The men are still roistering over the remains of their supper, a heap of charred and ragged bones, as the king, awash in fire and shadow, sits down with the hermit in his stone bowl strung with dried fish, in the gruesome presence of the four carcasses he still barely believes to be dead. He has his back squarely to them, and all his hair standing on end at the sense of them splayed there mother-naked, all awry, like puppets loose on their strings when the show is over. He shudders. The hermit, sighing and smeared with ashes, has a tale to tell, a long-winded tale fit for a queen, so he says, and the king is morose but will do his best to hear him out after a long day. He has eaten and drunk as heartily as any of his men, however, and is soon nodding off in spite of himself, and snoring aloud. Still the hermit drones on and on, telling his beads, awake and watchful and himself no less at peace, though he will not be laying himself down or closing his eyes tonight or banking his fire. He puts on a branch. The flame has gnawed into the heart of the logs; knotty and furrowed, they are more fire and shadow than substance, more the ghost of the living wood, and his thought runs to the tale he has been telling, of the curse on that other king’s children long ago and the hag of fire who for her cruelty was cast to the four winds. The hut is deep and warm and red. By his side are his dear ones, split here and there along the bone now but still clad in a skin as fine as parchment, so fine that their hollows of bone are shining through and, to his sore eyes, brimming like the embers in quiet fire.
At first light the king is woken and he and his men break their fast. By now he has made up his mind. The swans were old ragamuffins the hermit raked up from somewhere and tricked out in swanskins by way of mischief and mystification, these being his tools of trade, after all, like all such hermits, unless he was mad enough to have swallowed his own story. A spell that has lasted almost a thousand years! Too bad for him if they died of fright. But the king, being sly enough to play along, beckons him over to share the meal. The hermit refuses, he having his fast to keep. The king shrugs.
Well, you are a solid stalwart kind of fellow, I see, he says, munching, and in your own way as down to earth as anyone. They say you hermits, wary and wilful though you be, are men of your word. But what earthly good are you here? Come back with me to my kingdom and sow your holy seed in richer ground.
The hermit, being nobody’s fool and his god’s man alone and no trophy to make up for the lack of four singing swans, thanks the king kindly and again turns him down, keeping his surge of anger to himself.
Take your time, man, think it over. That kennel of yours is not fit for a dog. What have you got to lose?
Here I am my own man.
You can be that and your own master and still be of some good to the world.
Wherever I be, the hermit says, I am a servant and no one’s master, least of all my own. I have my god to serve. This is where he has led me to sow his seed and here in obedience will I dwell.
What I should do if I had any sense, the king growls, and one of us might as well have, is take matters into my own hands and sling you into the bilge for your own good.
The hermit allows himself a sour smile. And much good it would do.
The king gets to his feet. Last night, he mutters, did you say they sang?
Sang? A slow headwag by way of answer, a halfwit’s wry facepull.
The king has had enough. With a grunt he packs up and sets off with his men for the rough crossing and the long wet trudge back home, empty-handed and far from looking forward to his bride.
How did he know? The hermit watches the boats wallow one by one past the black stone and out of sight. Had he sent out his spies far and wide, or set a watch in a curragh out at sea, some harmless enough fisherman who, his catch hauled in, could slip away on the tide and sell his secret for all it was worth? Or was one of the regular boatmen bribed, one of his fellow hermits, the weakest of them, the one of least faith – there is this crack in the world, he thinks, this flaw, there will always be one ready to sell his soul for silver. One is all it takes. And yet, who knew? He himself had never told a soul or left a trace of them to be found. The swans had made themselves scarce whenever a boat hove into sight. It galls him that he will never know who betrayed him, however often the traitor might come sailing back in high good fellowship with all and sundry, keeping his treachery up his sleeve. His sin is no affair of mine, the hermit tells himself, except that thanks to him I am alone as never before. I have lost a lifeline I never knew I had. It may be that only one has betrayed my trust or, for all I know, many, and that is the trouble, I am in the dark from now on. I have no one I can trust.
No one? He takes it back, making his cross. Not so. In thee I trust. Thy will be done.
Now in the wet softness of mid-morning he has the island to himself. He can ring the passing bell to his heart’s content and dig them a muddy grave facing east to the sun of their birthplace. One by one he takes them in his arms at long last, naked as they came into the world and still no taller than their child selves for all their fathomless age, each fragile skull cupped in his hand and a musty whiff in his nose, the whiff of the ossuary, well he knows it. On his knees he leans over to lay each one face up, the grave filling with puddles and patches of sky reflected and his own cowled stoop of a shadow, all the while saying the office for the dead. On impulse he breaks off two thin branches of green leaves from the overarching oak and lashes them in a cross that he lays over what is in the grave, to be a tree of life everlasting. Lastly he tosses in four handfuls of clods, one each, catches his breath and fills the grave in, patting it flat with the spade, and weighs it down with a flat rock coated in green and gold lichen, illuminated, yet barely visible, at one with the earth. Then he scatters leaf litter over it, feathery brown leaves and leaf mould muddy underneath and studded with snail shells and pearly mushrooms, until even to his own eyes this is unopened ground.
But the swanskins he folds, the three in the one, as they were so often folded in life, into a single great four-headed, eight-winged heraldic bird that he ropes up tightly into a bundle – weighing next to nothing, and that is just as well – and carries on his back down to the shore. It is late in the day and the rain eased off long ago, except in the trees, into hushes and spatters of drops, and the sun is almost down to the sea’s rim. He unties the rope and with a great stab of grief heaves his burden into the waves. They waste little time in undoing it and setting them floating free, his four sorry shocks of feathers. Fingering the rosary he stands and watches as they wash out on the ebb tide until they dissolve in the haze of the horizon.
Only at the corner of one eye, one last fiery tatter of red, or a bird, or a slash of sun.
By the time he heads wearily for home the haze has gathered all around. Soon the way ahead as far as he can see is brimming with the mist as it comes welling up, a lake of milk where his boots are fading, deeper and deeper, until it seems as if the world is sinking and he treading on clouds. Overhead the sky is clear. At every landmark he finds himself half expecting the swans, as always, to come into sight, the mind being always slow to take in what happens, for good or evil; and so the past will seem to live on, a sharp reminder over and over again of irreparable loss. Sleep will be for him a haunt of wraiths and his days a desert, and he as much under a curse of exile now as they were then. Whenever he rings his bell or opens his holy book he will remember them. Wherever he goes on the island he will find himself starting in sudden joy, relief, only to know that never again will a rustle, a loud swoop, a white splash on hidden water, a petal of plumes parting from a lily pad, a cross on the sky, ever be more than a bird. They were a miracle to behold and the work, when all is said and done, of the one god, the last of their kind. But, for all that he knows that their maker has surely taken them under his wing by now and they are in bliss, and he is left with his heart of flesh that might as well be a stone. Would that it were.
The sun long gone at his back, stars and a moon to light him on his way.
This has always been an island
of mists and mirages, apparitions, visitations, a shifting world where stories change shape as loosely as clouds. Some say that the northern king does take the swans away with him, come what may, and keeps them captive at his court, where they remain mute and his bride unbedded; others, that he takes the swanskins by force, only the skins, or else they are freely handed over; while others say that the hermit uses them for shrouds and they go into the green grave, and still others, that, the spell once broken, the swans fade clean away on the spot, feather and flesh and bone fallen to dust.
Others are of the belief that the hermit talked their long story out of them, one taking it up as the other fell silent, haltingly, because it was so long since they had spoken or had any need of speech. And he drew out the music as well, the songs, and that was simple enough, that flowed as freely as water, as the firelight in the stone hut, and it was, as he told them, a foretaste of heaven for him, the little hive of song they were gathered in, and so it would be for them too if he had any say in it. Some insist that he would have taught the swans their prayers to the god who had brought them together, and baptised them too, whether as swans or in their true forms, but as parched as mummies, before or after their death; and that his little splash of spring water, being blessed, was stronger than all the water in all the lakes and the seas of the east and west; and that, though they crumbled to dust, as we all shall, their souls abide with the saints in heaven, the hermit not least.
Still others say that the hermit’s bell, a voice never before heard in the land, is more likely to have been what broke the witch’s spell than any raid by a henpecked petty king out of nowhere. And others again, that the swans would have thanked the hermit kindly but told him they were lost children out of another time, and heaven for them could be that green time only; and that, while he had been a brother to them and a dear friend, they were too afraid that the holy water would part them from their kin forever to let themselves be baptised; and that in the end they went to be with their loved ones under a green mound by the power that was in them, or to the immortal home of their forefathers under the waves.
Because no relic of them has ever been dug up in all the years, there are those who believe that the hermit buried them not on land but at sea, where no one would disturb their bones, or in one or other of the shiny lakes with the heart of a bog on this lonely island or on the mainland; or that he said so, in his sly way, to make sure no one came digging. There have been brothers, though not of his own ancient order, who maintain that he would have done better to burn them on his fire, alive or dead, for having bewitched him and been an occasion of sin. Be that as it may, having taken a vow of silence, which he kept, he never left the island, they say, but died there after a blameless lifetime of penitence, of sleeping like a stone in his stone bell and rising with the sun, ringing his bell, and in his spare time chipping away at the black stone high over the sea, giving it a body and a holy face, to be a monument. Some even claim to have landed there and found a stone with four smooth round stones at its foot, or skulls, or eggs; and on it, weatherworn, a graven man in a halo, arms wide, gazing out to sea.
Some tell how they have rowed all around the islands along these shores and no such island with its coves and lake and wall of cliffs was ever there, let alone a hermit’s bell or stone hut, whole or in ruins, or carved sentinel stone, and they should know. Islands come and go, as others point out. Many others could not care less whether the island existed or not. They say the point is that the old world died with the man who died and had everlasting life on the day he gave up the ghost in the golden city far in the east; and that his death broke the spell and all other such black magic; and that the swans had died of their fathomless age and fallen to dust so long before the hermit was even born that their paths never crossed.
Others go so far as to deny that there ever was any such spell or curse or holy hermit on any island of the west. They say the stepmother stabbed the children herself or drowned them, or both, and their clothes along with them, set adrift until they sank to the bottom of the lake, where they wallow in the mud to this day. And she was caught and butchered for her crimes and had her carcass fed to the fire.
Some, on the sole word of a king of a time out of mind, as it was handed down over the years at many a lonely fireside, maintain that the hermit was indeed, whether he knew it or not, like so many of his kind, a poor cracked harmless fool driven to peopling his exile with visions and hallucinations, sorrows, songs and flights of angels.
This water has a long memory. To this day something of their presence lingers on in the lake of their transformation and may be seen, if you have eyes to see, floating from time to time, catching the light, in a splash of white, a ripple, a scrawl of shadow or mirrored cloud, at either twilight, when the lake edge is a spangled hem, and most clearly in the late summer and early autumn, even in the high glare of noon. When white clouds hang low at summer’s end and the lake is another sky, each the other’s reflection, as still and as full of clouds, except that the lake is rimmed with a green murk at blood heat – at such times you may catch sight of a quick flank, a thigh, a gilded thread, a ravel of blood deep underwater, no sooner seen than gone. If you wade into the shallows then, through the pulsing waters that flow off you in rings to run up on to that velvety rim, and you swim there and dive under as she did of old, see if something of her is not still there in the glass of the surface, imprinted, breaking up as you burst through, being made whole again as the surface falls still around you, never within reach or far away.
Stay well away from the deep water if you know what is good for you.
In autumn at seed time all around this shore the last leaves light up at sundown as the year draws in, some curled over to house the spider suddenly gilded in a shaft of sun; the mushrooms come alive underfoot in the wet woods as if from the otherworld, in shapes like shreds of firelight frozen to flesh, lips and earlobes and, each in their quick season, scallop shells, corals, sea urchins, winkles, sponges and jellyfish, petals, gemstones, woolly caps and domes and bells, pearls, moonstones, snake heads, moth wings, rags of dried blood and red silk in the green ivy and leaf litter. Quick to emerge, quicker to shrink back. And after every rain the lake wells up and up, all the colours of sky and water inky with shadows above and below, running deep.
These petals of fresh snow, these lilies, these swans, how fast they melt away
Blood red dress, where are you? Where are you, other self? Lost in the abyss
The lake has seen it all before. It always keeps a weather eye out
Lilies open and close up in a slow heartbeat of wings on water
A swan floating near and far on a drowned underside and a shadow
Fire of day, breathe me out of the abyss limpid and silken of skin
Four furrows in the white lake, ruffle of eight long wings, clouds in midair
Black on the sky, we are, white on woven waters half shadow half light
Paths of the sea, furrows of a full moon rising, and a fallen sun
Tongue of Blood
I
O
reborn of live blood am I the voice hot in your ear O hear me out I eye of fire and slither of stone out of the depths wisp of the dark deep in the dark I shade of shades
O to be full flesh who am a hollow cave
labouring my own way down into the earth’s
caves of no earth but stone
caves burrowing coilings
writhings fumings with smoulder the deeper
down to the seethe of fire and the rock melt
thundering in outpouring rivers of fire
only here in the upper caves may a crack
of light, a scrape of blood seep
down to me in long threads
like the roots that grasp
cut in midair
turned to immortal stone
or sweet water trickle down to me
or a nipple of stone that swells as I close
my mouth
over
one drop
another drop sucked out of the world of day
and night through dry stone
for only the blood of the dead comes this far
and water that has lost its way
I tread no measure draw no breath
I walked under the sun
I saw the slung spider stitch web reach over reach under the sun shine the rain
I go where nothing reaches down but wind and water and nothing walks but a shade of the great shade under the earth’s pelt
I know how live blood ebbs and flows in stone veins rarer than light rarer than gold the blood to open eyes and mouth
I know water plain water will not do for us who thirst for power of thought and speech and form that only blood can give
and when what wells up in a nipple of stone is blood then may the dead suckle at last and speak hear who may
and appear to ourselves and each other
if only at the edge of sight a rain of shimmer
a swirl, a hush, swelling, as of the sea spider
caught and lost in the fisherman’s lamp
writhing its blistering limbs
in dark water
I am remember me what I know I am
I know in my time he whose will was to wage war wove a great web of battle and flung it far and wide over the islands and wild seas of the world
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