The Singing Spring

Stories for Another Day

There was once a man who had one son, but his wife died, so he married again and had six more children. The youngest was a girl that he named Septima. But then his second wife died too. The man could not manage all of these children by himself, so he gave them to various aunties and cousins to be looked after. The very youngest, Septima, he begged his grandmother to take care of. Then he set out to travel the world, and whether by choice or by accident, he was never heard of again.

Septima was a tiny baby, and the grandmother was very, very old. One day as she was cooking and singing to herself, she heard the baby in her cradle singing the same song she had just been singing. The grandmother smiled to herself, and from then on, she set herself to teach Septima all the songs that she knew.

While she was still in her cradle, the grandmother sang funny rhyming songs, and Septima laughed and clapped her fat little hands. When she was a toddler, the grandmother sang songs that told the stories of her people, ballads and folk songs. When Septima was older still, learning to chop vegetables and scrub the floors, the grandmother sang about the making of all creatures and the wonders of the heavens, the stars and the forces that made them move, the winds and the waters, how they were formed and how they should be cared for.

Many a time when there was a new birth or a homecoming, the grandmother would be asked to sing to bless the baby or express the joy in everyone’s hearts. If someone should chance to die, of old age or sickness, the grandmother would sing songs of sorrow and lament to accompany the people in their grief and to bring them comfort. Septima would often go with her, and when their two voices joined, people said they had never heard anything more beautiful or more powerful.

One day when Septima was old enough to care for the garden herself, and do the cooking and cleaning so that her grandmother could rest, her grandmother said to her, “Septima, it’s time for you to go.”

“Go where, Grandmother?” Septima asked brightly. She was sewing a patch on her working pants and humming to herself as she did it. “Do you want me to go to the market for you?”

“I mean,” the old lady said, “it’s time for you to leave. It’s time for you to go out into the world by yourself, and do what you must do. You are a Singer, and that’s not given to everyone. And it’s not given to anyone lightly.”

“But, Grandmother,” Septima said, horrified, “who will look after you and carry in the wood for the fire, and read to you, and help you dress?” For the grandmother was so old, that she was nearly blind, and she needed help with almost everything.

“Don’t worry about that,” the old lady said. “One of the cousins will come and live with me, or I’ll go and stay with one of your brothers.”

Septima shook her head. “No, I won’t go,” she said. “You have looked after me since I was a baby, and now it’s my turn to take care of you.”

The grandmother kissed her sadly. “I have taken care of you and I have loved you and I will never stop loving you, but now it’s time for you to go.” She began to sing a song Septima had never heard before, that almost brought her to tears. It stirred up a longing in her very soul, a hunger she didn’t know she had, to see what was in the world and what she could do about it. She found her feet moving towards the door in spite of herself.

The singing was like two hands pushing her out of the door. As soon as she turned and put her foot on the path outside, the song was like a merry jig that lightened her heart and her footsteps, but when she tried to turn and go back in, it was like a wall keeping her out of the house.

The grandmother sang and sang, more strongly and more beautifully than Septima had ever heard her sing before. With tears in her eyes, Septima let her feet carry her over the threshold and away down the road.

And so she went. She went to other villages and other towns, and sang for the people out of the joy of her heart and from the sorrow of her soul. She sang the music and the stories of the people wherever she went, and they welcomed her and gave her a place to stay and shared their food with her, until she felt a stirring that meant it was time for her to move on. For no matter where she went and what she did, she felt inside a deep urging to a task she had not found yet, a feeling that there was work to do that she had not completed yet.

Surely, she thought, this great gift has been given to me for an important reason, not just to sing for ordinary people in their day-to-day lives. And a great gift it was. No-one had ever sung with such beauty and power. She could sing the birds from the trees to circle in a great cloud around her, she could sing the rain out of the heavens, and sing the winds to sleep.

But as time went on, she found herself singing the same songs for this wedding or that birth, singing the same ballads that people asked for over and over. Discontent grew in her, and with it, resentment. Her singing became so bitter that people lost their taste for it and they turned away when she sang. She left the villages and towns and wandered alone in forests and in the wilderness, silent. The bitterness in her grew, and she could hardly remember any of her songs.

Then one day as she wandered through the forest, the earth beneath her feet began to tremble. “An earthquake!” she thought. The trees around her shook and a rumbling roar filled the air.

A song she had not known she knew rose up out of her. She sang with all her strength to the earth itself, of peace and quiet and calm. The shaking quieted, and the earthquake died to a murmur.

When she went to go on, she heard a distant voice crying. She followed the sound to the rocky wilderness at the edge of the forest. The earthquake had opened a crack in the earth, and at the bottom of the gaping split, there was a small boy, covered in dirt. He was barely three or four years old, and he was crying loudly. Septima had never seen such an ordinary-looking child, or one quite so dirty. She called to him, “Don’t cry. I’ll get you out.” The little boy stopped crying and looked up at her with a tear-stained, muddy face.

“It wants to eat me,” he said. “The ground opened its mouth and it’s trying to swallow me.”

“Don’t be silly, it was only an earthquake,” Septima said. “Hold on and I’ll get you out.”

The hole was not deep, only a little more than Septima’s height, but for a small boy it seemed very deep indeed. Septima took her knife from her pack and cut a long, thick vine from the forest. She tied one end securely around a big tree, then she threw the other end down to the boy.

“Can you pull yourself up?” she called.

The little boy shook his head. “It’s got my foot,” he said. “I told you, it wants to eat me.”

“What’s your name?” Septima asked.

“Rustum,” he answered.

“Well, Rustum, move over a bit and I’ll come down and get you out,” she said. Holding on to the vine, she let herself down into the hole.

It was exactly as the little boy had said. His foot was jammed between two rocks, and no matter how hard Septima pulled, she couldn’t get it out. It was as if the ground had closed its jaws around his foot.

She placed her hands on the rocks and began to sing. She let her song find its own way and gather its strength against the force that was holding the child’s foot. She felt the boy sigh and lean trustfully against her, and she sang with renewed strength until the very rocks shifted under her hands and released him.

As the rocks opened, a stream of water gushed suddenly up from the earth between them. Within seconds it was up to their knees.

“Quick! Up and out,” Septima said. “The earthquake must have opened up some kind of natural spring.”

She lifted Rustum up to grasp the rope and shoved him from below as he scrambled up out of the hole. The water had already reached her waist.

Rustum’s face popped over the edge of the hole, looking down at her. “Now you,” he smiled.

Septima smiled back and took hold of the rope, but as she went to climb, with the water already up to her shoulders, she discovered that her long hair had become caught in the rocks. She pulled at it frantically but it would not come free. The more she struggled, the more tangled it became. The water rose past her mouth and her nose. She snatched one last breath and sank down to try to free her hair, but it was no use. There was no air left in her lungs. Everything began to go black. Then she saw something fall past her, glittering and twisting as it dropped to the bottom of the hole. Her knife! Rustum had found her knife and thrown it down to her.

Her fingers scrabbled among the rocks until she found it, then she sawed through the strands of her hair in handfuls, until she was free. She swam to the top of the hole and clambered out. She and Rustum hugged each other and laughed for sheer joy.

“You saved me!” Rustum shouted.

“You saved me!” Septima answered. They grinned at each other. They looked back and saw that the spring had already bubbled up over the rim of the hole, and water was streaming down the hillside, carving a bed for itself as it flowed.

They sat down together and ate some of the food Septima had in her backpack, and then it was time for Rustum to set off for home. He hugged her fiercely and said, “Will I never see you again?”

Septima shrugged her shoulders and said, “Who knows?” She was full of amazement at the things that had happened in a single day. She felt that the bitterness inside her had been washed away. Her heart was light again, and full of joy.

In fact, they did meet again, just once, but that is a story for another day.

Rustum put his head on one side and said, “Your hair looks funny.”

Septima smiled and said, “Go along now – it’s time you were home. I’ll sing you a song to set you on your way.” A new song had bubbled up in her like the fresh water of the spring. As she sang, it pushed Rustum along like a friendly hand and made his feet skip.

The water that rose up from the spring, clean and pure, flowed without stopping from that day on, bringing life and health to all the land around it. Everyone called it Rustum’s Spring, or sometimes the Singing Spring, but if you asked them, no-one could ever tell you why.