The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

Brigid’s eyes caught hers, and she asked about her favourite songs, and they fell to talking like they’d known each other for years but had not seen each other for more, familiar and starved for each other,

“I thought,” said John, who wanted to be vicious, but wasn’t up to the task, “that witches hated giving up their greens. That they punished people for taking from their gardens. We did a whole show about it once.” She chuckled. “And why not? Everyone wants to see a witch punish someone for stealing from her. A witch is a kind of justice in the world. It makes for a fine story. No one wants to admit the truth, for all it stares them plainly in the face.” “What’s that?” “Steal from a woman long enough, and a witch is what she’ll become.”

The witch sipped her tea as she looked at him. It struck him, suddenly, that she wasn’t ugly at all—he couldn’t remember how he’d thought that.

The string around her finger glowed like metal in a forge, then snapped and sizzled away to nothing. Lydia herself began to glow, as if stars melted into her veins, and rose up from her blankets, rose further still, until she floated above him, her hair high and wild as the lightning, and the air around her crackled with power. “Liar,” she hissed, and the word burned bright as her hair. “Liar! You’ve tried to cut me and bind me like wheat all this time!” And she spoke back at him every truth she’d untwisted from his words, every piece of her he’d taken while seeming to give her gifts, every day he’d ruined with his sad jealous eyes reproaching her for hurting him with her happiness.

Bones jutted beneath his blackened skin like mountain peaks, twisted like serpents coiling, cracked and rumbled like a thundering sky—but settled, finally, solid and sound as good joinery.

To be read with care and attention and clarity is such a generous gift, and I wish every writer such kind and exacting fellows.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Hope Mirrlees for writing Lud-in-the-Mist, and to Terri Windling for introducing me to the stannary town of Chagford, its many wise and wonderful inhabitants, and Dartmoor more broadly. So much of The River Has Roots is a love letter to that enchanted place. I’m grateful, too, to Loreena McKennitt’s “The Bonny Swans” for first introducing me to the ballad type of the “Cruel Sister,” and to Emily Portman’s “Two Sisters,” for finally stirring up the itch in my soul to the point where it had to be scratched. Greater thanks than I can articulate are due to the El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe for their 2014 album Zajel and the transmission and preservation through it of “Tarweedeh Shmaali,” or “Lover’s Hymn,” which provided the inspiration for the Professors’ Hymn.

Hoda passed away in 2021, while I was just beginning to outline this story that I hoped to share with her. Her passing taught me things about grief that it is everyone’s portion to learn in time, if you’re going to love anyone at all: how a street in your city will be haunted by your memories of walking it to visit her; how finding unexpected scraps of her handwriting in your music books will make it impossible to play your instrument for a year, as you wish you’d made more of an effort to see her before her decline. I miss her deeply. She was an incredible teacher, warm and funny and kind. She taught me as much about pedagogy as she did about playing music. I wish I could have shared this book with her, but in the absence of being able to do that, I’m sharing these small parts of her with you.

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.