Wolves by Simon Ings

Author:Simon Ings [Ings, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575119901
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

THE SHAMAN

The opening passages to The Shaman, Michel’s first novel, go something like this.

A subtle current bears Cole inland, over flooded levels, past the comically bloated corpses of drowned cattle. Rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees. The new coastline rises incrementally above this shallow sea: an unreliable medium, a waterland where men and livestock founder and blue lights flicker mysteriously in the hours before morning. Inland, axes ring out as the locals, obeying a long-suppressed folk-memory, chop wood for boats of shallow draught and, salivating, eye the skies for teal, widgeon and wintering geese.

Cole is an old man now, perhaps the oldest in the village, his long life earned through guile and a fertile imagination, but he has grown weary of the land, weary of the tales he tells and all the claims which he exerts there. Discontented, he makes for the open ocean, seeking renewal, perhaps – or extinction. But he is, after all, just a dotty old man, the genius of his own place but a fool beyond it, and the sea wall, long since submerged by the rise of the world’s oceans, presents an absolute barrier to his ambitions. No way can his keel-less and homemade raft negotiate the surf that wall kicks up.

So the urge to flee dies in him, as it has died so many times before, and Cole contents himself with a wet and exhilarating attempt to explore the ruins there. The waves will not allow him to get close, and every so often the foamy break threatens to overturn his craft, but Cole persists (it is his chief quality), filling in with his imagination what will not reveal itself to his eye.

Of the houses that were ranged along the sea wall, only stumps of masonry remain to cut the surface at ebb tide. Under the sea’s merciless action, these stumps are falling away very fast – faster than the seaweed and the limpets can colonise them. There is something proud about their ruin, as though they would sooner be extinguished than be subsumed into an age to which they do not belong.

Time is getting on. Cole steers away from the wall, toward lagoon-smooth inner waters and his first acts of daily ritual. Adaptability is his great strength; his only virtue. The old world dies. The old man lives.

Away from the churn thrown up by the submerged wall, Cole throws out his primitive sea anchor – a wicker dog basket, attached by its handle to a length of plastic clothes line – and waits patiently for the bell to sound. Cole understands, better than most, the flow of waters round these parts, and comes to this spot once, sometimes twice a day to hear the church bell in its squat and flooded tower not far beneath the waves. The changing tide sets it ringing, three times, sometimes four. Once, at full moon he heard it sound a dozen times, and trembled, expecting a marvel. A big wave. A flood. A great bubble of marsh-gas.

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