The Elder Man

by Katherine Wyvern

  It was a remarkable room. There was no TV anywhere to begin with. One whole wall was lined with books, floor to ceiling. There was a battered antique table under a window, obviously used as a desk, and sofas made from cob piled with pillows, sheep fleeces, and blankets, but the focus of the room was the fireplace, which was sculpted like a cavern in the roots of a huge knotty tree, the twisting trunk for a chimney and a tangle of branches that supported and half concealed niches and shelves and sculpted birds and joined the rafters of the ceiling overhead. The roots sometimes morphed into snakes, the branches into antlered heads. Unlike the rest of the room, which was roughly whitewashed, the fireplace still bore the orange-brown color of the raw clay.

  Every bit of wall was covered in twisting and twirling bas-relief, which reached outwards sometimes in full-bodied sculptures to meet a pillar or support the ceiling. It was all swirls and curves, constantly transmuting in and out of natural forms, somewhat Celtic, somewhat Jugendstil or Art Nouveau, but not quite one or the other. There were a few paintings too, real paintings on canvas, not prints or posters, violently churning abstract things, full of color flares and ferocious momentum with no recognizable shapes. They were totally at odds with the rest of the décor, and also, absurdly, they complemented it nicely. They shared the same stationary form of savage, relentless energy.

  “Well,” said Van smiling, “if you are good, and if you get up in time for breakfast for a change, and don’t make your mother come looking for you in bed at 11:00 AM every day, and if you put your back into the work, and if we manage to raise the walls high enough that it makes sense, then we might do a spot of clay plaster on Sunday, and you can try your hands at sculpting things with it.”

  “Please, please,” they repeated. “We’ll be good!”

  “That’d be a first,” said Frederic, rather stormily, from his seat in a corner of the room.

  “Oh, but we will!”

  “You’d better. Or I might lose my proverbial patience, girls,” said Van with a bristling scowl that was both playful and rather formidable.

  “What is clay plaster exactly?” asked Mark, who was also examining the walls with great interest.

  “It’s much the same as cob but a finer texture. You can add a number of things to make the mix stickier, but essentially it’s clay and chopped straw for the body of the sculptures and clay and manure for the details and surface finish.”

  “Manure?” said Josefine, looking a little sickly and suddenly a lot more reserved about the whole dragon venture.

  Mark, who had been following the lines of an intricate tree sculpture, took his fingers off the wall very quickly and looked at Van with a worried frown. “You mean these walls are made with … er…”

  “Horse dung,” said Van with a perfectly devilish grin. “You’ll love it. You’ll see.”

  “We will?” asked Sofia, a little weakly.

  “I promise you,” said Van, holding her lightly around the shoulders and leading her to a chair.

  “Manure and clay have been used in plasters and stuccos since time immemorial and are still used extensively all over Asia and Africa and wherever natural building is coming back into fashion. Only from grass- and hay-fed animals, of course. You need whole fibers in it. Although the digestive enzymes in fresh manure do the clay a lot of good too.”

  Josefine looked greener by the minute.

  “Don’t worry, though,” said Van, grinning. “We’ll probably have to stick with dry manure this time around. We won’t have time to let the fresh stuff ferment.”

  “That’s better, yes?” asked Mark, dithering a little.

  “Well, it doesn’t develop quite such a feral smell.”

  There were some groans and moans in the company.

  “Don’t look so glum, children. All acts of creation, you know, are rooted in shit, one way or another.”

  “Tea? Cake?” said Allie brightly from the kitchen door, and everybody perked up, or tried too, and the trays passed around, pouring out sweet good humor.

  Paul had baked the cake, a perfectly glorious tarte au fraises, covered with an inch of thick cream and topped with the sort of strawberries they pick in heaven, and it was sloppily, filthily delicious. Armin managed to get cream splattered almost to his elbows, and he just licked it off. He didn’t feel even a little bit guilty.

  Meintje struck up a conversation in a corner with the Americans, and in a lull of the general noise, her quiet voice caught everybody’s attention.

  “It was not really my idea. The cobbing workshop. It was my husband’s dream. We lived in the Netherlands and the United States for so long, always in crazy towns. He wanted to retire to some rural place away from civilization, build a roundhouse, and live off the land. I always thought it was a rather ambitious scheme for someone who had been doing nothing but filling cavities all his life, but…” She gave a small laugh.

  “So where is he?” asked Monica. “Shouldn’t he be here?”

  “He died last year,” said Meintje, evenly, without any drama.

  “Oh dear,” said Monica, embarrassed.

  She didn’t seem able to get over the awkward moment, and it was Edith who asked, “What happened?”

  Meintje shrugged. “Cancer. One day he was fine, and then he began having these pains, and in three months, he was gone, just like that. One year away from his retirement and his roundhouse dream.”

  “Jeez Louise,” said Ella. “That fucking sucks. Pardon my French.”

  Meintje smiled. “I said worse things in the past few months. So I suppose it’s my … memorial to him, being here.”

  Van, who was still standing, and walking about with bottles and teapots, squeezed her shoulder and poured her a steaming cup of tea, which smelled like a whole field of wild flowers.

  “Well, that seems a wildly romantic reason to join a building workshop,” said Monica, and Armin had the impression that there was a slight sneer in her tone.

  He sniffed unhappily. He wasn’t good with people and wouldn’t have known how to talk to Meintje right then. But even he found Monica’s reaction rather insensitive.

  “So why are you here?” asked Mark a little more stiffly than usual, although, ever the gentleman, he poured her more wine.

  “Well, no offense, but it seems to me that women should really stop playing house in the kitchen, and bending over backwards to please their men, and going out of their way to make men’s dreams come true. I came here because it’s only right women get a chance to build their home if they wish. It’s a matter of principle.”

  “By that logic you should be building skyscrapers in London,” mused Van. “There’s not much political oomph in building mud huts.”

  “See, that’s just typical. If you build a cob house, it’s a work of art. If a woman builds one, it’s a mud hut.”

  Armin blinked, frowned, and squinted at Monica to see if she was being ironic and realized, with absolute astonishment, that she was completely serious, that, at this quiet, mellow, friendly gathering, she was going off in all sober earnest—or at least only slightly tipsy, gosh that woman could drink—on a flaming feminist tirade.

  “Oh, wow, that’s what I call putting a spin on someone’s words,” exclaimed Armin’s mouth before his brain had had a chance to have a say in the matter.

  He didn’t want to be dragged into such a discussion, but since his mouth was doing so well without him, Armin let it run ahead and add, “Can we please agree that not all males are assholes? As a matter of principle? I am as feminist as any woman. I am super respectful and supportive, and it’s a little tiring to be considered a privileged entitled bastard just because I happen to have testicles.”

  “There is no need to take it personal,” said Monica, “but the fact is—”

  “The fact is, Monica, that if you generalize like that, you are dragging everybody in, whether it’s personal or not,” he said, getting a little heated, and in that moment, Van, who had come to sit close to him, kicked his ankle smartly under
cover of a small table full of books and tea mugs.

  “You seem to be saying,” said Van, cutting him off—which was just as well since Armin was close enough to losing his temper and, in any case, could barely bite down a yelp of pain from the kick—“that women are only powerful when they behave like men.”

  “Well, if equality is to mean something, women will have to,” she said flatly.

  “Well, that’s too bad for you. Wrong workshop. Real builders, you know, the steel-and-concrete sort of builders, always accuse me of building like a woman.”

  That caused some laughter in the assembly.

  “How?” asked Ella, genuinely interested but also, Armin thought, trying to defuse the situation a little.

  “I suppose it’s because I like to build organically, rather than following imposed, coded design principles. I like to let materials decide the shapes they want to take, up to a point. I like comfortable curves and small, enfolding spaces.”

  “That’s very male, actually,” said Meintje, smiling. She was surprisingly good-looking when she did. Armin was pleased and relieved to see the smile on her face, which had been so grave a few minutes earlier. Van grinned, amused, and bowed.

  “Perhaps it is, considering. But, you know, I like to create gentle buildings that nestle into the landscape instead of dominating it. I believe a building should be nurturing, both as a process and as a finished artifact.”

  “But I suppose that is a trend among all natural builders, no?” asked Ella.

  “Oh, no, not at all. I know female natural builders who build far more masculine, imposing, and—shall I say?—rational buildings than I.”

  “See, that is exactly the kind of stereotypes we are constantly confronted with. Males are rational, and females are nurturing,” said Monica, missing the point spectacularly. “You still want to see females as some kind of angels of the hearth.”

  “Not at all. I am the angel of my own hearth, thank you very much. I am fairly male, I think, and also nurturing, I hope. You want to see an opposition. I don’t. What I want is to see women deciding for themselves what they want to be and do. If they would like to fulfill a stereotypical female role, as you put it, why should they be ashamed of it? Why must they be badgered into being aggressive and competitive? I love that democracy gave women a chance to choose. But then, if they don’t choose to be corporate managers or firefighters or politicians or superheroes and be generally full of rebellious rage, they are made to feel guilty. By other women, mostly. As if they were letting the side down. I do not understand this at all. I just don’t. How is that liberating?”

  “That’s exactly right,” said Mark, with some emphasis.

  “But the point is, that they don’t have a choice, not a real choice. If they want to have a choice at all, they have to choose to fight for their rights. Every day. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Well, yes,” said Edith conciliating, “but we have made immense progress. You weren’t even there when things really sucked. Of course there is still work to do…”

  “Kill all males, for example,” cut in Frederic with a small sniff.

  “I ’ave never known a woman who remembered to change ze oil in ’er car,” said Jean-Pierre laconically and unexpectedly from his corner of the sofa, where he had been sitting mum all evening. Armin had not even been sure if he understood English or not. “By ze end of one year, zey will all go by foot.”

  Everyone burst into deafening laughter, even the women, except Monica, who huffed and droned on and on in that piercing nasal voice.

  Armin, who was both exhausted and bored, lost the thread of her discourse. God, what a life it must be to be so bloody woke all the damn time, he thought, trying with only moderate success to suppress a yawn. It must be like having hemorrhoids. Or a pimple in your foreskin.

  Van had gotten up again and was coming and going silently from the kitchen, refilling the kettle, opening bottles. Jade the hound had fallen asleep on the rug by the fire, and Michel had gone to sleep on top of him. Van quietly picked up the child and took him out of the room, presumably to the bedroom. There were small LED lights scattered here and there in the room, but Van also lit a number of candles in sconces and lanterns. Armin wondered if he was still listening to Monica, and if he was equally irked, but then he became just lost in the strangely live organic shapes that adorned the walls. They seemed even more alive in the soft, trembling glow of the candles, which made them wave and flicker in and out of light and shade, and as Van’s shadow, or rather shadows, cast by several different candles, traveled over some of the sculptures, Armin began to see a new shape couched deep into the branches and limbs of the creatures on the walls, all the twisting, forking, waving trees and serpents and dragons and apparently random swirls and spirals. It was just a suggestion of a shape, perhaps, so cleverly disguised that the viewer might never be certain he had seen it, or, having seen it, might never be sure if it had been put there on purpose or was rather a chance shape, like some things you see in the clouds.

  It was a recurring human figure, subtly hinted, here and there, never whole, never obvious, always just suggested in the curve of a tree trunk, half hidden in shade, and always crowned with horns or antlers, sometimes real antlers.

  It seemed almost to Armin, once or twice, that Van’s wandering, wavering shadow had antlers of its own. Enough wine, he thought, blinking. What I need is black coffee.

  “Why the antlered man?” he asked over Monica’s voice. The non sequitur took everyone by surprise.

  “Eh?” blared Monica.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Mark, completely thrown.

  Armin felt suddenly bashful and a little stupid, not to mention rude. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. It’s just that I keep seeing him everywhere, and I wondered…”

  Edith, Meintje and Ella looked at him quizzically, all three head tilted to one side rather comically. Rebekka looked vaguely around, as if trying to catch the shape that everyone had missed.

  Armin decided he could either explain or let them all think he was stoned, drunk, or tripping, so he pointed with his index finger to the wall. “I am not hallucinating. Look, right there by the window. And there, where the shelf meets the pillar. You can see an arm and a shoulder. And just outside the fireplace, near the table. He pops up all over the sculptures, if you look.”

  Van was smiling. Jean-Pierre harrumphed, frowning, and crossed his arms in front of his chest. Allie shot him a quick apprehensive glance.

  “Why the antlered man? Who is it?” repeated Armin, a little confused, looking at Van.

  Van shrugged. “He’s … Amun, and Silvanus and Pan, and the Leshy and Veles and Svyatibor … even the Minotaur, perhaps. There is a picture of him as old as fifteen thousand years in a cave in the Ariege, la grotte des Trois-Frères. The Sorcerer. Prancing fellow with antlers and a thumping big dong.”

  Every woman in the room, including the young girls, giggled.

  “Van!” said Allie.

  He grimaced theatrically. “Sorry. All these old horned males. What can I say?”

  “Van!”

  “Anyway, some would say he’s the Devil, too, and Baphomet. And lately, just the Horned God. It all got twisted about since the Christians started messing with the old deities. And the Wiccans just made one big stew of it all to cover all the bases and be on the safe side. They may not be wrong however. In France, the Gauls came to call him Cernunnos or Carnonos or Cerunincos, which all simply mean the horned one or the antlered one. I suppose we might go with Cernunnos.”

  He smiled.

  Allie looked at him adoringly. Jean-Pierre scoffed.

  “Wherever you look, there was always a god of the forest, the earth, the water… a god of low places, valleys, sources, meadows. His trees were always small trees. Healing trees. The willow, the elder, the rowan. Not a sky god. Not a war god. He was also, as often as not, a god of agriculture and fertility. And death and healing, even resurrection. Fall, winter, and spring, the seasons.
Nature again. It was easy in the old days to believe in such a divinity. And it was wise to pay tribute to him. Forests, fields, death, rebirth, the cycles and forces of nature were rather more … central.”

  “They still seem central enough in this place,” said Edith, smiling.

  Van bowed.

  “But why the antlers?” asked Josefine. “It seems awfully impractical, even for a forest god.”

  Van gave a wry laugh. “It sure is,” he said. But then he sobered and added, “There has always been something mystical about the stag and his antlers, in all the old Indo-European cultures. The stag was important enough to have his own constellation, roughly where modern astronomers place Ophiuchus. The Celts put it nicely, saying that the stag carried the solar disk in his crown. His antlers and his strength are greatest in the autumn, lost in the winter, and emerge again in the spring. He incarnates the death of nature and its awakening. He and Cernunnos are avatars of the fall, of the death of nature and its rebirth. Cycles again.”

  “Is that why he’s sculpted everywhere?” asked Armin. “Do you, like—er—believe? In this… god?”

  Van scratched his graying beard and gave him a roguish grin. “Let’s put it this way. Just on the off chance he’s still walking about in these parts, I’d rather not piss him off. Those olden gods...” He waved a hand and rolled his eyes, and everyone laughed, but Armin held eye contact with him for a moment and had a feeling Van had not spoken completely in jest.

  “And they say,” Van added, and everyone went quiet again, “that he was a sort of … guardian, you might say, to the entrance of the Underworld. Or Otherworld. As a god of cycles and metamorphosis, he was also a god of passage. A ferryman of sorts. And the keeper of the gate. There again, the stag is his equivalent, in a way, because he travels to the underworld of winter, to retrieve the life-giving sun. You don’t want to mess around with an antlered guy who can snatch you from the world of the living or prevent you from coming back should you have strayed onto the other side, or worse, deny you passage when your time comes to go across.”