Discussions lasted all through the morning. Curlew and Mist quizzed Raven on his perceptions of Wraeththu, his attachment to his humanity, his fears of pain and change. They had a lengthy conversation regarding his sexual orientation and experience. Raven noticed that both Mist and Curlew became alert, fascinated when he openly admitted that he'd found his sexual encounters unsatisfying, incomplete somehow, as if there was more to be attained but he'd no idea how to reach it. For what reason Raven would never be able to say, he held back information about the child he believed he had so recently conceived with Pale Fawn.
Discussions were disturbed briefly by a har bringing lunch, a thick, spiced soup with hunks of corn bread. Pragmatically Curlew stated that conversation never went well on an empty stomach.
After lunch they were joined by Batalha. Unlike the rest of the Sulh, he was dressed in a simple white robe. Everything about Batalha was pale and insubstantial – his hair, his eyes, his skin – as if he were a wraith that could vanish in a heartbeat. Curlew introduced him as scribe and history keeper.
“That’s a bit of a fancy name for it,” Batalha quipped. “Really I’m just a field researcher.”
Through poetry and song Batalha held Raven fascinated telling the creation myths of Wraeththu and the Sulh tribe. As he sang he played complex rhythms on his small, many stringed harp. By early evening Raven's head was reeling.
Finally they joined the rest of the tribe for supper around the fire. The blissful evening air soothed his pounding head as he ate the simple meal.
Abruptly his attention was caught by a har on the far side of the fireplace. Not overly tall but built solidly, the har was dark haired but pale skinned, his hair shaved completely on one side of his skull and tumbling down in thick curls on the other. A complex blue woad tattoo curled and coiled over the shaven skull, intricately defining the eye socket and the climactic point of the cheekbone. The tattoo wound down around his throat and appeared to continue down the left hand side of his body.
Raven, surprised by the strength of his interest, had to ask Mist who the har was.
“Fen,” came the reply. “From the waterlands of Alba Sulh. One of our warrior phyle, fearsome and loyal.” Looking around the camp Raven could see a few hara that were clearly also of warrior phyle – although none of them as physically arresting as Fen.
After supper Raven wandered a little way away from the camp. He sat down on a fallen branch with his head in his hands. There was so much to take in, so much that was new. Curlew had deeply shocked him when he'd told him that on inception changes would take place within his body that would render him both male and female. Batalha had shocked him further when he'd stated that although there was no record of it happening as yet, he believed that Wraeththu would one day go on to procreate. However, Raven's reservations about the lack of place for women in this new world of Wraeththu were somewhat appeased. Batalha told him, sincerely, that he felt women too had a new path to walk – their time was not yet done. Raven found he believed him.
These thoughts chased each other around his head as he sat on the fallen branch. Familiar forest sounds echoed around him, soothing scents floated by on a cooling breeze – and then something else.
Raven sat bolt upright. “I know when I'm being watched,” he told the night.
A patch of darkness detached itself from the shadows and moved into view. Fen.
“Scared I'd run off?” asked Raven, hiding his surprise that it was the har he’d been staring at earlier.
Fen nodded. “You know too much.”
“And you'd what? Kill me?”
Fen nodded again, slipping a narrow-bladed knife from his boot. “I'd have slid this gently down the side of your neck into your shoulder, severing the subclavian vein. You'd have died in seconds – silently.”
For a moment Raven glared at him. “Then it's as well I've decided to stay,” he hissed, pushing past Fen as he returned to camp.
The following morning Raven informed Mist and Curlew of his decision to stay. They greeted this news with evident relief and pleasure. He did not mention his encounter with Fen the night before.
Whilst the tribe tucked into their breakfast eggs, Raven drank only an herbal tea prepared for him by Mist. His pre-inception purification had begun.
Raven withdrew from the rest of the tribe spending long hours in meditation with Mist, who described every detail of the inception process: the fasting, the ceremony, the althaia and the aruna to follow. Raven suggested a few native herbs that might assist each process.
Late that afternoon Raven, Mist and Batalha went foraging in the forest. They collected humming bird blossoms to stimulate kidney function and detoxification and dug up the small roots of greenbriar to purify the blood. Mist pressed Raven for every detail of the plants, their habitats, their range, and their properties. Batalha listened intently, all the while humming to himself.
“Batalha takes in everything,” Mist told Raven, “He has a phenomenal memory and ‘records’ everything – as a song.”
The group wandered further into the forest gathering leaves, roots and bark. All the while Raven was aware of a dark shadow – Fen? – behind them; clearly he was still not entirely trusted.
At last they returned to camp. Raven drank more of the herbal tea, which appeased his growling stomach not at all. Then followed more chanting and meditation and finally sleep.
The next day followed a similar pattern, although a further cleansing ritual was required. At Mist's request a small hut had been constructed from scented boughs and leaves. Raven joined Mist, Curlew and Batalha inside as heated stones were brought in. Cedar, sage and sweet grass were cast upon the stones as the heat and humidity soared. The sweat lodge had been an important part of Mountain People lifestyle and Raven felt quite at home there. Batalha’s serious songs of cleansing and reverence soon gave way to a bawdy many-versed ballad about the joys of aruna.
Still humming the chorus, they emerged hot and sweaty. Raven was glad of the herbal tea, although he was getting heartily sick of the flavour. That night following meditation, Mist looked intently at him.
“You are ready,” he said. “Tomorrow we will perform your inception.”
The ceremony was performed at a simple forest alter. The entire tribe assembled. Mist performed the rituals, while Curlew provided the blood. When it was over, Raven was helped back to the quiet confines of Mist's tent as the changing processes began.
Althaia.
The transformational force that rips, sears and burns through the body, driving men to the edge of insanity and beyond. Mist and Raven had prepared well. They had gathered mullion. Its roots and leaves smouldered; the smoke a mild sedative that soothed inflammation. To control his fever, Raven sipped a tea made from the leaves and dried berries. As Raven's skin began to blister and erupt in sores, Mist applied the salve they'd prepared from mint and greenbriar. Raven remained lucid by chanting the ancient healing words from the mantras of his people. Where he felt it appropriate, Mist chanted with him.
Althaia would never be easy but Raven's passage into Wraeththudom was far gentler than most, Mist told him – Mist was impressed. And already, at this early stage, the point of rebirth, their two cultures, Sulh and Mountain People, had begun to blend.
In the late afternoon of the third day, Raven and Mist lay sleeping. Althaia was done, the changes made. The doorway drapes were thrown wide open so a refreshing breeze could blow through and remove the tattered vestiges of stale energy and discomfort. The bedding had been changed and Raven lay upon it, gleaming and perfect.
He stirred and awoke to find Mist gazing sleepily at him.
“You are wondrous” Mist told him. “You made your transformation well. How do you feel?”
Raven stretched and yawned, enjoying his new body. “The strongest and fittest I've ever felt,” he said. “And the most alive.”
“We must seal the changes with aruna,” Mist reminded him.
“Sure, but close the drapes would you?
I don't want the rest of the tribe in on this.”
Mist graciously nodded and complied.
Raven sat up, pulling off his shirt. “So where do we start?”
“Well, sharing of breath is customary.”
“A kiss, you mean?”
“A kiss, yes, but it's more than that, a kiss of mutual visualisation. We share our thoughts, feelings, memories.”
“Show me.”
“What would you like to see?”
“How did you get your name?”
Mist smiled. “A happy memory,” he said stroking Raven's cheek, drawing him closer. As their lips met, Raven was hit by a blast of power that made him gasp.
Undaunted, he plunged his hands into Mist's copious blue-grey hair and found himself soaring over a rolling green landscape of hills, fields, hedges and woodland.
“Alba Sulh,” said Mist from deep somewhere in Raven's own head, “our homeland, the western borders to be precise – my home.” The time of this vision, Raven could sense, was shortly after Mist's own inception. He had gone out to discover his new name and, as was often the custom, he'd decided to take inspiration from nature. When human he'd enjoyed climbing a hill near his village, a large rocky outcrop set on a wide plain. From the top you felt as though you could see forever.
There was a freshening breeze as he'd started to climb. As he climbed higher the wind blew stronger. On reaching the top it had become a howling gale and the view he'd hoped to see was obscured by low cloud and wisps of fog. He sat down with his back to a rock watching the cloud and fog swirl past him. Shapes and colours billowed around, patterns and stories, visions of new paths and new journeys. A mist vision – gifted only to shamans.
The new har had returned to his tribe knowing his name and his purpose. His tribesmates came to greet him with wonder for he was greatly changed. Gone was the short-spiked tawny hair, replaced by a mist-coloured cloud and his eyes, once blue, had become all-seeing obsidian.
Mist pulled away gently. “Your first breath-vision,” he smiled. “Now you try.”
Clumsily, erratically, Raven showed Mist the story of his own name. He showed how as a child his mother had taken him on her lap and told him the story of his naming. Shortly after his birth, as soon as she was able, she had taken herself and her precious bundle up into the forest. She'd sat beneath her favourite tree, the one beneath which she was now buried, and awaited inspiration. A black, glossy bird swooped down and stood before her feet. He bowed low, offering her a gift of fruit. As she accepted, the bird began a capering dance, stretching his wings and drumming his feet.
“Raven,” she'd said. The bird bowed once again and flew away.
She had been both pleased and disturbed by this experience. Raven was a proud name associated with warriors but she had also been raised on stories of the Raven-Mockers. These were witches of indeterminate sex who the tribe believed robbed the dying of life, feasting on their hearts to add length to their own lives. In time she had begun to think of Wraeththu as the Raven-Mockers and grew fearful for her son.
Mist drew away. “We do not eat hearts,” he said, sadly.
“Nor do you steal lives to add length to your own. You add to the lives of others,” Raven told him. “Now finish what you've started and seal my changes with aruna – for I am Raven and will not be mocked!”
Mist laughed uproariously, flinging Raven onto his back.
“As you wish,” he said. “I hope in aruna you find what you seek.” He breathed a single breath down the length of Raven’s chest and belly, following it with the lightest of touches with his fingers, igniting every nerve cell along its path.
Raven gave him a look that said, “If you don’t do something now, I’m going to explode.”
Mist laughed again, piercing him, and Raven’s spirit was catapulted high into the sky, looking down on the camp and over the mountains. He was momentarily disorientated.
Beside him Mist said, “Come and fly with me.”
Over the treetops, above the resinous mists, away from the forests towards grassy plains and the sea and then beyond, Raven and Mist’s essences coiled around each other. On, across the lapping waves to a necklace of islands, long drawn out ribbons of sand where long ago the forests had found their way and made their home. Through the trees, across the sands, past crazy wooden houses that reached up to the sky and tumbling in the surf, free of the shackles of flesh Raven and Mist became lost in each other and the landscape around them.
Then climax and a return to flesh.
Mist pushed his own sweat-soaked hair away from his face and turned to Raven.
“Better than before?”
Raven nodded.
“That place, the islands. They’re important to you.”
Raven shook his head, “I’ve never been there.”
“Then they will be important to you sometime in the future.”
“Can aruna do that? Show you the future?”
“It can. It can take you out of time, all times become one, all places become one.”
“Amazing!” Raven grinned. “That’s going to take some thinking about. But right now… can we do it again?”
Mist laughed. “Give me a moment would you?”
Raven settled down quickly into his new life. The band of Sulh he had joined were information gatherers, herbalists, anthropologists, and historians. Batalha was the group’s memory.
They foraged for food, kept a few hens in a portable run, made craft goods to sell and trade, living as lightly on the land as they could. It was a way of life that resonated strongly with Raven’s own.
Many days were spent with Batalha roaming the forests, observing how the land and that which lived upon it worked together. Raven told him the myths of his people, the herbs they used for healing, the magical rites they practiced to ensure success and longevity. All the while Batalha hummed and sang softly to himself.
“Back in Alba Sulh they’re creating a library” Batalha told him “The Great Library of Kyme. The Mountain People and all they knew will not be forgotten.”
Other times Raven worked with the artisans making jewellery and leather goods. In this way the artwork of the Mountain People became absorbed into that of the Sulh.
Always Raven was aware of the presence of the warrior phyle there to protect the tribe, each of them with their curling woad tattoo. Fen particularly held his attention. Raven watched him now, out of the corner of his eye, sharing a joke with another tattooed warrior, Fen’s mouth split wide as he barked with laughter. Although he no longer felt watched or mistrusted Raven was constantly aware of the Waterlander’s presence.
He asked Mist about it one day.
“Waterlanders are like that,” said Mist. “Strong soul energy. They suck you in.”
“I can’t imagine a land made of water.”
“Ask Fen about it.”
“I couldn’t”
“Don’t be a coward!” Mist laughed, “You fancy him! Do something about it.”
“I don’t!” Raven spluttered in protest. Mist cocked an eyebrow at him.
“I do,” sighed Raven, “Dammit!”
Later Raven found Fen sitting on the same fallen branch by the lakeside the he himself had sat on, a long time ago it seemed, the night he first came to the tribe. Fen was smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings in the air. He acknowledged Raven’s arrival with a nod of his head but said nothing.
Raven sat down beside him. “Mist and Batalha have been instructing me,” he began.
Fen nodded again but didn’t look at him.
“About Alba Sulh and The Waterlands to the east.”
Fen cocked his head and looked sideways at him.
“I’ve lived in the mountains all my life. I can’t imagine what waterland looks like.”
“It’s wet,” said Fen. “There’s a lot of water.”
Raven began to babble, “Only I… Er... Mist said I should talk to you...”
Fen’s face split into the broadest grin Raven had e
ver seen.
“That’s the clumsiest request for a snog I’ve ever heard in my life!” he hooted. “Come here, I’ll show you.”
Raven had become used to the higher vibrational energy of the Sulh, his encounters with Mist had prepared him somewhat, but now he realised that Mist must have been holding back. Either that or he’d underestimated the strength of the soul energy possessed by The Waterlanders.
Fen’s kiss nearly knocked him off the branch. On a blast of power he was transported to an alien land, wholly flat. Reed-fringed strips of land barely encroaching on the vast expanses of water that stretched away before him. He was, he realised, inside Fen’s head, sharing an oft-visited memory. The Waterlander stood upright in a coracle, kept in balance and moved along solely by Fen’s will.
It was sunset. Streaks of purple, orange and crimson smeared the sky and reflecting in the water beneath. It was impossible to tell where sky ended and water began and all the while the haunting call of a curlew urged him onwards.
“Home,” said Fen, deep inside Raven’s head. “And the call of the curlew, I’ve been following that for years. I followed it to Curlew himself, then to Megalithica, then here to this mountain and now to you.”
“How could you leave a place like this? It’s magical.”
“There’s magic everywhere you just have to look – you know that. There’s magic here in these mountains of yours.”
Later, lying spent in Fen’s bed, the tendrils of aruna still caressing them, Fen told Raven the legend of Avalona, the first city of Alba Sulh.
“No-one really knows how it came to be there. It lies southwest of The Waterlands. Some say it fell, fully formed from another realm through a rift in the fabric of reality. Others say that a great red-haired king and his red-haired sister battled with magic over the swamp lands and created the rift. It’s supposed to be an amazing place full of twisting towers and flying creatures...”
“You’ve never been there?” Raven asked, tracing the undulating tattoo down Fen’s chest.
“No, the only one of us ever to visit was Curlew and he was weird for days after.”
“Weird? Sounds intriguing. Can we go there?”
Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu Page 28