all for the whore to wage war the sister-in-law gone astray all for her weave a shroud of the sinews hair steeped in blood of whole hordes of the dead
I out of my blood wove a daughter and out of her blood a thick web
My will it was to weave my web of silk in secret by the lamp in my lair of rock and lay it aside to gather dust year by year. So did the pyres wait, towers of firewood watched over night and day on mountaintop to mountaintop, island to island, stepping over the sea to the high-walled city in the east where another tower of firewood bided its time. Fire to cheer the fall, a ribbon of fire over a ribbon of sea, a bridge of fire to straggle its way crag by crag to the mainland, erupting wind-whipped, to this my crag, the Spider, at last aflame. Then the processions of oil lamps writhe from shore to shore, each one lit from the last. Our streets come alive ablaze in uproar. Our king of kings is on his way home victorious, home again to his queen and her web. How long has it grown in secret? In her lair she deploys it, a silken sail fit for the black ship of a king of kings, for the wind to fill. But he will fill it, and a tight fit it will be, seamed as it is in spider thread, so sleeved, the sleeves so hemmed along, so blind, that the cloth will do for his winding sheet. She tries it on, she does, the queen in waiting, and strokes its long flanks and lifts its blind arms up high. One queen there is we hear of who has woven to while away her years of the war weaving by day unweaving by night a winding sheet. Not I. What I weave stays woven
I who am my own patience alone
He alone is worthy of the cloth fit for the gods that spills out crimson at his feet. Not for the homecoming king to tread the bare earth. And not for him a mere queen or wife arrayed in crimson but a spirit of fire is she who waits at the far end of this cloth running from the portals to the gate, this tongue lolling out of a stone gullet. He deserves no less, our high king whose ships trod the crimson path east in a fair wind, on a wind unjustly bought with blood not his to bargain with. Well may his bare feet mash the blood red silk in time to the lyre and the triumphal chant. Well may the crowd’s roar fill his ears and drown the screams of women bereft who never knew it till now, who lived only for the black ships to carry home the father, husband, son long since taken away to the king’s war and left in the dust and ashes. Their curses on him. See how he strides from the sun to the gloom of the gateway. Two stone lions rear over him there or lionesses are they or a lioness and her mirror image?
I am the last beacon my dry heart bursts into flames the hour is at hand when I come into my own and do battle and I dismember the mortal enemy
To his whore as she flings down, hair flying, off his chariot, his fishwife, screaming, I say, You belie your high birth with your swansong, and you a king’s daughter before you fell prey to our king. And what do you belie, says she, your majesty?
Her mouth was stopped with her blood. Majesty is as majesty does and mine does not lower itself to bandy words with slaves
The bathwater lies low as I undo his clothes that stink of the shipboard. He slides in with a sigh. His eyelids close. Out I fling the crimson web I have woven. It settles and spreads, clinging. With a roar he thrusts his blind fists into my blind sleeves and the seams hold. I who wielded the shuttle now take up the double axe, a bronze butterfly, falling. My web is hooked in loops, good spiderwork, and it holds fast. Let him thrash and bellow all he may gagged and bound in the royal silk he enters oblivion launched from the haven of his bath
whose wave flings up over me and he and I are straight away dressed in crimson fold on fold from the web that I wove and the web of ravelling blood that he weaves in the water, flailing out. Stricken, he shrivels, he lunges, shrinking, swelling. As the octopus, clutching, takes on the pallor of rock or sea floor, so does he as he shifts awash on marble. When he falls still I lick my salt lips. I stoop and cup my hands and drink deep of this blood, wine, water I alone here by this water of life, of death my face firelit bloodlit
Fire is still wavering on the rock wall from the bathwater as he thrashed, unfolding its own weaves of wallowing light. Here is water fit for a king who bathed a city in blood and has the peace he deserves. Laved not in blood red wine but in his hot blood, his great maw and wound agape, his queen walking at his side no less royally clothed, he is borne out to the tombs on a bier by slaves, only not along the silken tongue he has filthied with his tread, and for lamentation in his wake he sets the stray dogs yelping
I thicken I take shape never more in flesh and blood a body of darkness inside the dark faint as a reflection as an eel sinuous
So I came to know the lust for blood and see at last what the spell was that had kept our men waiting so long beneath those city walls. So I underwent the hot spasm of the high priest when he felled my darling and stiffened and jetted his milt over her silken dress her skin
Day after day they lay in wait for a fair wind but all they had was a dark wind barring their way to the far city over the sea. The seer came up with a remedy, a sacrifice, to the goddess of the place, the greatest, a high king’s ransom, a daughter, to be felled in cold blood while the heroes drank and whored and played on at knucklebones by the stranded ships. Never for a woman were they bound for war. Liars. What was she to them, my sister? Or my daughter? They came for slaughter’s sake, for plunder and gold, slaves, bonfires, orgies, rivers of blood
And first blood to him. King of kings. O mighty one, to have contrived to kill a child, his very own firstborn. O magnificence in full flight. Hers was the first blood. Her own silken blood they clothed her in, crimson from head to tail, no mere wedding-night’s splash on a sheet, proof of purity, she must run red all over. He with his lies he had her heart’s blood spilled out on the altar stone. Proof of infamy
Once the wind changed, as it was bound to do, they had no time to lose. The wind changed, and the king’s luck, and they took ship in no time and were swept out of sight over the sea. He made off without a word
I ran to the shrine but they blocked my way. She is the prey of the goddess, they said, and would not say where they had put her. I tried to pass and they held me face down in the dust. I was not to see her. Was she not fit to be seen after they had their way with her? Had they drained her dry, baked her on the holy pyre, gorged on her flesh? Did she get no burial but in their guts? No lamentation but mine? Why should he get what he withheld?
Death takes all when the time comes, even high kings. So why is she not among the shades, she who became death’s bride? Is she reborn in the flesh to walk the earth, weeping in exile, to this day? Or is she with the gods? Which gods and where are they? And to the fanged avengers, the black hounds, the hags, I cried out for justice but only at the spilling of my blood, shed by my only son, did they come slavering. Are they all dead too, shades of themselves, shades of shades? What are shades but absences, echoes, reflections cast in the water and the air and the mind’s eye, breath of the cave winds? We are no matter what, what comes back into being, if not life, never life again, at a sip of warm blood. How should we know what we are and were? Do the living know? Do the gods?
What are the living if not a matter of tissue on bone? So soon undone
As for the gods, old tales and priests tell of gods of light and darkness, of thunder, of sea and sky, of a moon goddess baying for blood. Tales and priests I know. Priestesses. Casters of spells. Murderers in broad daylight
My tidings are here before me. Alone in my rage and grief in the bridal tumbrel I rattle past the women of the city, young and old, not one but has a man on the ships whose life she fears for. As always I look neither right nor left, I am marble, a statue enthroned. I dismount, send to the temple, give my orders, lock all the doors of the citadel and prepare to die
But not even these giant walls will hold back the tide of lamentation, nor the will of women in grief. When my voice rasps to a standstill others take up the cry, women calling out to the men on the black ships, calling out to me, calling child sister daughter mother, let us in, until I break I give way and arms wide I fling open the do
ors
As one woman and she my own image they crowd in flapping, crowblack, masked in their torn hair clotted in mire and blood, and drag in a bier of fresh green bay boughs and set it down and lay on it a white pillow, a bridal wreath, a shapeless dress
We share out the mess of boiled wheat seeds studded with pomegranate seeds like bleeding wounds and pour out the wine of the dead and dance bewailing her around the bier hand in hand wreathed in the flare and fume of the torches and our own towering toppling shadows as one by one they shear off their hair and stoop to lay it on the bare shoulders of the dress and kiss the pillow on its ghostly brow. One name, calling her home, we weave through all our lamentations. (One name, as long lost to me as she is! And how much more blood shall I lap up before I recall her name?) I alone have no hair left to shed, who at the death flung down my own shorn head of hair wind-winnowing in the shambles of the shrine and the curdling wake of the black ships
So she is laid to rest in her own room. And if our wake is hollow, all a mockery, because we have no corpse bathed in wine and oil and wound up in the crimson silk, a chrysalis, for the tomb, what more is there for me and these others here, these unbidden, this unsung chorus, these women of the city, to do but fill the vault with the bonfire of our outrage at her fate who is the hollow at our core?
O undone! O, unwed unburied
Before the ships even made landfall a kinsman and enemy of the king my husband who had blood crimes of his own to avenge came dangling after me, he who had never yet dared set foot, and capering at the turnings of the stone passageways, in wait with his cock high, he of the wild goat’s eyes, my noonday lover, and the goat’s laugh and rank flesh. I will have you he said or die and he did and died
A web is a honeycomb spread wide, and the web I wove spreads itself wide over the scales of the water burning red and seamed with shadows over the shoulders of him who lies giving up the ghost in one last heave of breath. His dying is slow, say I, majestic. Patience is in the bones of all of us who weave and we lapped up patience with our egg yolk, my sister and I, enfolded in the one shell, if our nurse’s tales be true, we daughters of the swan, our own mother taught us how
Such a web of war my sister wove year after year as did I only hers was on a wide loom in a tower of the doomed city while the battle roared red to the threshold. And her web was burnt to ash in the ashes as she should have been. Unless she draped herself in its folds to saunter back into bed with her cuckold? My web I buried in stone. Mine rests in peace
Dead or alive they come among us, those whose blood drips down. They fall into clefts and fissures into a stone tomb bleeding their blood. Blood can be stone and blood can be got from a stone, sucked from veins as fine as gold. Spears of stone form, hang down, grow tall, drip drops. The power of speech is a stone pillar stiff with the blood of goat or horse, snake, lizard or man crushed, slaughtered, fallen. Fate, not I, set them on the thin crust on the stone lip and leaked them down through seams in the roof to these ribbed hallows
I had a mother once. I had a daughter. She was my young self, my mirror image, my heart’s darling. What have they done with her? No one will say. Bones and fat and hide go to the gods, says the seer, and who else but he feasts on the leavings? The seer, the wise one who speaks for the gods, he will have his way, leering his leer
As for her father, he lay in his unseamed gut stewing in the sun, his gut that gorged on the blood of generations, on a whole strangled city burnt to ashes. There was a distillation for you, the blood and filth he fed to the winds that day and the crow rasp and vulture flap, dog yelp and snarl, that sang him to his rest. His tomb could wait. They dined royally and the common people held their tongues and noses
He is down here, our high king. None of the heroes, least of all he, dares lick a stone spear. He is a grey wisp, a ripple in the air, voiceless, a drift of dust as of mothwings among the olives, a silence. War was his reason for living and the war’s reason was what? A city sacked, fire, murder, rape, for what? Revenge for his brother the cuckold. He had got a daughter on my sister. Why not their daughter? Who better than theirs to be sacrificed? Why ours? The seer says so, says the king, and she is mine to dispose of by a father’s right and a king’s. Was a city not worth a spare daughter? He had others and could get more. He had a right. He shuns the stone spears welling with blood. Too late he dreads a drop of blood he is done with blood as with speech
I not I the names are lost gone with the dead daughter all gone what was her name? mine? what do names matter who were one flesh and blood? Whom and where to ask for news of her? if I only knew her name it takes so much blood so be it I have no power to kill the lips of no wounds that I kiss are of my making I only roam I seek
In a dead world aswarm with shades all I seek is a name, a shade, a child of my heart. That is all I ask. They are here, the teeming multitudes, invisible, all but one. Where is she, my firstborn girl who loved me as long as she lived and went to her death ages of the world ago believing I had a hand in it?
Voices drift in the void voices on the cave winds too far away catch listen put a name to no whose mother motherless motherous motherless murderess
O a fine young buck was he rampant in the red gaze of brands burning high in the brackets at the stone turn of the stair. I followed his prancing shadow to where he hid and out under the sun among the rocks, a cool hollow, fine olive tree shade shrieking with cicadas, the sea tarnished with afternoon. There he slit open my dress and ran his finger first inside one fur-lined lip and then the other and his shadow covered me with cold. Olive grove days, silvery, salty on the skin and hair, under the hot sky when there was pleasure to be had for once, freedom and forgetfulness and long sleep. Over and over in marriage bed and bridal bath he made love to me, my shaggy goatman. That was the autumn of my years, my vintage, when even the air was drunk on the fumes of the new wine, heady, luminous, and the bees and wasps drank and danced and fell in a stupor. That was my berry time on the bramble, and my time of the fig and pomegranate and grape full of seed, and of the slow fire at work in the crowns of trees, burning them dry, my seedtime and spider time and my thanksgiving time to the holy ones, mother and daughter, and my time of the loosing of the floodwaters, and no winter time to follow for me but the all of time no time underlife of death
The shades all shun me dread my passing say let no one tread in the footsteps of her
I, the one struck down, mine to avenge a daughter on a husband only to fall to a son’s blade. Like father, like son, butchers all. Blood, for the milk of life. Whose blood have I spilt? The blood of him who went to war to lay a city waste in fire and blood. What was a death to him?
His crime? He felled my ewe lamb. And mine? I avenged her whose blood cried out of the earth by a mother’s right alone I gave tongue to that cry
A beacon flared from a long way off and was the light of the burning city, carried on mountaintops over the sea until the castle flared in answer, and the watchman came shouting
The passages alive with flaming brands are molten rock, paths such as lead into the heart of the earth. And so it proved, and first, as in all matters, strode the king
Tree roots bore through the roof into the cold air of the cave and spread out, naked, alive to the touch of a hand. Winter trees shades of trees shrunken wisps starved limbs
If you on the earth whose ears are flesh can hear, know that when blood spills and sinks out of sight, it is not done with but cries out under your feet whether you hear or not. It cries out for justice and the soles of the feet of all the living carry the stain over the earth. As I give tongue out of the cave mouth
I labyrinthine I shade
For the black ships to set sail the goddess of the shrine must have a fit sacrifice, the seer said. Liar. He, speak for a goddess? Can the gods not speak for themselves? Are they stone? What do winds and seas know of the gods, or sky or earth? No dark god rules us here, no queen snatched out of the green world, no grieving mother goddess who, seeing in me as in a cave pool the mirror
of her grief, might take pity, she who has breasts as a vine has grapes and is one vast womb and whose entrails are these caves. Lies blind. So does truth
I hush a shade one blind way or another grope I harsh of screech
O rivers that run underground, into ponds and deep lakes and tunnels of water that tastes of nothing but stone; and rivers of fire, lakes and fountains of molten stone run cold. There is room underground for seams of ice and fire. We shades have a labyrinth, nubbled and veined, their domes and udders and columns of stone, statues of stone, and dust, and grit hissing in a dark breath, water floors, water bodies, this underworld, this great shell, this cast of every snake the tales tell of. I hold up my firebrands high in chamber after chamber. Some are crystalline, icy fretworks, some have fish fins and others membranes and red veins. Some are statues I love to entwine and suck, bloodless though they be, and blind, my holy witnesses. In the upper passages are chinks of daylight, red gold or so far from the sun that they are faint and grey. Whiffs of grass come down in a breath, cattle dung, grape must, a lost world. In the crevices ooze blind white worms, emanations of the stone. Bats find their shallow way in and swoop and squeal flitter twitter swarm to sleep in furry clots of heat high in the walls and out again in the passages of night and day, and now and then one will fall and lie broken on wet stone, bony wings of torn parchment and hot blood running. Two eyes like coins in the dust, a pelt stiffening on bone, a cast-off shroud. In hot blood is the gift of speech that burns like wine. White bats turn to bare bone with my firelight in them, they are so fine, woven of spiderweb and branching veins, and even they have a sip of blood. Here and there a spider in its web is spread open as wide and as still as the printed hands of the long dead, rimmed in blown ash, dead breath. A bloodless spider may still suck and creep into cracks and holes to hang itself bone-still white in the web’s heart. How does so dry a spiny and disjointed womb extrude such a strength? Web is long-lived, as weak as water, as tenacious. Web is threaded steam, and smoke, and ice, frost, no sooner seen than gone
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