Mire Read online

  MIRE

  The Riverbed

  Book One

  Vivien Leanne Saunders

  ‘Mire’ and ‘The Riverbed’ Series are Copyright © 2019 by Vivien Leanne Saunders. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover design and Illustrations by Vivien Leanne Saunders

  Source images all public domain from Unsplash

  Proofed and Edited by Vivien Leanne Saunders, George Glass and Jane Martin

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Vivien Leanne Saunders

  Visit my website at https://sivvusleanne.wixsite.com/authorvls

  Printed by KDP Direct

  First Printing: 2019

  Amazon

  For every soul who knows how to breathe at the bottom of the river, and for the people who pull us out when we want to sink.

  Velvet and satin and puppets on strings

  Everyone's dancing with Lady Marlene

  Fear is the colour of all that they wear

  Mother of pearl palace cold like her heart of stone

  KATZENJAMMER, ‘LADY MARLENE’

  Drunk and driven by the devil’s hunger

  Into the water let it pull him under

  Don’t you lift him, let him drown alive

  Let that fever make the water rise

  DELTA RAE, ‘BOTTOM OF THE RIVER’

  CHAPTER 1

  I had been dead for less than an hour when my mother dumped me into the river.

  The summer was so hot that sweat trickled down people’s faces like rancid fat. Flies spewed from the sewers and squirmed into grey cuts of meat and jugs of sour milk. The pox closed every fifth person into its pustular embrace. A body would rot quickly in such heat, and the last thing my family needed was a rancid corpse putrefying in their kitchen. Perhaps that had been at the top of my mother’s mind, or perhaps she had already done all of her grieving. I had spent weeks withering away.

  I do not blame her for her mistake.

  Still, she did not spare a moment to embrace her child, to whisper that she loved me or to bid me goodbye. I remember that there was only silence, and the heavy pain in my head, and then suffocating darkness as the lid of the coffin slid over me.

  The river was full of grime and sewage close to the docks, but as my coffin floated downstream the water grew cool and sweet. The smell of good air and green plants revived me a little, and I felt a fine mist through the seal between the base and the lid. In her hurry, my mother had forgotten to seal the cheap coffin closed. I was lucky that the carpenter had made it well despite the rough edges; it floated as well as a boat, and carried its slight passenger in the current without a murmur.

  I have no idea how long I slept for, lulled by the gentle swaying of my boat. Sometimes I was lucid, but when I forced my eyes open they stung with salt, and when I struggled to move my arms I could not reach to wipe it away.

  I dread to think what would have happened if my dazed idiocy had faded away. The wooden lid was a bare inch from my nose. To this day I have nightmares about opening my eyes and seeing the close, rough grain. I never saw the inside of my coffin, and so I had no idea that I had been buried alive.

  My world splintered around me.

  The rocks felt too hard against my hot skin, and I feebly shoved them away until my arms broke free. The coffin cracked and shuddered, and another plank of wood groaned and drifted away. Dim sunlight burst through the gap. I recoiled from it and felt sand beneath my bare feet.

  Panic gave me strength, and as more of the light spilled through the traitor coffin I dug my fingers and toes into the sand and struggled free. For a beautiful moment I was completely submerged. I felt delicious cool water sliding into my ears and my mouth. Then I opened my eyes, saw the surface shimmering above me, and choked. I pushed myself forwards and out of the wreckage onto the shore.

  The sun was setting when a woman found me lying in the shallows. Her cry of disgust woke me, but I did not have the strength to look up. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and when she rolled me onto my back she grunted. My clothes were sodden and weighed my dry husk of a body down. Mother had wrapped me in my finest dress, and a thick woollen cloak, so that whatever river demon claimed me would be kind. He would know that I had been loved.

  Such profound love! The stranger who pressed her hand to my nostrils cared more for me. When she felt my struggling breath against her fingertips she cursed. I heard every footstep as she stomped away. The mud made a sucking sound, and her breath rasped in her throat.

  I was alone. I lay, and looked up at the stars, and my breath crackled and wheezed like the birds in the trees. It was peaceful, now that the woman was gone. I was not afraid.

  The river I was lying in carried the waste from the city all the way down to the sea. The filth and rotting food bled away into the banks, and the water was clear by the time it reached the village where I had landed. The glacial beauty was deceptive. The rapid current carried the dead. There were enough hidden pools and deserted stretches for the bodies to disappear even before they were shoved out into the ocean.

  The farmers and villagers buried their dead. To them, the river was not a sacred resting place, but a rotting stretch of carrion and flesh. They did not fish in it, nor drink a drop. The river belonged to the dead. Nothing good would ever come from it.

  It was no surprise, then, that my arrival caused a great deal of trouble.

  Petra did not want to admit that she had been to the riverbank. The fat old shrew ran back to me ahead of the men from the village, and she pinched my ears until I started to wail.

  “I heard you screaming. That’s how I found you.” she hissed. “If you tell them anything different I’ll twist your ear right off.” To prove it, she gave the lobe another sharp yank and dug her nails in. It was a particular trick she had, and when I met her husband I saw that his ears were permanently dimpled from it. Many other villagers had the same look, so I suppose the punishment was common to these people. When she backed off my headache returned with a vengeance.

  “Here!” Petra cried, and made a great show of lifting me into her arms. The mud slapped onto her homespun dress, and she grunted again in distaste. Fixing her face into something like sympathy, she peered down at me and I saw her long nose, the leathery skin, and the rotting brown teeth. “There, little girl. It’s alright.”

  “Where did she come from?” Someone demanded. Their boots paced across the dry land as they refused to come any closer.

  I heard the tremor in a second man’s voice. “The river spat her out.”

  There was a low muttering at this. Petra dropped me back into the mud. A man started shouting. He had seen the skeleton of my coffin. Heads turned to look; hearts turned to ice.

  They said I had died – truly died – and that the river had sent me back. It was utter nonsense born of the stories that their grandfathers had created, and yet to my infant ears it did not seem so unlikely. I remembered dying, wasn’t that true? There had been a great sense of peace, and the darkness had felt rich and thick. I could see, but not speak. That made sense too, for the dead cannot speak to the living. Through a chain of nonsense, a five year old convinced herself that she had died, and that the winnowing river had borne her into new life as gently as a mother’s floating womb.

  I felt sinewy arms lifting me up. The men tried to set me
on my feet but I could not stand. The strength that had let me drag myself ashore had been burned away by the fever, and I hung from their arms as limply as a rag doll. Hands fell onto me, and one by one they pulled my sodden dress away until I only had my goose-fleshed skin to protect me from the night. The hands touched me again, calloused and impersonal. They turned my limbs out and around like cuts of meat, muttering to each other about every freckle and scar, until finally they were satisfied that I was not a demon.

  “It does not mean that she is human.” Petra dropped me back down into the mud and picked up my dress, running her calloused hands over the fine fabric. One of the men snatched it away from her and threw it into the water.

  “Someone wanted the river to take her. I say we send her back.” he growled. Someone laughed, and then smothered the sound with their hand. He dragged the coffin lid from the rocks and studied the rough handiwork before dumping it back into the stream. “A man made that, not a ghost. The girl is sick. Perhaps her family did not want to see her die.”

  There was a murmur. I have painted these men as heartless, but it wasn’t quite true. They were frightened, but even cowards will not readily send a child to her death. If I was a ghost then they could abandon me without feeling a shred of guilt, but they were not so blinded by superstition that they couldn’t see me shivering in the mud. Petra planted her hands on her hips and raised her voice.

  “So, either someone dumped a dying brat downriver, or the river demon spat this thing into our laps to curse us. How do we decide?”

  The sensible man knelt in the mud beside me. His hand touched my face, and then I felt wool tickling my skin as he covered me with his coat and lifted me up. It was the first kindness any of them had shown me, and I instinctively curled up against him as he carried me through the group.

  “She needs to be fed and cared for. If you want to argue about demons then it can wait until she recovers. If she dies, at least you’ll know that the river is saving its jokes for another day.”

  “Jokes?” Someone spluttered, and a few voices rose angrily. The man held me a little tighter, and his hand stroked my hair.

  “Would you sacrifice an innocent child to your fear?” he demanded, and I felt his anger rumbling in his chest as his voice rose. “If she lives you can lock her away and inspect her flesh for any black-marks you want, but I will not let a little girl freeze to death while you argue!”

  The men fell into a sullen silence, but I felt their glares burning the skin on my back.

  “You’ll be a wonderful nursemaid, Landen.” Petra sneered. The man shook his head and I felt a sudden imbalance as he held me out to her. I whimpered, convinced I was going to fall, and he cursed and drew me closer.

  “I will take her to your house, Mrs. Heim.” His voice had become strangely formal. “The child needs a mother.”

  “I’m not the only woman in this village.” she said flatly, and looked around the group. “Any of your wives could do it.”

  “But none of them pulled her out of the river.” One of the men retorted.

  She breathed out sharply through her nose and then stormed off in the sucking mud. My stomach churned as I realized that they were really going to leave me with the twisted bat. I whined and struggled until Landen understood and let me loose so I could throw up. There was nothing in my stomach, only bile, and it tasted as bitter and metallic as blood.

  They say that I screamed and struggled for three days, but I cannot remember a second of it. The taste of metal stayed tart on my tongue, and every time the darkness coaxed me closer the bitterness made me shy away. The people of Singen did not make sweet things, and for those three days the women kept me alive on mushroom broth which festered in my stomach. I hated it, but my body started to heal and my stomach growled for it.

  Petra rapped my knuckles with a spoon the first time I tried to snatch the bowl away. She did not see me as a child; she cared for me attentively because she relished the attention. Every animal action I made was described in garish detail to the villagers who peeked under my blankets and prodded my skin.

  Petra and her husband feasted on the breads and stews which their neighbours brought so that they could gape at me. The food was filling and hearty, perfect for nourishing a sickly child. Strange, then, that I stayed thin while my nursemaid grew fat!

  The more pallid and ungainly I looked, the more people gossiped. I looked like the creature they were afraid of. Petra began walking me to the fields and back each day, leaving me in the sun until my skin turned blotchy. She shaved my head bald and told the others I had been riddled with lice. She dressed me in her own clothes rather than accepting anything the other children had outgrown. With my shorn head and skinny wrists poking out of the bundled sleeves I made a convincing demon.

  Singen was built from clay and stone. Its ugly buildings surrounded a slime-slick spring which dribbled out of a sheer rock face. The villagers lurked in the mountain’s shadow like insects. Every man, woman and child spent their days hauling endless pails of spring water to their fields. The heavy labour gave them a peculiar appearance – short, stocky bodies with pale skin and arms that were so muscular they looked like they were wearing padded sleeves, even when they were naked. Even the children were misshapen. When my fever began to ease I thought I was still hallucinating when I saw their sickly, bulbous flesh.

  A few decades ago, a distant rockslide had diverted the river into Singen. It flooded through the barren soil, carrying seeds and planting them along the banks until the land sang with life. Despite this bounty, the villagers still carried their buckets to the fields. The babbling river taunted them for it.

  I only understood when I was older. The people of Singen did not read, sing, or carve. Without their work their lives were empty. If they stopped their endless toil, then their children would never understand their wasted years. How else could they respect the menial labour which had tied their ancestors to the spring?

  I was a timid child, and I had never learned to disobey an adult. For a long time all I could think about was how sleepy I felt. I fell asleep in the most unusual places – at the dinner table, or into the dirty laundry pile. Once I lay myself down on the grass beside the field and, when I woke up, found an enormous thistle prickling my bottom. When the urge to sleep took me I would not have cared if my bed was on fire.

  Petra never asked me for my name. I spent a month being called girl without feeling its loss, but when I was stronger I wondered if she knew what I was called. I knew I had a name, for nobody would have dressed their daughter in such a fine burial costume without calling her something, but I hadn’t heard the word in so long that I had forgotten it. A score of names flew through my mind, but none of them seemed to fit. I could have been called Meera, or Sylvia, or Teresa, but then so could my sister, or even my mother. I puzzled over it until my head hurt, and decided that if anyone wanted to give me a name I would use it. Maybe, one day, someone would give me back the one that I had lost.

  Sure enough, the villagers invented a name so they knew who to gossip about. The ones who liked me called me River, as if I could repay my debt to the dreary current by carrying its name on my lips. The ones who hated me called me Clay. I suppose one name is as good as another, but some spark of stubbornness made me adopt the second one. They meant it as an insult; I wore it with pride. The visiting neighbours winced when I greeted them with it. Petra refused to call me any name at all.

  I dreamed of my home every night. Slowly, the fishy stench of my city was eclipsed by the musk of mushrooms and moss. When the autumn leaves began to fall I had forgotten it entirely. My family’s faces took longer to die. One morning I awoke with my hands fisted at my eyes, pressing the lids into darkness as I desperately clung to one last dream. I knew that when it faded, I would have entirely forgotten that life. I rubbed my eyes until they stung with blue stars and red candle flames, and the shadow of my mother withered into ashes.

  To this day the desperation of my five-year-old self still m
akes me catch my breath. When I was older I returned to the city, and my feet found their way onto a familiar street. I knew that I had stepped on the round, dry cobblestones before – but every house looked the same, and even if my family still lived there I would not have known which door to knock upon.

  But none of that mattered to the child who sobbed her infancy into dust. Petra was awoken by my cries – great, heaving sobs, they were, sucked in through a gaping mouth – and she promised to give me something real to cry about. I bit back my wailing, pressing my hand to my hitching chest. I vowed to myself that I would never give Petra the satisfaction of making me cry. I wept for my mother, not for this hag. I could not remember the woman who had buried me, but I could feel her love in my sorrow.

  CHAPTER 2

  I spent my mornings exploring the village until the other children finished their chores. When they were done, I followed them and watched them play. I was too timid to join in. It wouldn’t have made a difference; every time I crept too close the children would throw stones or run away. Their parents had warned them about the river demon, but I knew they were more frightened of their fathers’ belts and their mothers’ sharp nails than they were of me. Only a few of the boys faced me down. They were twice my age, and had no patience for ghost stories. Their hearts were filled with so much stubbornness that it could not be beaten out of them.

  My mother would never have let me near boys like that, but as the weeks passed and I forgot her, the stern warnings left my ears. The boys were sullen and whispered about me, but as soon as their parents were out of earshot they stopped being cruel. I don’t mean that they were friendly; bullying me was just too much of an effort. They had a scant few hours to play every day before the sun set, and they were determined to indulge themselves for every minute of it.

  Goading an easy target lost its charm within a week, and after two I was allowed to creep closer and join in their games. When they explored, I trailed along behind them. When they fought, I clapped and cheered for whoever was winning, and when they chased each other I was always the last to be tagged.