Then Shall the Trees of the Woods Sing Out
(1 Chronicles 16:33)
Tirzah steps through the tangle of undergrowth, her coat catching on twisted, thorny branches, and immediately it is as if she has slipped into another time. Or maybe time is absent from these woods. The feeling intensifies as she makes her way down the bank. It’s like wading through a knee-deep, fast-running current of water: each step is a struggle. The ground is close-covered with glossy ivy now, and she picks her way carefully through the black tendrils snaking underfoot. The bag on her back grows heavier, and the straps bite into her shoulders. There is a constant rustling amongst the seared brambles, and the air is noticeably colder as she descends. Tirzah has a sense there are no living, warm creatures left alive in the undergrowth, but she tells herself that is not true. Animals hibernate; they stay cosy and safe in their little nests. And there is Brân, somewhere about. The air smells powerfully of composting plants and fungus. Above, the beech trees rub their veiny branches against each other, although she cannot detect a breeze. There are no signs of the birds she thought she saw a while ago.
Tirzah is having difficulty seeing across the tinkling water. The stream’s margins are fringed with hundreds of icicles, thin as pencils. Now that she is poised to cross, she hesitates, unsure of her plan. Her limbs are uncoordinated, and there is an unfamiliar weakness in her lower back. The winter afternoon is racing down to meet her in a glacial mist. She almost turns around, but is stopped by a sound. At once her reluctance becomes an urgent need to move forward, and she leaps across the stones, slipping and filling her boot with water so cold it’s as if her instep has been stabbed. Then she is scrambling on the icy grass, bending double for a moment to keep herself from falling. Straightening up, she hears the noise again: a slow creaking, altogether out of place amongst the trees. Tirzah cannot stop now, and walks doggedly on into the clearing with its scorched earth. Barely any snow has fallen here. The creaking is closer, and the blood in the chambers of her heart stalls. She lifts her eyes, aware of a bitter gush of spit washing her tongue, and allows the bag on her back to fall. Brân, she says aloud, in a stranger’s voice. Oh, Brân.
And there he is, hanging from the biggest beech tree, his body like a rotten bolster, his shaggy, ruined head wrenched to one side by the rope. She steps closer, and realises the crows are silently feasting on his semi-frozen flesh, their ragged wings flapping, their bright eyes unblinking as they jostle each other for space. One clings to the rope, wings knifing the air like black blades. There is a noiseless flip as the world overturns, and Tirzah sinks, suspended between the trampled earth and the high, grave sky, her eyes locked on Brân’s icy, blood-black face and wounded scalp. She sees the empty eye sockets and lipless mouth, his devoured tongue and stiff, gnarled hands. Her throat contracts as if someone has grabbed it with a powerful fist. One of the boots Biddy left for him is lying open-mouthed on the ground. She looks at Brân’s naked, filthy foot with its long, curved nails. The truth of what she sees pushes at her heart, and she cowers from it. Brân and his crows, she thinks dully. Brân, the Prince of Crows. And she lies on the perishing cold ground with a silence like the end of everything crushing her. When she comes back to herself she detects the creaking music of the rope and the feathered manoeuvrings of the feeding birds, but still she cannot move.
A ringing starts in her head, and her tongue is so dry it is stuck to her mouth’s roof. The sweetly nauseating smell lying over the clearing permeates her lungs; she can taste it. The hulking trees lean over, and she struggles, inch by inch, to stand. When she regains her feet she sways, unable to clear her thoughts, and retches. She wants to expel the vileness that has seeped into her with the cold air, but there is no moisture in her. Her eyes are filled with Brân’s lonely, shrivelled body. The crows continue to fight and feed, ripping strips of flesh efficiently from his face and neck. The biggest bird, the one she thinks Brân listened to on the night she stayed with him, is jabbing his horny beak into Brân’s frigid eye socket, and after each successful jab, he turns his head to look at her, his gaze glowing and untroubled. Leave him alone! she screams, and the scream startles the birds into letting go and awkwardly flapping out of reach. She runs at the body, beating the air around him with her arms. But when she stops, exhausted, her face smeared with snot and tears, the birds resettle. Tirzah stands, gasping and shivering, unwilling to move in case Brân needs her, crushed by her failure to save him.
The minutes outside the wood tick on, and the invisible sun slips down the snow-laden sky. Eventually she becomes aware of the shadows growing in the hollows under the trees. Without knowing where she is headed, Tirzah starts to walk, leaving the bag where it fell. Soon she cannot hear the creaking rope any more. Around her tiny flickers appear, and she realises it is still snowing. The flakes whisper amongst the naked branches, and the air is laced with white skeins. On she goes amongst the trees, almost blinded, unmindful of where she is, and as she stumbles, images of Brân flash and twist before her: Brân with his spear and headdress in the leafy sunlight, Brân sharing his food, Brân showing her his grass-filled den, his sharp eyes glinting across the fire. The smell of crushed ferns as Brân lay between her legs, his unsubstantial body labouring. The tangy smell of him. Tirzah has to rest, and leans against a towering beech, unseeing, her leg muscles twitching. Gradually she becomes aware of something lighter ahead, amongst the tree gloom, and starts towards it. Coming nearer, she realises that here, in the woods she knows, is something she has never encountered before.
Behind the huge, mossy boles of the beeches, slim white birches hover like wraiths, and Tirzah walks eagerly towards them. In a huge circle they hold back the forest with pliant arms, and it is as if their coverings of silvery, fraying bark give out a faint light. The circle’s empty centre is blanketed with untouched snow, and Tirzah hesitates, reluctant to walk any further. The open sky is mauve and subtly moving, the clearing an untroubled shield to hold against the terror behind her. Here there are no crows; there is nothing to fear. Tirzah stands, transfixed. She senses a kind of rapture amongst the radiant, delicate trees. On the edge of hearing, a voiceless song mingles with the snow-muffled silence, neither breaking nor filling it. Here again, hovering at her eye’s corner, she is aware of the shining white presence that visited her on silent wings in the twilight one evening long ago. The open fields and wild places are its home, and yet she senses it inside her, gazing out from her own eyes at the impenetrable, secret woods.
So the boundless world is all things, both good and bad, she thinks, as snow feathers her hair and catches on her eyelashes. And I am part of it. And so was poor Brân, and so are all the people I love, and beyond them, all the folk I will never know. She thinks of Osian and the discarded train set, and his lost mother waiting. If only he’d understood about the valley, how limitless it is and full of mystery. Her mind darts to how she used to dream about other sorts of people, undiscovered yet, living their lives in the world, and she smiles at the girl she used to be. Finally, she thinks about the front room at home with its warm crib and sleeping baby. Her mother and father will be back soon.
The slender trees stand shoulder to shoulder with her. Reaching out to touch their papery skins, she knows she must go soon. A wave of energy flushes her cheeks and expands her heart. Snowflakes hiss and twirl, white on white on white, and the silver birches come and go in the dusk. Tirzah hears a sweet and lonely tune high up in the woods: thousands of branches are dancing in the chilly air. She turns her mind to the long rows of lighted red-brick houses and pictures Biddy standing at the bay window, watching the darkening street. From across the fields, on the cold wind, she can almost hear her unnamed baby girl crying for her, and feels milk spreading warm as blood from her breasts. Without a backward glance she leaves the circle of glimmering trees and the empty snow-spread clearing at their heart, and runs, surefooted, away through the woods. She is glad to abandon the feasting, ravenous crows and the husk of Brân swaying in his tree. Glad to fo
rget even the lovely birches and the brilliant snow. I must go home, she thinks, as she runs effortlessly out of the woods and across the white fields. My whole ungovernable life is there, waiting to begin.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Juliet, all the wonderful folk at Oneworld and to Cathryn Summerhayes, my hugely supportive and unflappable agent.
I am grateful also to my writing group, Edgeworks, and to my neighbour Will for his advice about the spelling and use of some of the Welsh phrases in this book.
Also, to my family and friends, a heartfelt thanks.
Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Norman Schwenk, without whose bolstering presence, unfailing humour and wide-ranging knowledge of stuff I couldn’t have written this book.
A Oneworld Book
First published in Great Britain & Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2018
This ebook published 2018
Copyright © Deborah Kay Davies, 2018
The moral right of Deborah Kay Davies to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78607-444-7
eISBN 978-1-78607-445-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Tirzah and the Prince of Crows Page 33