They cut through the snows towards the town where he was born. The one he hopes will give him sanctuary.
If any of my people have survived this, they will be there.
Mercher wavers that evening, standing exhausted in his armour and staring back towards everything he has betrayed. Gwyn can sense his hesitation—like the headache of frozen air that clings to water in the bottoms of the valleys—but it never reaches him.
All we have to do is walk.
The great walls of Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth, at the height of the siege. He walks the battlements for hours, putting one foot in front of the other to stop his mind from racing. Letting quiet certainty gather in the minutes and days before the cry goes out—carried like blackbird song in the silence of a sunset—and the red army floods out of the hills.
Guard up! Mercher shouts. Get your visors down! Archers, ready your bows.
The dawn that comes after the last battle of the siege is cleaner than any he can remember. A quiet peace settling over everything like winter.
It didn’t last, then or ever. But what does?
Albany, flickering at the edges of the light like a tongue of flame. That anxiousness for what comes next working at the back of his brain. But the way back into the south, into the heartlands that had birthed him, has begun to sing him home again.
She asks, how am I going to do any of this without you?
And he embraces her the same way he would his own kin. As his daughter from a life other than this one.
You will be fine, my queen. There is no one better for this than you.
And, she says, how long will it take before you get sick of tending to your garden and decide to start another war?
A long long time. He hopes. The world needs more gardens. Fewer wars.
* * *
He did not notice the days and the weeks passing by in the cottage as he once had. And with every tiny increment, the pressure eased a little more. His life slowed to the pace of his own hands and feet. The timbers of the roof. The grain of wood against his skin. The tiny seeds of life and stone, inching their way into becoming.
Gwyn no longer burned bread in the oven. Instead, he learned to nurse enough heat out of the stove to sustain him through the shortening nights. Evenings stretching themselves out languorously in front of the approaching summer, turning everything to red and gold. The blue light of the distance that hung tremulous between the sunlight and the stars.
On one of those long evenings, Mercher guided his destrier onto the narrow path that led to where green fields met the open brown. The cottage shone white in the last light like it was shaped out of fresh metal. A skeleton of new-cut wood in its roof, with slates laid out almost half-way and much of the rest patched up with skins and hide. Hay and water all made ready in the stable, and seedlings pushing themselves up through the tilled earth. The arrogant green of early summer.
Gwyn met him on the threshold, brought him inside, and helped him with his armour. “There’s something that you have to see. Before we lose the light. I know you’re tired, love, but come.”
The stone garden was waiting for them both, and Gwyn’s heart rang whole.
Light and life and water spilled in over the rocks, through the high vent in the wall. Stalwart, carpeted with moss and tiny alpine flowers. Jewel-coloured spiders spun their webs between the carved ivory of cavespire, and moths clustered about the shifting lights of the wisp o’ the marsh. Bloodstone knapped to a sharp edge. Waves and waves of it, like the gills of a fish. Nightwatchmen painting the air with their little living embers.
Then Mercher’s arms were tight around him. And the whole world tumbled down into a patient kind of bliss.
* * *
Stalwart
A common building material in the southern borderlands.
It had barely yet been spring when Gwyn came to this place. Standing upon the footings of the first hills. It was difficult to spot the ruin at first, nestled at the point where his world and the wilderness melted into one another.
A hundred years ago this house had been borrowed from the stalwart and slate, the sand and the clay of this land. Untended, it now ached back towards its birthright. A cottage in the process of remembering what it was like to be a mountain.
The wagon creaked as Mercher swung himself down to stand beside him, looking up the hill towards the broken walls. He looked back over his shoulder, the same way that he had once lingered too long into the evening and stared back towards everything that he had already sacrificed.
He did not leave then, and he will not leave now.
Mercher put his hand onto Gwyn’s shoulder, and the heat radiated down deep into old muscle.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
Gwyn sat down on the edge of a waystone weathered away until it was almost featureless. His thumb stroked the deep grain of the stone. The whorls of moss and lichen that had grown there. Gold and green and grey. Something in it tugged at him. Some wordless threshold between the high walls of Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth behind him then and the broken ones above him now, crumbling on the brink of the moor.
He stood, and reached out for the horse’s reins.
“Yes,” he said. “I think I am.”
Copyright © 2016 C.A. Hawksmoor
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
C.A. Hawksmoor lives between genders and between worlds but also in North Wales, surrounded by mountains and moor. Their heroes include Carl Jung, John Michael Greer, and Sarah Connor. When they’re not busy waiting for the collapse of industrial civilisation they write stories, waste time on Facebook, and try (and mostly fail) to grow vegetables. Their website can be found at www.cahawksmoor.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
COVER ART
“Forest,” by Geoffrey Icard
Geoffrey Icard is a French graphic artist with expertise in traditional 2D design and game creation. He has worked as a 2D and 3D artist and concept artist on numerous game development projects and now works as a freelance artist. He prefers environments but always tries to learn and push his characters because he believes environment without life is boring. He is also a gamer and takes inspiration from video games. See more about him and his artwork at geoffreyicard.blogspot.fr and in his gallery on deviantArt.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #196 Page 3