The Honey Month

by Amal El-Mohtar

  DAY 4

  Raspberry Rose Honey

  Colour: If yesterday was a Riesling, today is a Sauvignon Blanc. It’s just-turned-dawn coloured, pale and clear with less yellow than a hint of gold to come. The consistency is also much thinner than any of the previous honeys; this is much more liquid, not a hint of cloud to it.

  Smell: Very nearly odourless, but my first impression was of heat, of a roasted sweet, but then on second thought, no. Very faint hint of the unpleasant thick scent of the peach creamed honey, but that yielded such deliciousness, I’m delighted.

  Taste: There’s a hint of apple to this, but the rose! I taste rose petals, I taste scent. The raspberries are hidden—there’s a faint bit of tartness to the aftertaste, and that’s where they come out, but in the main it’s golden apple-light and pink roses gilding themselves in dawn. This is so beautiful, subtle and balanced and entwined with itself.

  Sleep now, my love, hush; I will lay this rose against your lips and you will breathe it in like a lullaby, let it lead you into sleep. Hush, my beauty, hush, my lovely, I will hang raspberries from your ears to draw the good dreams in, I will place honey on your tongue to sweeten your words to the princess you will meet among them, who will come riding a white cat with a silver buckle ‘round its neck, who will bear a standard and a sword and a pen about her person, who will ask you to fight for her glory and her crown. She will call herself Queen of Roses, and you will see the garland that thorns her brow, and it will seem splendid and terrible and worthy of your strength. She will ask you to speak a poem to her, and when she does, you must say,

  O Rose, aren’t you sick

  of metaphors, of perfection,

  of being Queen to a grasping multitude

  who’ve never brushed a thorn? Rose, I am sick

  of these shadows you cast on pages, of cheeks

  that would not know your colour

  if it sweetened their pale lips.

  Rose, I won’t touch you,

  I won’t kneel to drink you in,

  I won’t write you odes or sonnets,

  nor paint your gardens red. Rose,

  only love me,

  only let me speak this to you,

  only judge me worthy of you,

  and I will be content.

  And when you have done this, her mouth will grow stern. She will frown at you, say you have displeased her, and to remedy this you must journey far afield to the fountain of topaz and rubies that lies in the land of Nod-on-Thorn, and once there you must drink from the fountain and fall into a thousand years’ sleep, upon which time, if she has forgotten her displeasure, she will come with a lick of honey on her lips, press them against yours, and draw you back to wakefulness like water from a well.

  DAY 5

  Cranberry Creamed Honey

  Colour: Dark amber, cognac. Funny to me how I have such boozy associations, but they are apt.

  Smell: There’s a sharpness, a resinousness to this. It’s also very liquidy.

  Taste: A definite cranberry tartness, but the honey taste dominates; the tartness limns it, darts around its edges, makes it one of the more refreshing honeys I’ve tried. I think of pine, strangely, redwood; tasting it is like walking a forest path.

  There is fire in his wrists, fire in his sharp-shod walk, fire beneath his fingernails. He is red, redder than rowan berries, for rowan doesn’t bleed as cranberries do, and it is cranberries that he gathers, that he stews and crushes, cranberries in which he steeps his skin. Lacking a Mithrasian bull, he takes them, bathes in them, rinses his hair red-black, seeking transcendence.

  It is not white, he says, that is pure. It is not black. It is red, because it moves, it changes, and it keeps itself always. It is not static as fossilized wood, not delicate as new-fallen snow. When red seeks to be its truest self, it is in motion. It fears no change.

  He has shrugged at Paracelsus, at Tarot cards, at accusations of devilry. Red is his religion. He squeezes berry juice onto his eyelids, swallows it nine times a day, thrice at each meal. He wants the redness to spill from him like a scent, that in walking the forest paths the sleeping deer and wolves and rabbits will come to dream in garnet tones, will tremble and flush at the thought of pursuit, the game of the chase.

  The bees dream red when he passes.

  When they wake, their queen begins to wail. She needs it, she says, that red of reds that walks the woods like a shadow. The bees are dutiful, and go.

  They find him, but do not know how to scrape the redness from him, cannot brush it against their bodies, cannot gather it like pollen. In vain they stamp his cranberry cheeks, in vain they buzz his cranberry ears. They cannot take a piece of him back to the hive.

  Meantime he is beset by a phalanx of black-ribbed gold, drowns in the drone of their discontent. He swats at them, rages at them, gathers stings against the back of his hand, the curve of his elbow. What are these that come to gild his redness, limn his red thoughts with their bright noise? What are these that dare change his red shadow’s shape, settling and rising like clouds at sea?

  They madden him. They do not mean to. They hardly know that they are pushing him, driving him, herding the redness of him homeward.

  Enough, says the queen, while he weeps in great red sobs. Enough, that is enough. She does not need to leave her childbed to imbibe him, only needs him to stay in the comb of her children’s bodies, stay and share his colour with her. He cannot but comply.

  She dreams, and her workers pour red into their gold, raise larvae with rust-red bodies, make honey heady as the setting sun. They weave it into their songs and dance its colour into the air they breathe. There is an orange to them, an amber, now – never quite red, for it is not the cranberry they love, but the shaping of their gold, the change, the sharpened edges to their queen’s dreams.

  He is in all they do, their most precious drone; they love him like a fine day. They look after him in their fashion. The bees go out, burrow into their sisters’ bodies, sing their gladdest thanks against his lips. They go bearing their darkest honey, the densest, the best, the closest to the red they can never quite achieve, the redness that is his, only his. One by one, they place a drop on his tongue like a sacrament.

  It is never red enough.

  DAY 6

  Lemon Creamed Honey

  Colour: Pale yellow and cloudy, just about the colour of lemon flesh.

  Smell: I’ve described others as having a faint citrus after-scent, but this one has a real lemon bite to it, makes me expect to see bits of pulp in the vial.

  Taste: Refreshing. The lemon in this is like morning light, its sweetness juicy rather than sugary, without the slightest hint of tartness or sourness, like lemon and honey bind in a way that cancels out the less desirable qualities of each and marries only their virtues together. Delicious.

  The lemon road is long, the lemon road is wide,

  the lemon road is pleasant as a maid-sung song;

  the lemon road will have you for its bride.

  When first I turned my feet from the salt-stitched tide,

  They told me I was foolish, told me I was wrong.

  “The lemon road is long, the lemon road is wide,

  it will sour all your footsteps, sour you inside.

  Stay here with the brine, with us, where you belong—

  the lemon road will have you for its bride.”

  I laughed at their warnings, but I couldn’t—though I tried—

  put them from my thoughts while I walked myself along.

  The lemon road is long, the lemon road is wide,

  and I felt myself pucker, felt a tightness in my side,

  a frown on my lips, with the whisper growing strong:

  the lemon road will have you for its bride.

  My fingers all are yellowed, I struggle with my stride,

  I hear a yellow laughter from a yellow-sounding throng.

  The lemon road is long, the lemon road is wide—

  the lemon road has got for me for its bride
.

  DAY 7

  Thistle Honey

  Colour: Sauvignon Blanc again; pale clear gold.

  Smell: Similar to clover honey, light, with a tiny bit of green apple.

  Taste: Intriguing—definitely an apple taste, definitely green apple, and again, this is one of the refreshing ones; there’s a crispness and a mellowness at once, and I feel it’s playful, a child among honeys, but a wise-eyed child, somehow, the kind to whom you’d speak seriously one moment before tickling the next.

  The day I met Scraggle I was walking in the hills on a windy day, wearing a button-down blue cardigan half open over a yellow blouse.

  “You look like summer,” she said to me, and smiled. I smiled back. She was cute, sitting on a large grey rock; she looked about seven years old, with a wide mouth and round cheeks, tight button nose, blue eyes and curly brown hair. “Curly” is perhaps too generous; she was named for her hair, she’d later tell me, and it was a twig-tangled mess that day.

  “You look a bit like summer yourself,” I said, and she did, wearing a purple tank-top and tatty jeans in Cornish February. “Aren’t you cold? Here,” I shrugged out of my cardigan, held it out to her. “Put this on. Someone nick your jacket?”

  She stared at me, looked from me to the cardigan, and I wondered what I’d done wrong, because I could’ve sworn she looked about to cry. Then she took the cardigan, bounced behind her rock, and disappeared.

  There’s no other way to say it. She was there, then she wasn’t. I shivered all the way home.

  It’s strange, how your mind works in those situations. You spend years longing for your dreams to last longer, be more tangible, leave some piece of themselves in your waking world, but when something does happen, when you’re confronted with the strange, suddenly it’s a matter of finding any explanation but the obvious for what happened. I had none; my mind was still rational, if stunned. If I’d been hallucinating the whole thing, I’d probably have been a lot warmer.

  Besides, she was sitting on my bed when I got home, cardigan and all. She looked at me warily.

  “I only eat thistle honey,” she said, defensively, “and it must be very fine. You may heat the juice of apples for me, too, and perhaps a bowl of milk and a new loaf of bread, but nothing else.”

  When I did nothing but stare at her—not my finest conversational moment, to be sure—she frowned. “You must know the terms of the compact. You snared me by them, after all. And all for being polite! Mother did warn me not to be polite,” she muttered.

  “You—how did you get in? You need three different keys—”

  She rolled her blue eyes. “You are very stupid, summer-girl. I am hungry; I require honey before we come to any terms.”

  “But I don’t have any—I mean, I’ve got, you know, regular honey, but—”

  Her chin trembled, her eyes misted, and she started crying.

  “You are horrible, summer-girl! Why would you do that? Why would you give me a skin just to see me starve? Mother will miss me and she will have to steal some ugly farmer’s brat to replace me and they will soil my beds of sweet-peas and trample my asters and all because you wanted a thiskie all to yourself!”

  “But I don’t!” I wanted to give her a hug, but she was hugging herself tightly in that way that says don’t touch me, don’t come near, so I stayed put. “Honest—I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t even know your name—”

  “Scraggle,” she sniffed, rubbing her fingers into her eyes. “For my hair. You’ll have to give me a new one.”

  “...Why?”

  “Because I am yours, now, stupid, and you must name me and feed me and keep me for I may not name nor feed nor keep myself while I wear a skin of your giving! Don’t you know anything?”

  “But I didn’t—oh!” I brightened. “You mean, the cardigan? I just didn’t want you to be cold! You can give it back.”

  She tossed her head back in exasperation. “If you mislike your skin, can you give it back to your maker and request a new one?”

  I suspected she probably wouldn’t like an answer that involved cosmetic surgery, so I bit my lip. “So—you can’t—I mean, there’s no way to change this? I’m sorry, Scraggle—I just didn’t know.”

  She sighed. “It’s all right, I suppose. You do not seem cruel, for all that you are very stupid. You have freely given me a skin off your back, and I am at your service. Only find me some honey? Thistle honey, remember.”

  I frowned, thinking. “Is that why it happened? Because I gave it freely?”

  She shrugged. “Of course. But I cannot buy it from you now; there is nothing that can repay the gift freely given except a life of service.”

  “But—” and I hoped very hard, “I didn’t give it freely.”

  She squinted at me. “I was there, summer-girl. You asked for nothing in return.”

  “No, see—” and I grinned at her, “I gave it to you in thanks, see? For your compliment. Because you said I looked like summer, and that made me feel very beautiful, and I was in your debt, so I gave you the cardigan to repay—”

  She vanished. The cardigan went with her.

  I wished she’d have let me finish the sentence, let me see her relieved and happy again. But I figured the brush with magic was reward enough—not to mention escaping the expense of thistle honey on a grad student’s budget.

  I didn’t go walking in the hills for a couple of weeks. I didn’t want to, knowing I’d always be keeping an eye out for her and her rock, knowing I was setting myself up for disappointment. But one day I wandered into one of those organic cafes, the kind with the cloth-covered jams and ribbon-bound jars of cardamom jelly, and I saw a little glass container of thistle honey. I took a breath, decided I had enough tea and toast to last me a couple of days, and bought it.

  The next day it rained, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I stomped out onto the hills in wellies and a black slicker, jar of honey clutched tightly in hand. Hoping against hope that no one else would be in earshot, I yelled “Scraggle! Scraggle!”

  “What, what? Ugh, I forget that summer is loud as bees. What is it, summer-girl?”

  “I—” was overcome with delight, honestly. There she was, still wearing the cardigan—getting it soaked, mind, but still. “I—just brought you some—” at the warning look she gave me, I swallowed. “Listen, I was wondering if you would swap me that cardigan for this honey. Is that a fair trade?”

  She pursed her lips, considering. “Is it thistle?”

  “Of course,” I said, trying to sound solemn.

  “Done!” She clapped her hands, shrugged the cardigan off. “This is good. I was tiring of the colour.”

  I handed her the honey a little tensely, expecting her to vanish any second. I didn’t dare say what I was thinking: that it made me happy to see her again, that I wished we could be friends, that I wanted to run down hills with her and ask her about her family. I didn’t dare, because suppose there were rules? I couldn’t afford a jar of overpriced specialty honey every time I wanted a glimpse of her, after all. So I kept quiet while she opened the jar, dipped her middle finger in, sucked, and closed her eyes happily.

  “Well!” she said, screwing the lid shut, and vanishing the jar into a pocket of her tatty jeans. “Shall we go?”

  “Go?”

  She patted my knee, grinning. “Stupid summer-girl. Perhaps you’ll be brighter when the rain’s gone, just like the sun in summer! Yes, go. We can’t have an adventure standing still.”

  The things you learn on soggy Cornish hills. Of course we couldn’t. Nor did we. Who’d want to stand still in the rain?

  DAY 8

  Raspberry Creamed Honey

  Colour: Close to cognac but a little lighter, with a hint of pale pink rose when the light shines through it; also, very evenly cloudy.

  Smell: Hmm. Similarly to the peach creamed honey, there’s an unpleasantness—an odd non-food smell, like sugared belly-button fuzz, and warm.

  Taste: Pure raspberries. Rasp
berries made golden. Tart sharpness made smooth, and it’s amazing. Much clearer fruit taste than the other creamed honeys so far.

  My feet were in the river when the dawn forgot to rise.

  I saw it begin. I saw the light yawn against the water, saw it raise a rosy finger out to hook a cloud—and then saw it pull back, recede, vanish. I curled my toes into the silt. This was not how it was supposed to happen.

  Stand barefoot in the water at dawn tomorrow and you shall receive a great gift, said the note. I had assumed it was my aunt, playing games; I thought she would be here standing next to me, back from her travels through Prague, Paris, Beirut, squeezing my shoulder and offering me raspberries. I thought that we would watch the dawn together. It was the sort of thing she would do.

  But the dawn was gone, sucked back into the horizon, and I felt like I should know what to do.

  As is sensible in such situations, I spoke to the river.

  “Where, if you’ll pardon my asking,” I cleared my throat slightly, “is the dawn?”

  “Being swallowed by the ogress,” murmured the river. “She’s pulled it from me like a tablecloth, and I am bare and cold when I should be warm.”

  “Why now? The dawn has risen for every day of the ogress’ long life; why should she fancy a taste for it now?”

  “Why not?” Shrugged the river. “She is an ogress; you’ll find they’re always hungry. Perhaps she ran out of raspberry creamed honey and thought the dawn an appropriate substitute.”

  I thought about this, and it seemed a good enough reason. “Does she hunger in her sleep?”

  “Naturally,” sighed the river, “but it’s the dream-thief she troubles then, less so the dawn. I’ve no doubt it’s he who woke her, to give himself some respite—but he brought it on himself, poor lad, and we can hardly give up the dawn... I would speak to her, but I am so cold, and she chews so loudly.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I have an idea.”