by Linda Talbot
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The wind sings through the open mouth of Logoth, the alabaster god by the whispering sea. His eyes of multi-coloured mineral gaze blindly at the stars.
Griesha listens from the undulating city wall. The song is a prophesy.
She sees the white-clothed interpreter approach; a slow-climbing ghost in the moonlight; arms outstretched in supplication. He kneels at the god's great feet and listens.
The song follows a disturbing scale that moves from major to minor; a warning and lament the interpreter reads as imminent danger. He sees the face of a stranger, moving with the motion of a ship.
The city is a self sufficient entity. No one knows its origins. It does not decay. Its elegant structures of a pale, unidentified mineral, curve and enfold, with bridges over salty inlets from the sea.
Griesha was told her race of people awoke one day to find the city shimmering in the sun. Their needs were mysteriously fulfilled. Yet they are a race without a soul, treading a land of indestructible beauty. There are days when the deathless flowers glow too unerringly in the softly filtered light and the languid lapping of the turquoise sea nullifies their senses.
The people might have been plucked from the void on the whim of an ancient god whose voice rises and falls in the song of Logoth.
As the interpreter kneels, he is borne to a land of cypresses and soaring peaks. The wind blowing through sun-steeped time is the wind that enters the god's open mouth.From a bustling harbour, a fleet of ancient ships sets sail. He knows they carry the stranger.
Lystos sails at the head of his fleet. He recalls how his son Shoun died during an exploratory expedition of the island. Lystos knows nothing of the people's passivity and, not knowing either that a stranger cannot survive in that land, suspects he had been killed.
Now he will devastate the city and take the island. He has heard it is an inexplicable paradise. Some say it rose from the sea; a pulsating mass of foliage and flowers; its unassailable city poised on the highest hill.
The inhabitants are thought to be immortal and their god melodious and monumental.
The interpreter runs to Arias, Griesha's father.
"Prepare. Strangers!" he declares. He describes the lush land he had envisaged. It was lovely yet flawed; a land where fear fuelled rituals of regeneration. And he related the departure of the fleet.
Arias listens. He knows nothing of other lands. He does not even understand his own. He has no arms, having had no need of them. He merely waits on the pure white wall, watching the placid sea.
At dawn Lystos slides over the ocean's rim. Birds with pearl grey wings waft majestically over the water, assessing the invaders with curious eyes.
Arias still stands on the wall. His anxious mind draws demons from the salt; floating figments of unreason that only the pearl grey birds disperse.
The ships with their elegant prows draw near. Griesha joins her father and is dazzled by the craft, shining in the sun. She is mesmerised by the splitting of the sea into heads of tossing foam as the craft glide towards the shore.
Yet as they scrape onto the sand, the sun withdraws. The pearl grey birds darken until their plumage glowers with menace. They settle in a line before the ships.
Lystos is paralysed, his hand half raised, his face frozen in anticipation. His navy stands to attention, motionless.
Arias gazes in disbelief. Griesha looks only at Lystos's dark austerity.
Night falls. The navy dims. Still the great birds wait in line. And from the hill Logoth begins to sing; a quiet confirmation of rebuttal.
The people of the city sleep. But Griesha leaves her bed to gaze again at Lystos; god-like now in the moonlight. When she eventually sleeps she hears Logoth's song and is borne from her room to his feet. She feels along his frozen legs, her fingers probing each indentation in the stone. She thinks the body quivers, compelling her to climb and touch the god's great chest. Her head is parallel with the carved sinews of his neck.
The song envelops her, washing through her blood and bones, until her eyes meet those of Logoth; depthless pools of sky blue and sea green flecked with the ochre of earth. They are unblinking.
Griesha fingers his massive lips. She opens her mouth and feels the song entering her soul. Logoth's great mouth closes. Griesha can utter every rise, fall and implication of the song. Carefully, she descends.
She is not dreaming. She shivers in the night. The rough ground is real beneath her feet. She looks at Logoth; impotent without the power to prophesy.
Griesha is compelled to walk towards the shore. She confronts the petrified ships. Lystos stands motionless; his eyes fixed on the inviolable city.
Griesha feels the song swell in her. She looks at the frozen face of Lystos and opens her mouth, releasing the unearthly chords.
Inexplicably, she is suddenly beside him. Slowly he bends and the cold skin of his face grazes hers. She shivers and lifts her lips to his, passing the song to Lystos, feeling its chords wrung from her.
He takes her arm and eases her below deck. Gently he lays Griesha down and runs his hands lasciviously through her blue-black hair. As he enters her, she feels the song alive within him. Afterwards she is dazed and delighted.
He goes on deck and begins to sing. Griesha is unnerved by the solemn song. It seems wrong in a mortal mouth. Dawn breaks and the men begin to move. Lystos leaves Griesha and descends onto the sand. The dark birds rise in a whirring cloud of fallen feathers. His men follow. Still he sings. People appear on the city wall. Bewildered they look up to Logoth and realise he is silent. They see Lystos and hear the song of their god.
The invaders reach the city gates. Silently they glide open. Whoever possesses the song has influence over the city. The early morning is sunless. The city's white walls grow dull and are suddenly vulnerable. The invaders swarm like insects along the streets and over the bridges.
Helplessly, the people, who have not previously encountered aggression, fall back. Lystos is lustfully transformed. He and his men accost the terrified women. Their men are immobilised.
Griesha struggles from the shore, her recent pleasure plunged in pain. She sees her father, arms spread, flattened against a wall. She cannot reach him for the marauding men and is carried on the raw rape of the city.
By nightfall the city is depleted. Audibly, it sighs. Lystos stands on the pure white wall. He sees Arias crouching, head in hands, by his ruined residence. Drawing his sword, Lystos leaps from the wall and runs it through Arias, who falls heavily and, clawing at the dust, dies.
Griesha screams, runs to Arias and rocks his head in her hands.
Lystos looks on; bewildered. He had come to sack the city, not to murder. With his men he returns to the ships. Griesha follows. Her infatuation turns to rage. She had given Lystos Logoth's song. She would retrieve it and return it to the god.
She grasps Lystos's arm as he prepares to embark.
"Take me with you!" she pleads. Impatiently Lystos pushes her away. Now his destruction disgusts him. A demon had driven him to murder. The song has turned sour.
He prepares to sail. Griesha watches the marauders depart. Lystos no longer sings but she knows he carries the song within him.
She walks slowly back to the fallen city. For the first time clouds move across the sky, sliding black shadows along the shattered walls where people are hunched in trauma.
Then, as she looks, the people begin to disintegrate. Flesh flakes and gently falls like snow. Bones soften and begin to crumble into the dust.
Horrified, Griesha searches for her father. She finds the ransacked house but Arias has vanished. She kneels where he had sat and weeps.
When she looks up seven young men and six young women are walking purposefully towards her. How have they survived? They are silent and apparently unseeing, although they pause before her, waiting. They want her to join them.
Numbly she gets up and walks with them to the hill where Logoth towers in silence. They kneel at his massive feet, fingering th
e stone. Now it lacks an unearthly element. It is merely a mineral; lifeless and, like the city, subject to decay.
Five years pass. The young people live a rudimentary life in the ruins. They are no longer provided for. They have to fish and venture inland to trap small mammals. The indefinable food that had previously sustained them has vanished.
Swiftly, they age. Their hair turns grey, their faces furrow. They have no urge to procreate. Then, one morning, as they wander near Logoth, whose stone is eroding in the wind and rain now lashing the land, they see two ships nearing the shore.
As they approach, Logoth's song drifts like a rifled recollection. Griesha, haggard and withdrawn, recoils. Now she can see Lystos at the prow of the first ship. He is singing.
The ships beach. The men begin to climb towards Logoth. The young men and women want to run but, as in dream, their feet are rooted to the ground.
Lystos seems no older. But he is darker and more menacing as he climbs, singing, up the hill. Griesha thinks Logoth quivers as the song is borne on the wind. But it is she who trembles. Lystos pauses and, disappointed, surveys the men and women. He does not recognise Griesha, she is so radically changed.
Without a word, Lystos gestures to his colleagues to take the unresisting men and women to the ships. As she embarks, Griesha looks back at Logoth, lost and songless above the derelict city.
Night falls. Lystos goes below. Softly Griesha also descends. He looks up. A flicker of recognition. But it passes. He cannot know this woman with a haggard and haunted face. Griesha smiles.
"What do you want?" Lystos is annoyed. He should have bound the captives.
"Where are we going?" Griesha asks.
Lystos glowers and does not reply. He looks more closely at her. She must have been beautiful. Her bones are fine, her eyes clear, her body firm. He has not held a woman for weeks.
He grasps her and, repeating the action of five years earlier, lays her down. Griesha reaches deep into his mouth, prolonging their liaison with her quivering tongue. In her head she hears Logoth's song and, extending her tongue, plucks it from Lystos' s throat. He shivers and withdraws, sensing some part of himself has been relinquished.
The ships reach the mountainous land the interpreter had envisaged. Cypresses - dark interjections reaching for the sun, climb the steep slopes.
The men and women are led from the ships onto an orderly quay. Lystos binds them and they move in a line to a building of brashly painted columns and stepped porches.
They enter a central court and move towards steep steps that vanish in the dark. Lystos stands in the centre of the court and tries to sing. Silence. He strains, his deep voice tuneless and gruff.
The men and women are taken to a small room in the depths of the palace. Intermittently there is a distant reverberation, then a roar, muffled as though by walls. The dim and airless room lulls the captives into semi-consciousness through which uneasy shadows slide. The image of a beast with distorted hints of desperate humanity, cowers against one wall.
Griesha gazes as the black bulk gains identity; its blood-shot eye swimming in the gloom. The dull red liquid runs into the blackness of its body which loses definition and merges with the wall. The men and women drift into dark dream.
That night the sexes are segregated, the men left in the haunted room, the women led to another chamber of shadows and distant disturbance. They cannot sleep. In their troubled subconscious they sense drama deep in the palace. Then the disturbances abruptly cease.
Suddenly three figures steal into their room. They are dressed as women yet their physiognomy is partly male. They help the women to their feet, easing them from the room and up the steps.
The moon floods the great court, turning the palace walls to milk. The women see their rescuers are two homosexuals from the seven male captives, who had posed as females in the women's quarters.
They reach the quay where a ship of blond timber and silk sails gently rides the dark night water.
A young man with blood-stained hands and a woman whose clothes denote royalty, breathlessly arrive.
"The beast is dead!" says the man. Griesha thinks of the bull-like image on the wall.
As the ship gets underway, she sees Lystos mustering his men in pursuit. But the enchanted vessel, carrying the young women, skims the high water and Lystos is soon a small figure on the rapidly receding quay.
Griesha feels the song inside her and senses she has been borne back in time to a land of significance and grace and some horror, demanding appeasement.
At dawn they sail into a glowering sky and disconsolate wind. Griesha sees her hazy homeland, abandoned in the rain. And, as they near, Logoth, defaced by storm, materialises from the mist.
The ship glides effortlessly over the surging sea and beaches on the shingle. Driftwood, deposited by the storm, lies like a misshapen menagerie, glistening in the rain, impeding the women as they disembark with the homosexuals and struggle up the beach.
Quizzically, Griesha looks back at the strange young man and his dark-haired consort, but already, as though time has mysteriously moved forward, the silent ship is far out to sea.
Griesha leaves her companions and walks up the steep slope to where Logoth stands in windy isolation.
She kneels and feels his frozen feet. She grasps his great eroded legs and, clinging to the stone, begins to climb. As she reaches his rugged neck she sees his great mouth slowly open. The wind whines tunelessly through.
Griesha feels the song, potent with power, still within her. She reaches for Logoth's great mouth, summoning the song from her soul. It swells and bursts from her body into Logoth's waiting mouth. It swirls and eddies and as Griesha begins to descend, issues with a rush on the rising wind. It sings across the wretched land, prophesying re-birth. Griesha stumbles to the city. The sky clears, the rain stops and the wind drops. Sunshine lies in blinding pools.
Griesha sees the shattered city shining as its broken body heals into a whole; white-walled buildings breathe in the rain-clean air, bridges curve once more over salty inlets, bright with diamonds of dancing light.
She passes through the great gate and sees the dead, who had blown with the dust, walking through the winding ways. But she searches for her father in vain. He had been brutally murdered and his ghost looks on, unable to materialise but relishing the land's rejuvenation.
Once more, the inhabitants, who only now and then have a haunted hint of their inexplicable past, are mysteriously supplied with every need.
The white-clothed interpreter resumes his audiences with Logoth, submitting himself to the solemn song. Instinctively Griesha knows the men who had been taken to the palace were sacrificed before the beast was killed.
Lystos regrets his aggression against Logoth's land, yet was compelled by the beast, that was perhaps an aspect of himself, to demand the sacrifice, fearing an outraged god would retrieve the song of Logoth. He had not known Griesha, who had inadvertently transferred the song, was among the victims.
The interpreter kneels by Logoth and as the song flows through him, sees the wavering land of Lystos. The palaces shake, their coloured columns precariously lean and crumble. Horns of consecration, erected high on the wall like a tribute to the nameless beast, topple into the dust.
Is this because the beast has been slain or because Logoth's song, that had promised immortality, has gone, leaving the land to the whim of wild gods? On the sun-steeped island, the song weaves without end through the wind.
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The White Shell
This tale is inspired by that of Tereus, who acted as mediator for a king, married one of his sisters, then fell for one who was younger, confining his wife to slaves' quarters. Eventually both women turned into birds and left him.