by Ilka Tampke
There, squatting by the fire, stirring a sour-smelling soup, was Manacca. She looked up in fear, then frowned. ‘Aya?’ Slowly she stood. ‘Why are you here?’
She was taller, but very thin. Her voice was strong. I could see her eyes had sharpened. She had seen violence. Would she forgive me mine?
‘I have come to take you to Môn.’ I paused. ‘I want to teach you. Will you come?’
She straightened her shoulders. She was near starving. Ravaged with sores. But I knew I could tend her and nourish her. If she would let me.
‘Where is your mother?’ I continued.
‘Killed.’
‘Do any of your fringe-kin live?’
She shook her head.
‘And how were you spared, Manacca?’
‘I was here,’ she said. ‘They did not search here.’
I exhaled, closing my eyes in silent thanks to the Mothers. They wished her to survive.
I took a deep breath and asked her again if she would come with me.
‘Will you strike me?’ she said.
‘No.’ I stared at her. ‘I will never strike you or leave you again.’ She stepped forward hesitantly.
When she allowed herself to be held, her hair smelled of smoke and rain.
We approached a lone farmhouse on the outskirts of Llanmelin. Smoke rose from its roof and its plot was well-tended. An elderly farmer was kneeling in the soil.
‘I’ll ask for some food for our journey,’ I said to Manacca.
We tethered the mare and walked toward the house. ‘Tidings!’ I called to the man who was absorbed in his sowing. ‘Could we trouble you for—’
I stopped still.
The man had looked up. It was no farmer. It was Prydd.
He walked towards us. He wore a farmer’s shirt and a peaked woollen hat that covered his mark.
‘I thought you were in Môn,’ I gasped.
‘I was,’ he said. ‘I returned in the autumn. It seems I would rather live under bondage on my own tribelands, than free anywhere else.’
‘But how…’ I stammered. ‘What is this…house?’
‘It was empty after the slaughter. There was no objection to my claiming it. And I tend the orchards.’
I stared at him in disbelief. Manacca cowered at my skirts, still mistrusting. ‘But you are a journeyman…’
‘On dark moons, perhaps, if I am deep enough in the forest. Otherwise I am a farmer.’ He held out his arms with a shrug. ‘There was great despair among the tribespeople after the slaughter. It strengthens them that I am here, although I cannot keep their rituals.’
This was not the man who had felled me from my title. War had revealed him. ‘You are a true journeyman,’ I murmured.
‘And what of you?’ he asked.
‘I came for the child. We are riding to Môn.’
He nodded.
I was about to turn away. I would not ask him for food. He had never wanted to help me.
He grabbed my hand and brought it to his bowed forehead. ‘I bless your journey, Ailia. I honour you.’
Was it mockery? A taunt? ‘Do not say it,’ I said, freeing my hand. ‘You claimed I was false.’
‘You were not false. You were always true. I feared your voice and I sought to silence it.’
Shock stuck in my throat.
‘Now I am sorry.’
Finally, I smiled. ‘Can you spare any bread?’
We sat beside a fire in the darkness of the forest.
Manacca was scared. She had never slept in a wild place.
I did not sit close to her at first, but let her feel a little awe, a little of the land’s intention, before I reassured her. ‘Do not fear this place,’ I said. ‘It knows a different law from that of the townships, but you will find strength here. This is where you will hear the Mothers.’
She nodded and was quiet.
I breathed the dark, moist air into my chest. No boundary stood between me and the forest. What lay within this dense black earth, this watchful stone, these whispering trees? What was this land? What invisible thread held me to its pulse?
I had been to other places now. I knew that all ground could be dug, sown and stood upon. Only variations of bloom and weather made this land distinct from any other. What was it that I should love it so deeply and need it so utterly, with the steadfast adoration of a babe for its mother?
I moved closer to Manacca and wrapped my arm around her fleshless shoulders. We would take weeks to ride to Môn. Her body was weak and could not sit saddle-bound for long without needing rest. I pulled out some of Prydd’s dried pork and wheat cakes from the saddlebag and gave them to her. As she ate, she asked me whether the war was finished now.
‘Not yet,’ I answered.
‘Are you going to keep fighting?’
‘No.’
She looked up. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m going to do something more important.’
‘What?’ Her eyes were round.
‘I’m going to teach you to sing.’
I would teach her the songs that Rhain had taught me. She would bind them to the lakes and beaches, as I had to the mountain paths. They would be further adrift of their origin places, and for this they would be altered. But they would endure.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Singing is not more important than fighting a war.’
‘Yes it is.’
The fire crackled sweetly in the darkness.
Manacca yawned and sank lower against my chest. ‘Sing to me?’
I was tired. It had been a long day. A long year. ‘What shall I sing? The battle of the Medway? The story of the river Cam?’
‘No,’ she said, looking up. ‘Sing me a new story.’
I looked at her. I had intended to wait until I reached Môn. I had wanted my first audience to be Sulien and the journeypeople, who knew the craft of song and would best understand the design of my first forging.
But as I met Manacca’s gaze, dark as loam, I knew there could be no stronger heart to hear my first song than hers.
I felt a moment of fear. Rhain had said I was ready, but what if I were not?
I had to try. I had to try to sing the song I had been forging in the place beneath thoughts ever since I had met Caradog. Ever since Romans had touched this soil.
Winter stars glowed through drifting cloud.
I took a slow, deep breath and felt it summon, from the grit of my bones, all that I had seen and learnt. There was no other who could tell this story. No other who had known the Mothers, the mountains, the war king, as I had.
The cold air grew warm within my chest.
Then there was sound, a melding of breath and flesh:
I was in many shapes
before I was released.
I was a slender, enchanted sword,
I was a droplet in the air,
I was the radiance of the stars.
I was a word in a poem.
My voice was bright in the silent forest. The words came smoothly, as if yearning to be spoken. This was the proclamation of authority that must precede any new forging:
I was a path, I was an eagle,
I was a bubble in ale,
I was a shield in battle.
I was a string in a harp
I was wood in a fire,
I am not one who does not sing,
I have sung since I was born.
Then I began the story of the Romans at Emrys:
I pierced a great, scaled animal,
With a hundred heads,
A fierce legion beneath the root of his tongue;
Another on each of his necks.
A hundred claws on him.
A crested beast; in whose skin a hundred souls were tortured by their wrongs.
My heartbeat set a steady pulse. I could do it. The joins were clumsy, the shapes uneven, but the poem was emerging. My memory was the metal, my craft was the tool, and my imagination was the forge fire.
I sang of how the battle had turned, ho
w we called on the Mothers to deliver us. And then, with the fluidity of the smith, and the urgency of the iron’s brief softness, I conjured a dream-like tale of the land itself rising to join us:
The Mothers replied:
‘By means of language and of the land,
Transform majestic trees into a war band,
And impede the mighty one.’
When the trees were enchanted,
In the hope of our purpose,
They hewed down the enemy
With powerful branches.
Then came a mystical contest, where trees were as warriors defending their soil:
Alder at the head of the line
Struck first;
Willow and Rowan,
Were slow to join,
Spiky blackthorn,
Eager for slaughter.
Raspberry took action:
He did not hide.
And Ivy, despite his beauty,
How fiercely did he go into the fray!
Manacca giggled. I carried on, inspired by her glee, describing every class of plant and shrub, showing her that we and this land were the same.
This part of the song continued for many verses, for I did not wish to reach its end. But I had to tell the ending. That would not come as easily. I took a breath and began:
Black is buried wood,
Heavy is the mountain,
Trees are cut,
I hear no battle cry.
My voice dropped away. Suddenly the truth of what we had lost overwhelmed me. Manacca looked up, her smile gone.
I had to give her hope. If I could not conjure a future in this story for her, then how could I do it for the tribes?
Through spinning words that no Roman would ever unravel, I sang of Caradog, who ruled as the sun, whose story would endure within the earth, until it rose anew. I called him not by his name, for his strength was to remain hidden.
Radiant his name, strong his hand,
Like lightning he commanded the war band.
Honoured blood flows
From this king buried in earth
Birch tips sprout
From his vigour,
He is born, re-born, and born again,
He is our language.
Wise people, sing of his return!
Manacca stared up, her face lit bright.
I knew, over time, this song would be embellished, re-shaped and strengthened. It would be sung and heard and repeated by people who would live many thousands of summers from now.
I squeezed Manacca closer against the cold air and finished with the final claim that would give my poem its authority:
Not from a mother and a father was I made,
I was created from the blossoms of trees,
From soil, from the sod
Was I made,
The wisdom of the Mothers shaped me,
As the world was shaped,
Now I hold in song
What the tongue can utter
Now I am Songwoman.
The song was finished.
I rested my chin on Manacca’s head.
‘Again,’ she said.
Author’s Note
Songwoman is a work of fiction, although the characters of Caradog (Caratacus), Cartimandua and Scapula, and the military events of their war, are drawn from history. What little we know about Rome’s invasion of Britain in the first century CE comes to us primarily through the writing of the Roman historians Tacitus and Cassius Dio.
Caratacus was a prince of the Catuvellauni tribe who fought the Roman army when it first invaded in 43 CE, then went on to lead a nine-year resistance campaign against the colonisers. In the latter years of his guerrilla war, he was based at a stronghold in the tribelands of the Silures, in modern-day Wales. I have sited this township at the Llanmelin Iron-Age fortifications, located near Chepstow, which may have been the tribal capital.
I have adhered to the known sequence of military events. For the purposes of narrative fiction, however, I have compressed time. Events spanning one year in Songwoman probably played out over three to four years of protracted fighting.
Tacitus tells us that a final decisive battle was fought on a steep hillside before a river, somewhere north of the Silures tribelands. The specific location of this battle is, however, yet to be determined. When my daughter and I climbed the slopes of Dinas Emrys and stared out at the jagged, mist-crowned peaks of Snowdonia, I felt certain that this was the place.
Cartimandua’s final betrayal of Caratacus is drawn directly from the writings of Tacitus, although her motivation remains the subject of speculation.
The mythology and beliefs of native Britain are elusive, as this was a culture that preserved its wisdom via an oral tradition. But the Welsh texts inscribed from the thirteenth century onwards are considered to contain stories that are far, far older. It is from these I have taken my inspiration.
Acknowledgements
This novel would not exist in its current form if it were not for my discovering the extraordinary scholarship of Dr Gwilym MorusBaird, who runs the online learning portal, whitedeer.earth. Gwilym opened my mind to the ancient stories of Welsh mythology and to the craft of the poet-bards who told them. He was immensely generous and patient with my questions. I hope I have done his work justice.
I am grateful to Dr Lynne Kelly, who conceived an illuminating theory around the memory techniques of oral societies, described in her book The Memory Code. Her ideas and research have helped to shape this book.
I drew heavily on the work of Miranda Aldhouse-Green, who writes about the Celtic druids and human sacrifice and was kind enough to answer several email queries. The text preceding chapter six is a reworked quote from Ardor, by Roberto Calasso.
For information about the military history of Rome’s invasion of Britain and the campaigns of Caratacus, I have drawn on the work of Graham Webster and John Peddie. Caradog’s speech before Claudius is taken directly from the Annals of Tacitus. Ailia’s song at the novel’s conclusion is a re-worked version of fragments of the poem ‘Kat Godeu’, from the Book of Taliesin, translated by Marged Haycock. The lines Ailia attempts in her lesson with Rhain are taken from the poem ‘Kadeir Teyrnon’, from the same source.
I wish to thank everyone at Text Publishing, especially my editor, Penny Hueston, for her artistry and care. Emily Kitchin, at Hodder & Stoughton UK, was a joy from beginning to end.
I thank my fellow writers who assisted with the novel at various stages: Suzy Zail, Richard Holt, Carla Fedi, Brooke Maggs, Michelle Deans, Melinda Dundas, Ann Bolch, Rebecca Colless, Mary Delahunty, Vivienne Ullman and Nghiem Tran.
I am grateful to my mother, Jane Mills, for understanding the process.
Most importantly, loving thanks to Adam, Amaya and Toby.
Ilka Tampke teaches fiction at RMIT University. Songwoman is her second novel. Her first novel, Skin, was published in eight countries and was nominated for the Voss Literary Prize and the Aurealis Awards in 2016. Ilka lives on five acres in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria.
PRAISE FOR ILKA TAMPKE AND SKIN
‘I loved the depth, sincerity and beauty of Skin. It gives a name and a shape to our capacity for yearning…Deeply layered, densely, sensuously written and profoundly original.’ Isobelle Carmody, author of the Obernewtyn Chronicles
‘In Skin, Tampke has taken the fragments and woven them into a convincing world.’ The Times
‘Conjuring up a wholly alien world with impressive imagination, Tampke has created a visceral tale of ritual, magic and violence.’ Sunday Times
‘Skin will appeal to lovers of historical fiction and lovers of literary fiction equally as well. It is an accomplished, absorbing and powerful debut.’ Hoopla
‘Myth, mystery, history and romance are artfully intertwined in Australian author Ilka Tampke’s enticing and immensely satisfying debut.’ Good Reading
‘Tampke’s vision is clear and brought to life vividly through the strength of her singular heroine. We have no
t heard the last from this resonant new Australian voice.’ Readings
‘Those who root for Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen will find much to love in Ailia’s personal quest, with Tampke more successfully navigating the realms of almost fantasy than Ishiguro, marking her out as an exciting talent to watch.’ New Daily
‘I am in awe of Ilka’s ability to recreate a Britain of AD43. Caer Cad is alive and I felt I was there, standing by its fires from page one. I found myself continuously questioning what was real versus fiction, thinking to myself I wanted to learn more. A great book.’
Cecilia Ekbäck, author of Wolf Winter
‘Skin is a beautiful and brilliant book, a masterpiece.’
John Marsden
‘Tampke skilfully blends fantasy elements with historical events.’ Guardian
‘Tampke carries readers to a most remarkable time of the Iron Age…We’ve just welcomed a remarkable new voice in Australian literature, and I can’t wait to read what she comes up with next.’ Alpha Reader
‘The mystical setting of Iron Age Britain is wonderful, full of magic and wonder and beauty. It’s everything I love in a historical fiction.’ Readwave
‘A subtle blend of reality, fantasy, romance and action, Ilka Tampke’s first novel is a beautiful read. She has created a mystical world that’s certain to charm most readers.’ Sci-Fi Now
‘I loved Skin—the whole book is sufficiently grounded in real history to let the story and mysticism shine through. Ultimately the book is about love, belonging and change.’ Cultural Wednesday
‘The book slowly sucks you in and before you know it you’ve been completely hooked…At its core, Skin is a young girl’s coming-of-age story, but its resonant prose, distinct characters, thematic depth and emotional sensitivity all combine to form a tale as evocative as it is compelling. 9/10.’ Starburst
‘While fantasy lovers will enjoy the mysticism and world building, and historical fiction readers will appreciate the Roman invasion story line, there are also plenty of sensual scenes between Ailia and her two lovers for romance fans.’ Booklist
‘A stunning debut novel…Tampke has clearly researched deeply into this period…a story that is not without echoes of recent and current world history.’ Otago Daily Times