Songs for Dark Seasons

by Lisa Hannett

  “In the Winter Palace I had more champagne than I could quaff in ten lifetimes,” she mutters. “Poured into delicate, cut-crystal glasses, served alongside sugared fruits and meringues stacked on pretty cake-tiers ... The plates on my banqueting tables were gilt porcelain, the cutlery polished silver, the salvers and serving trays fashioned from mirrors. Everything gleamed. There was so goddamned much gold, Miss Jenny. Rib after rib of it was leafed on vaulted ceilings. Engraved on double doors. Carved into reliefs in pale blue and white corridors. Flecked through ballroom tiles and majestic staircases. Framing masterpieces hung in my very own galleries--galleries jam-packed with giant paintings, paintings I bought, some even bigger than this whole wall. Gold was ribboned around epaulettes and across satin bodices. And still, whenever I wanted, it was poured bubbling into my glass ... ” Tina sighs, gazes wistful into the past. “We needed so much splendor, you see, to combat the grey world outside.”

  “Y’all might think I look a tad like him,” I says, backhanding a cinder off my apron. “But I ain’t no Rumpelstiltskin, gal. I spin hide, not gold.”

  That raises a brow, a chortle.

  Frankly, out of us two, I’m much closer to Great Catherine’s short stature. Beneath its stitched skull-cap, my shorn head barely reaches the mantel while Tina-Marie’s, even swaying with drink, is held high, refusing to accept it ain’t topped with an imperial crown. Meanwhile, she’s a match for the Empress when it comes to fat. Her broad torso is less regal than it is Viking-built; in that respect, she’s still Halvdan through and through. Them muscled arms of hers is made for wielding war-axes. Launching spears. Pulling oars.

  Rickets has left my limbs awful bowed, putting a lifelong hitch in my gid-up, but Tina’s stride is long and sure. Hers is a horselord’s gait. Designed for travelling across grass-blown steppes, riding or running or both. That there’s Hoelun’s influence, I reckon.

  All told, the tips of my toes lift like an imp’s, my smile’s holier than Mary, and my skin’s cracked and brown. Top to toe, I’m tough as the buckskin strings looped round and round my forearms, the oiled strands braided round my chook-neck, the overworked cowhide what lent me its name. Leather Jenny, that’s me. Even a blind man wouldn’t call neither of us beautiful, but that opinion don’t bother me none.

  Go ahead: call Leather Jenny a gnome, a dwarf, or any other magic runt imaginable. She won’t argue. She won’t complain. She ain’t got unreasonable expectations, no far-fetched aspirations.

  Better than most folks, I knows my rightful place in this world--always have--not to mention how to stay in it.

  * * *

  “There you go,” Tina says, white-knuckling her mug, turning to waggle a finger at me. She huffs over to my ratty couch by the fireplace, green corduroy rubbed pale on the arms and cushions, then stomps back to the table. “That’s exactly my point, Miss Jenny. What more can anyone expect from Chippewa--or any other place now, in this godforsaken time, this godforsaken country? What can I hope for here? Nothing, that’s what. No straw, no gold.”

  “Y’all forever want a magic fix,” I says with a shrug. “Straw into gold? Please. Show me a man with more than ten deer-free acres of corn, and I’ll show you the only true alchemist these parts ever will know. Now park yerself a whiles, jitterbug.” Joints creaking, I lead by example and lower meself onto the sofa in a whump of dust. “All that to-ing and fro-ing’s driving me batty.”

  “It’s not just the gold,” she says, stopping. “Not just the palace, the fancy champagne. It’s--” Her mouth guppies as she grasps for words.

  There’s this foreign notion I heard spoke on the wireless once, what describes that gut-ache folk get when they’s homesick for times they can’t never go back to, or missing places they ain’t never really seen. Never could wrap my tongue round the word--it’s a bunch of aitches and breathy nostalgia--but I reckon Tina-Marie’s tone just now captures it perfect. Yearning, felt deep, in all its pain and hopeless confusion. It lifts her voice up to the cobwebs, keeps her focus from fixing on these unvarnished walls of mine. Turning slowly, her sights skim across star-charts painted on timbers, over chalked timelines and moon cycles, past maps and genealogies for every possible where and when I’ve yet fathomed. Leylines criss-crossing here on Chippewa land don’t seem to register with her. Histories lock horns with futures all around her, but she don’t see none of it right about now.

  She pays no mind to the iron cauldron I gots hooked under the flue. The chains of rue and mugwort and chillies pegged on the fire-shelf. The wax drippings on that mantel, the rune marks, the scattered bones. The miner’s bench tucked between chimney and sideboard, my sleeping-quilt draped messy across its hard length. The teetering stacks of faceless photographs. The hair-wreaths.

  She’s looking beyond my withy brooms and the gabled porch they’ve swept. Beyond the well dug outside in my pine-needle yard. Beyond the barrier of maples, birches, and sticky blue spruce that separates my wild half-acre from a county flattened into concrete lots and paved streets. Beyond stone circles on graveled hilltops, sacred groves of ash and cedar, sigil-marked teepees and the feather-clad folk what dwell in them. Beyond the coal-riddled mountains hemming us, one and all, into this forgotten valley.

  Far as Tina’s concerned, there ain’t really nothing here and now to compare with all that’s beyond, and beyond, and beyond.

  * * *

  “I was in the Varangian guard,” she says after a moment, expression wonder-filled. Perplexed. “I served in Mikhaēl III’s personal retinue--me, a Norwegian nobody’s son. I was favoured in Miklagarðr long before Harald Hardråde sailed south from our strong Northern lands. I owned armour, understand? What I wore into battle was mine alone to wear out, mine alone to die in. Good quality stuff, shared with no one. I had earned my very own helmet. My very own. Today, traces of my name--Halvdan--remain in that famous city. Over a thousand years ago, I etched it myself, deep and permanent, into a parapet on the top floor of the Hagia Sofia. Those rough letters have outlasted the hand that carved them. They’ve survived the blessed man who taught that hand to write.”

  Tina shakes her head. “I don’t get it, Miss Jenny. Once I was also the greatest khan’s mother, and his trusted advisor. Later, I was first son to Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver, most beloved of his children. After I died that time, my good father’s grief spilled into beautiful poetry:

  The people think of wealth and power as the greatest fate,

  But in this world a spell of health is the best state.

  “Important verses, don’t you think?” Tina-Marie turns, a picture of drunken befuddlement. She’s squinting, blinking too much. Tears have melted runnels into her face-paint. “Don’t you think they mean something?”

  “No doubt,” I says. “I gets it.”

  Now she looks at me proper, half-lit. Frowns. “How the hell did I end up here?”

  I knows she don’t mean here, wasting a morning in Leather Jenny’s cabin, so much as here in a broader sense. Trapped in Chippewa territory, at the country’s arse-end, powerless and poor, with a head full of impossible riches. By here Tina’s really saying now.

  This shiftless era. This hopeless state. This century of empty abundance.

  This long dark gap between short periods of brilliance.

  “Let me help,” I says, patting the couch cushion beside me, getting to the crux of it all. “I’ll untangle them timelines, straighten ’em out. Settle that uneasy mind of yers, get you back on track.”

  “Thing is,” she says, “I don’t want to know. Everything my selves have done, everything we’ve achieved? Everything we’ve lost.” Then, quiet and true: “I don’t want to know how I got here. I don’t want to know any of it anymore.”

  “Well,” I says, thumbing the charm-knotted cords wrapped round my arms, the many pasts that string me together. “Y’all know I can help with that, too.”

  * * *

  Folk never ask about Leather Jenny’s own early days.

  Would’ve disappeared age
s ago if it weren’t for y’all, I’d tell any who asked. If only they’d ask.

  Bound in their problems, their own little lives, they don’t bother. They don’t care. Not now, not then. Generations of ignorant, lucky fools. All they see’s an old bald woman, shrivelled and crooked but still limber enough to look after herself--to look after them, when they comes a-calling. Always been here, the soothsayer has, Chippewa parents says to their frightened young’uns, smacking the nail on its skull without even knowing it. Without knowing how very long that always has been for me in this county, so long I can’t rightly recall the full of it myself. Not rightly. Not anymore.

  Maybe, once, there was a Jenny-gal who cured deer hides on the banks of unspoiled rivers, a Jenny whose black braids were silken nightmares to brush, a Jenny who was smooth and smart and learned real fast, a Jenny who soon read cloud-currents and bark-peelings and sap-secrets, a Jenny who witnessed the first tall ships bringing all these cursed folks’ folks ashore.

  Maybe, later, there was a clever-Jenny who attracted shadows, a Jenny who was welcomed into grove and glade and coven, a Jenny who traded kin and company for hexcraft, a Jenny whose nimble mind and nimbler fingers sifted through lives once-lived and lives sometimes-remembered, a Jenny who ruthlessly stole strands of those years to lengthen her own.

  Maybe, there was a solitary Jenny who watched whole fleets arrive by water and leave by wing, a Jenny whose time-tressing weaved her through celebrations and civil wars, a Jenny who snipped folks’ time just a bit and stashed the freight of their years inside her own skull, a Jenny who soothed by seeing everyone they’d ever been, then wrenched her own plaits out by the root, desperate to forget what she saw.

  Maybe, there’s a Leather Jenny whose life is bits and pieces pilfered together, magpied snatches of other folks’ memories, other folks’ strings, a Jenny who is tough and tired-out as this here couch, worn almost beyond use, yet stubbornly holding on.

  Maybe, there’s the forever Jenny who wants always and only to be herself, somehow, somewhen, no matter who or what she takes to be so.

  * * *

  Tina’s head lolls heavy in my lap, weighed down with brandy and bother. Shoes off, she’s stretched full out on the sofa. Hands clasped over the rumpled round of her belly. Heels fretting against fabric.

  “Reckon I’m soused,” she giggles, slipping into the crass accent she’s tried so hard all these years to suppress. “Worse than Mikhaēl III ever was--never mind that folk in Miklagarðr took to calling him The Drunk.” She snickers. “Them Byzantine richlings wouldn’t know a real drunkard if he walloped ’em on their hook noses. The Emperor was a booze-hound, but highly functional; constantly but only ever mildly pissed. Nothing close to what Ger’s like after a night at the rodeo, I can promise you that.”

  Any other day, she’d die of shame before admitting what other folk already know: that Ger’s a lout if ever there was one. An ale-sponge first, a seed-spreader second, and coming third--by a long mile--a two-bit rodeo wrangler. Ger still gots enough flick in that wrist of his to rope a longhorn come Saturnsday nights, but somehow he can’t manage to loop nothing whatsoever round Tina-Marie’s wedding finger. Now his once-firm rump’s been flattened on too many of The Short Go’s barstools; all them bottomless cups he’s swallowed has turned his once-fine figure to suet. Unlike the man she won’t never call husband, Tina don’t often pursue such liquid escapes. Nor numbing powders. Nor needle-veined oblivion.

  Them habits don’t offer more than temporary black-outs, which simply ain’t long enough for her.

  “Slip this on,” I says, fishing a lavender-filled sleeping mask from my apron pocket, followed by a fine-toothed ivory comb. As any teenage girl or secret lover knows, everyone’s more honest in the dark. “Close yer eyes. Rest a spell.”

  After she fumbles the faux-satin elastic around her head, I work her tresses loose with my fingers, riffling the frazzled strands across my thighs. Memory knots cluster close to her scalp, filthy bunches of ’em, obvious as black roots in platinum blonde hair. Small wonder she’s been so agitated, I think. What with all them shadow-nits roaming, burrowing, laying pesky eggs so near to her dream-maker. Practically begging me to yank ’em free.

  “This pressure all right?” I ask, but with the very first scrape of my comb through them overburdened snarls, I knows it ain’t.

  All right.

  The pressure.

  First off, the tines snag on pieces of Halvdan’s life--these ones are closest to the surface, I reckon, since Tina-Marie was only just thinking on her Viking days--and I tug firm, drawing a thread out to arm’s length. What a tangle! What a mess. Combing, pulling, I haul them stringed recollections and twist ’em all out of order. The Hagia Sofia! Battle-steel and blood! Miklagarðr in its heyday! The Forum of Theodosius with its basilica, its triumphal arch! Constantine’s magnificent god-topped column, porphyry cylinders stacked one atop the other, defying gravity! Stone pretending to be a great shaft of light.

  Exposed like this, stretched and combed across my lap, Tina’s long lives begin to harden. Unfurled, her memory knots turn into my own life-giving leather. Watching for frayed filaments, for potential breakages, I pluck whole strands root and all. Won’t do neither of us no good if I leave wisps behind to burrow into her head once more, to wriggle in deep and start to fester. Careful, careful, I snare and tug and take. Immediately she breathes a bit easier. So do I.

  While I work, the morning broadens into afternoon. Day spills thunder-grey through the open window, diluting the fireglow inside. A lulling light, it washes round us, soft as the hush of my comb through Tina-Marie’s oldest and dearest recollections, dull as the much more recent memories I leave stuck firm on her pate.

  Rasping the comb through Tina’s coarse hair, I gather enough life-yarns to weave an immortal tapestry. Pinching and pulling, I unfurl a stiff cord of buff leather long as my arm. The follicle is misshapen and hard: a tenacious, tear-drop pearl. Tina stirs when it finally pops free. Her sigh is a farewell to St Petersburg.

  Another strand, slightly shorter, is yellow as a sprig of wheat and twice as flexible--it twangs loose from her scalp, flails, then recoils snug round my forearm. Immediately I’m weather-bitten, scoured by katabatic winds. Hooded falcons shriek, tethered on my wrist. Frustrated hunters, their talons dig in, sharp and tense, as I absorb the ache Tina has for that nomadic age. The steppe-words stop whirring in the deepest pockets of her chest, horsewhipped out between teeth and lips. Chitt, troot, añoolt, miitsuuk ... Phrases summoned like herds with a whoosh, a shoo, meanings galloping away before she wakes. I gulp ’em all down like fermented mare’s milk, soaking up all them moments, them honour-driven years.

  I coil these detached strands round my biceps and forearms and wrists, skin against skin. While I’m wrapping and knotting these extra days onto my lifeline, I touch-read each remembered event in the leather, stark as a headline. Hoelun abducted by Yesügei! Proclaimed chief wife! Birthed five strong babies! For a moment Tina-Marie stirs; she starts babble-whimpering beside me. Rattling off the names of all her many bubs, then and now--Alexei-Paul, Hümaşah, Gudrun, Honey Blossom, Joelene--blacking the cords they’re attached to with her guilt. It ain’t that Tina don’t love her current kids. Only, maybe, she should oughta love ’em more. Resent ’em less. The way Hoelun did her son Temüjin, my brave blacksmith! The way Flaccilla Augusta--more so than Theodosius--had loved her daughter Aelia Pulcheria, my short-lived Gallaecian gal. The way Emperor Sulieman had loved Tina-Marie when she wore the shape of his eldest son, Mehmed.

  The people think of wealth and power as the greatest fate ...

  So unfair, Tina reckons--I can feel the frustration in her stubborn knots--so goddamn unfair that she died in Constantinople before Mehmed had seen the end of his twenty-second year. Before he could follow his father again into battle. Before he could become Caliph of Islam, Amir al-Mu’minin, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Padişah, Shadow of God on Earth.

  ...
in this world a spell of health is the best state.

  So unfair to be stuck here in Chippewa county.

  Doing nothing worth the effort of doing it, nothing worth remembering.

  Enduring the longest, healthiest, poorest now she’s ever known.

  * * *

  In this today, Tina don’t teach her sons tactics, nor negotiate clan rivalries, nor dole out advice about conquering rival tribes. The only wars she mediates are her fool kids’ petty squabbles. Whose turn it is for the TV controller. Whose turn to hose down the trailer. Whose turn to go to bed hungry.

  In this today, Tina’s daughters ain’t draped in lace nor ribbons. They don’t stand proud in quilted wool robes, fur-lined and hemmed to the shin. Tina’s gals ain’t got sharp eyes, narrowed to keep out demons. To a one, theirs is wide bunny-peepers, ever startled, ever stupid. She don’t expect them to become bank managers or sportscasters or even book-keepers, but wishes they’d at least finish school.

  In this today, ain’t no dynastic marriage going to drag Tina out of the trailer park. She ain’t no-one’s consort, no-one’s lover. She ain’t got endless streams of men come a-courting--no Sergei, no Grigory, no Alexander, no Stanisław--no cashed-up movers and shakers advising her, lifting her up a class or two, keeping her there. Sometimes, she gots Ger Stout. Most other times, she dallies with ghosts.