Read Online The Fall of Light by Niall Williams - Free Book Online
Authors: Niall Williams
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and sit back and look into the distance.
The gypsies had travelled south in the dying of the year. Once, they had come from abroad in Europe in the hidden compartments
of ships and through the secret ports that were used by spies. They had travelled to this country not from need or flight,
but simply because it was there, because it was marked on the outer edge of maps and looked the splintered part of some greater
whole, and because they could not be still. Motion was natural, they believed. Nothing living stood still, and in their travels
they had seen the variety of the world and accumulated its slow wisdom. Some of them had journeyed around the perimeter of
the shore and then left once more. Others, drawn by the green mesmerism of the land, voyaged around it in covered caravans.
They took to its crooked roads and found the circuitous routes that defied the usual measurement of progress to be an apt
landscape for gypsies. These were roads that went nowhere. They were begun without concept of destination or, at best, no
hurried sense of arrival. They were the grassy thoroughfares shouldered by hedgerows and stone walls along which the gypsies
that remained lost all sense of time. Theirlives, which had once been measured by the new places they discovered, now took on the dimension of a long somnambulant dream.
They were not sure if the fields they passed were the ones they had passed only days before. And soon they did not care. The
oldest among them, whom they called Elihah, told them that they could not even be certain that the rain that was falling had
not fallen on them before, for sometimes they travelled into the past. One day’s weather became the next, and their ancient
language was discovered short of enough words to describe the thousand different rains. The seasons were not the seasons of
their childhood years before, the summer might have been the autumn and the winter was sometimes not over until the leaves
appeared and fell again in one windy week. At last, they grew accustomed to such seamless time and rode their ragged caravans
on through it, content in the simplicity of such living. Now, many unrecorded years later, their origins had almost vanished.
Elihah remembered he had once been a child in a ship on the sea, but whether that was the journey that brought him there,
or was a voyage even more distant in time, or simply one that he had dreamed in the seas of his mother’s womb, he could not
tell. His grandchildren were already old men, many of them gone back across the water to the great shelf of the continent,
wandering untraceable paths and lost to their greater families until by chance or design their roads might meet again at a
campfire or fair in this life or another.
The gypsies of Elihah had remained on in that rainy island for so long that they grew to know the ways of the natives. They
knew the sympathy for outlaws that endured there in the hearts of men, and the evergreen curiosity of people to know what
the rest of the world was like. And so they traded not only in tin and copper, but in stories too. They learned a version
of the native language. In it they told stories to those who would come to their caravans and peer in at Mara, the bearded
beauty, or at Petruk, a giant who ate the branches of elderberry, and in the conjuring of places far away they could retouch
their lost origins. They told of countries they knew but in truth had never seen, though they could describe them in such
vivid detail that the listeners walked away with the dazzling vision of places more strange than fairy tale. In all of their
tales the heroes suffered outrageously, there were wrongful rulers, and fierce oppression, exiled wanderingsin strange lands, floods and famine. These were the stories the natives enjoyed, and the gypsies could link one to the other
like threads in a fabric, making the tapestry longer and longer until it threatened a kind of
The gypsies had travelled south in the dying of the year. Once, they had come from abroad in Europe in the hidden compartments
of ships and through the secret ports that were used by spies. They had travelled to this country not from need or flight,
but simply because it was there, because it was marked on the outer edge of maps and looked the splintered part of some greater
whole, and because they could not be still. Motion was natural, they believed. Nothing living stood still, and in their travels
they had seen the variety of the world and accumulated its slow wisdom. Some of them had journeyed around the perimeter of
the shore and then left once more. Others, drawn by the green mesmerism of the land, voyaged around it in covered caravans.
They took to its crooked roads and found the circuitous routes that defied the usual measurement of progress to be an apt
landscape for gypsies. These were roads that went nowhere. They were begun without concept of destination or, at best, no
hurried sense of arrival. They were the grassy thoroughfares shouldered by hedgerows and stone walls along which the gypsies
that remained lost all sense of time. Theirlives, which had once been measured by the new places they discovered, now took on the dimension of a long somnambulant dream.
They were not sure if the fields they passed were the ones they had passed only days before. And soon they did not care. The
oldest among them, whom they called Elihah, told them that they could not even be certain that the rain that was falling had
not fallen on them before, for sometimes they travelled into the past. One day’s weather became the next, and their ancient
language was discovered short of enough words to describe the thousand different rains. The seasons were not the seasons of
their childhood years before, the summer might have been the autumn and the winter was sometimes not over until the leaves
appeared and fell again in one windy week. At last, they grew accustomed to such seamless time and rode their ragged caravans
on through it, content in the simplicity of such living. Now, many unrecorded years later, their origins had almost vanished.
Elihah remembered he had once been a child in a ship on the sea, but whether that was the journey that brought him there,
or was a voyage even more distant in time, or simply one that he had dreamed in the seas of his mother’s womb, he could not
tell. His grandchildren were already old men, many of them gone back across the water to the great shelf of the continent,
wandering untraceable paths and lost to their greater families until by chance or design their roads might meet again at a
campfire or fair in this life or another.
The gypsies of Elihah had remained on in that rainy island for so long that they grew to know the ways of the natives. They
knew the sympathy for outlaws that endured there in the hearts of men, and the evergreen curiosity of people to know what
the rest of the world was like. And so they traded not only in tin and copper, but in stories too. They learned a version
of the native language. In it they told stories to those who would come to their caravans and peer in at Mara, the bearded
beauty, or at Petruk, a giant who ate the branches of elderberry, and in the conjuring of places far away they could retouch
their lost origins. They told of countries they knew but in truth had never seen, though they could describe them in such
vivid detail that the listeners walked away with the dazzling vision of places more strange than fairy tale. In all of their
tales the heroes suffered outrageously, there were wrongful rulers, and fierce oppression, exiled wanderingsin strange lands, floods and famine. These were the stories the natives enjoyed, and the gypsies could link one to the other
like threads in a fabric, making the tapestry longer and longer until it threatened a kind of
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