. Oh what is deeper than the sea? And Esther answered from her hollow wooden heart, The depth of my true love for thee. On the last verse, Ysabel reached out a hand to touch the harp, as her tears spilled and their voices wove together: Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.

as they looked at her Ysabel understood, suddenly, every time Esther had struggled to describe Rin without reference to landscapes and seasons.

You’ll want to know, of course, what Rin said to Ysabel. It’s only natural, and I am sympathetic. But if I told you, you’d be in possession of a terrible secret, wouldn’t you? One that kings and grammarians alike would kill to possess. And who are you, ultimately, to be trusted with a way into Arcadia? Who’s to say you aren’t yourself a grammarian, or a king? 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.