Tales from Rainring: 1-38
Update for rainringcards.net
This page features the story which I wrote in order to enable the illustrators of Rainring to visualise and represent the characters and incidents which form the themes of the Rainring cards. It dates from early 1996 and I would not write it now as I did then. However, I reproduce it here without fundamental alterations, as it does provide a true key to the images of the original Rainring pack.
Owing to the difficulties of the html encoding coping with this page and its periodic additions, I am not supplying links to the cards featured. [Except Psyche, which is not on the Rainring site]. These can all be found by going to: http://www.rainring.co.uk/VisualDirectory/CardGrid.aspx and then clicking on the name of each card in turn, as indicated in the text.
PROLOGUE
Flow-Singer (1)
They say that somewhere, in a far-off place, a dark girl stands in a broad, brown river. She wears two garlands and a turtle pendant at her neck. She has two familiars: the grey elephant of time, and the blue swan of coincidence. With their aid, and tracing patterns in the water with her fingers, she makes stories. Her stories flow out and make the worlds, and this is one of them…
PART ONE
He emerged from the trees abruptly, to find himself on a small bluff of grey rock. He stood blinking for a moment, the afternoon glare of late August sharp after the twilight of the woods. From his vantage point he could see the golden-brown of new stubble, folds of pasture and beyond, the swell of soft blue hills. Immediately below, close enough to distinguish clearly, a small wattle and daub cottage with a couple of ramshackle barns adjacent, and a pile of sawn logs. Chickens scratched in the yard and a small boy and girl ran laughing along the bouncing branches of a nearby tree, prostrated in the recent gale and obviously not yet cleared away by the husbandman. His eyes were drawn to the mass of golden hair which haloed the broad, strong face of the big woman The Matriarch (2) who sat resting beneath the old shade tree, suckling an infant.
The rough, tawny-haired dog who had been panting softly beside her, catching wind of the stranger, leapt to its feet and began to bark with a note of self-righteous indignation: ‘This is my place. What the hell do you mean by sneaking up like that? Watch your step!’
He went forward and down, she quieting the dog with a word and greeting him as he approached. There was a candour and warmth in her blue eyes; no trace either of unease or of coquetry. The infant, still at her ample breast, seemed to have collapsed into a milk-sated stupor of sleep. ‘Welcome, Stranger,’ she smiled, ‘you will stay and sup with us – it is a long road to the next habitation.’
‘Gladly, Maam. In the meantime, let me be of use. I would not take your bread without return.’
Out of politeness, he did not question that they ate without the man of the house. There was a quietness over the little homestead, in her, among the children and animals, on the fields and the little stream that went chuckling through them. So that he felt nurtured in his soul, not to mention the good country fare in his belly, and gladly accepted her offer of a night in the barn on clean, new straw.
He was a taciturn man. At her first sight of him, a heavy grey cloak enveloped his powerful frame. She soon felt how, in a manner corresponding, he shrouded all intimate thoughts and feelings from the eyes of another. And, in his self-absorption, saw no more than the surface quiet of her. He spent several days at the homestead. As a countryman, he quickly saw that a man’s hand was needed here. For himself, it was good to rest awhile and recuperate.
Once, returning from the forest with kindling wood, he saw her standing on the bluff gazing out over the blue hills. Radiance (3) The baby, naked in the summer sun, gurgled and kicked on the blanket beside her. In her hand she held a sunflower. He sensed then the contained power of her, the maternal flame of her earth. This was her brightness, her resilience of self which, though he could not name, he yet felt. Uncomfortable, he thought that he should move on.
After the evening soup, he took leave of them all, regretfully. ‘Let there be a blessing on your house, Mother, for you have been good to a travelling fellow such as I am, but the evening is clear, and I feel the call of the forest.’ Touching hands briefly, he took his leave of them. With the children she stood watching until the trees claimed him once more. There came on her the sight of the promise and pain along his future road. But her own she could not see, only imagine.
As night came on, the strange transformation was upon him again, as he had known it would be. He was in a deep blue world, violet with shadows and silver with light as though of the full moon but yet brighter and tinged with blue. Whether he changed or the world, or whether something took them both into its otherness, he would wonder but never know. He journeyed now in a world substantial, but in his feeling totally other.
The Seer (4) Guided perhaps without even knowing it, he came to a lake – deep blue and silver, still as glass. There on the shore in the moonlight, profiled against the water, sat an ancient medicine woman: for a moment he wondered if it was only his feeling that made her appear thus to him as a figure out of the antique Westland; then he no longer cared.
A few embers glowed at her feet. Almost on top of her a great rock jutted out into the lake, upon whose summit stood, heraldic in the blue-white light, a magnificent stallion unicorn. He passed through some dim remembrance of her casting stones upon the ground – how the great wheel of his life lay before him among the wood-ash. Then a veil was drawn across his mind, and he knew no more.
He must have slept briefly in the trunk of some hoary forest giant, for awakening at dawn he could no longer remember the transactions of otherness, save for the scene by the lake. Yet when he emerged as from the trunk, the transformation was complete. Around him, as far as the eye could see, stretched the tawny orange sand, pink and grey rock of the desert at sunrise. The night had crossed him over from world to world as it always did, as though to force him to accept that the dreams and visions were without, not within him.
So he set off through the orange haze of quickening light; before long heard ringing sounds and Action (5) came upon a sinewy nomad lustily felling a dried-up thorn tree. Behind him, half hidden in a fold of the ground, he could see goat-hair tents and the faintly bluish spiral of a breakfast fire. ‘Welcome, stranger. Come eat with us.’ Such invitations may not be refused.
They rode all day over dry plains and barren hills, through stretches of burning dunes and up onto the sharp rocks of the plateau, where in places they were obliged to dismount and lead the camels. Thus they laboured through the cauldron of afternoon until the sun sank towards the horizon like a pumpkin and again the thick air was turned an incandescent orange. Then they reached a tiny pool at the edge of high, jagged hills, where the little caravan slumped to a halt. Torpor (6) The dark men promptly went to sleep whilst he lay bone-weary, propped against a saddle bag, listening to the soft keening of the wind in crannies of the rock and the periodic muted grunts of the squatting beasts. In that exhausted state, he had the sensation that time had stopped; as if he and everything around stood poised, waiting for the flow of existence to resume. And then he slept.
He was woken by the smell of meat roasting on the coals and the trickle of saliva from his mouth. The night was quickly chill; not long after eating he wrapped himself in his cloak, rolled over and plunged into oblivion.
He came out of sleep in the deep night, the stars chittering faintly overhead in the great vault of sky. He rose softly, distanced himself a little and climbed to a vantage point. The wind had died away, so that the great silence crouched like some portentous presence in the star-dim earthscape, palpably alive. Then the implacable summons. Through a narrow cleft in the hills he followed it, finding a deep, hidden watercourse. As he climbed there came again that strange folding and pressing of the air, as if he were being squeezed and then pulled through some invisible barrier.
The desert night had gone and he was back in the deep blue twilight with the violet velvet shadows and the silver glow. He froze, on an instant. Directly before him, not ten paces away, a form had appeared noiselessly between two boulders. It was a huge royal blue tiger with black and white markings and bristling white whiskers. Its amber eyes glowed in the surrounding dimness. He was not afraid. So close was it that he somehow knew the tiger was soothing him, the power of its reassurance obliterating all normal reaction. Then it turned and in one swift bound gained the top of the boulder to its right. One more flash of white and it was gone – leaving him, as his body at once recognised, compelled to follow. Soon there were trees among the boulders and lush vegetation appeared, with here and there the sound of falling water.
Clarity (7) Quite suddenly, a clear pale-violet light erupted to his left; turning, he saw the tiger silhouetted, between two fernlike growths against the skyline. In a thoughtless instant he knew that it was teaching him. Clarity: the word was clear in him, though he had no means of attaching it anywhere in his life.
Once more, the tiger turned and he followed it over the hump on which it had paused and down a steep, densely-forested slope towards the deep places of the jungle. He came out abruptly onto a rocky ledge and in the stealthy dawn light made out a mysterious river, overhung with luxuriant growth. Then he experienced a pain, a hollowness through his whole being and he knew that the tiger had gone.
Play (8) Now a new transformation seemed to take place. The whole was suffused with a light and feeling as of no world he knew. There came squeals of high-pitched laughter. Approaching the water, he could see children clambering into the trees on the farther bank and, grabbing onto climbing vines, come swinging out over the river to drop, or be pushed off shrieking with laughter into the water. But as to their race or language, age or origin he seemed unable to draw conclusions. For the children sailed like ghost ships in and out of the mountebank mist. ‘The mist is in your feelings’ a soft voice purred within or without him. So his eyes closed unrecognising upon this vision of the world to come, and he slept.
He awoke to find himself apparently in the same position. The scene was much the same, except that the tropical jungle had been replaced by the familiar forest trees of the Northland, silent of all human presence. With the bizarre exception of the unworldly scene with the children, he seemed to have accomplished the usual transition back to the north. The encounter with the blue tiger continued however to affect him strongly. Somehow it no longer sufficed to take up his familiar routines as if nothing had occurred. His body knew that the accumulated weight of those two encounters in the blue land – the first of real importance – had taken him across some inner divide. Yet when he tried to think about them, his mind refused to go near those experiences.
Withdrawal (9) He was soon back in country which he knew. Habit, no doubt, led him to the familiar white cottage of a goodwife with whom he had often dallied in bygone days. She was in the garden beside the road, forking over the vegetable patch. Looking up and seeing the familiar grey cloak, she hastened to offer him a pitcher of milk and a slice of bread as was her wont. He was as surprised as she when he could react only with a grunt and a half-gesture, shrinking back the while deeper into the hood of his cloak. Stumbling away, he left the good-hearted woman between surprise and annoyance. Only then did he fully realise that something was altogether amiss.
Troubled, his reflex was to seek the deep woods. The eruption of the blue land and the desert into his existence ought to have shaken him to the core. Yet he seemed now to live in a state anaesthetized against feeling. He had been roaming through the northern lands for years. At first, despite all reason and logic, the recent dramatic breaches in the continuity of his existence had not seemed to impact on him. It was as if each time, he returned intact to his customary being and territory. Now, had he but known it, the shadow of the future had reached him, this being the hidden cause of his shivers of apprehension.
Invasion (10) Within a day or two he found himself wandering in a great tract of unfamiliar forest, old grey beeches for the most part, turning colour as the fall of the year grew near. He came at length to a secluded clearing far from all signs of habitation. He sank down exhausted against an old rotting log to enjoy a little sun. He must have dozed off, for he was awakened roughly by big hands seizing and lifting him, so that he found himself staring into the fire-blue eyes of a huge blonde-bearded fellow in a rough leather jerkin. He made to give an account of his presence there, lest he had by ill chance strayed unwitting within a domain reserved against casual intrusion. But these rude woodsmen, if such they were, had no tolerance for the niceties of courteous exchange. Before he could think to make any resistance, other hands had closed on him from behind and he found himself speedily bound, gagged and thrown on a mule which stood waiting just beyond the clearing. His captors mounted swiftly and set off at a brisk pace along secret rides unnoticeable and unknown to casual travellers.
The infusion of herbs which they forced him to drink, when at length they dismounted and made a quick camp, must have been drugged. For he awoke having no knowledge of the passage of time to find himself in an immense cornfield, long-since harvested. There was no sign of either the forest or of any human presence. He was bound still, and roped to a stout stake driven deep into the ground behind him. The sun rose rapidly in a cloudless sky and a keen September sun beat down on him. He was already thirsty.
By late morning of the fourth day, all attempts to free himself having proved utterly vain, he was in poor shape indeed. Compounding the physical anguish was the humiliation. He was a child of the forest – to have been caught off guard was mortifying in the extreme. Now, as each previous afternoon, came an ancient black crow who alighted on the stubble in front of him. ‘Tomorrow we shall feed on you, my brothers and I’, it said, matter-of-factly. ‘it’s unusual for one so young to give his life away.’ It cawed derisively and within moments there were half a dozen of them close in, flapping their wings in his face and jeering at him. Then, as suddenly as they had come, they flew away towards an outpost of tall trees at the far end of the field.
Submission (11) He became delirious, losing track of time and beginning to hallucinate. Then the crows were back again, this time fastening upon a scarecrow who stood facing him, staring malevolently with its empty eyes. ‘Submit!’ Then the old crow, perching on the scarecrow’s head, in turn spoke, sneering. ‘Perhaps you, unlike the rest of us, are immortal? Perhaps you are stronger than death? Perhaps you have no need to be humble?’ For a moment, he felt the pressure of a huge dark force, as if the brilliant light of noon had flipped over in one instant into profound night. That immense force, his death, came rolling in upon him and he knew, in a sudden instant of clarity, that he was about to die. Then it seemed to him that a blonde-bearded face peered into his own, and that he was lapping water from a bowl held for him. But he lost consciousness.
When he came to, night had fallen and he found himself gazing into the eyes of the Seer, like a candle flame of the immemorial Westland, lighting a travelled way. Without speaking, she was somehow telling him that where he was, others had been before; that he was no longer alone. Laying his medallion and torn cloak across his knees, she held to his lips a bitter brew. It sent the fields and stars turning and folding upon themselves until, still bound and staked, he was in the blue-violet world.
He was in a garden, almost overcome by the perfume of great sprays of exotic roses. High white walls covered with glossy, dark green climbing plants protected him, nightingales sang among the scented blossom of fruit trees and a fountain splashed close at hand. There, regally through the twilight paced on silken pads the blue tiger, breathed on him, healing him of hunger, thirst and the torment of his spirit. But did not unbind him.
Obsession (12) Then came she who is the deepest dream of men, though they find her never in a mortal woman. To him she was as one in the young flower of womanhood, with tumbling thick blue-black hair, ivory skin and eyes the colour of lapis lazuli. She sat cross-legged on the rim of the fountain. She held between her delicate hands what appeared to be a large, dark gourd. A wild, frozen intensity suffused her pale countenance. With a spasm of supreme effort, she managed to pull the gourd open. A brilliant butterfly rose from its heart and, with a beat of its wings, was free. ‘Must see meaning.’ He heard, somehow, the Westland accents of the Seer. ‘Is spirit-talk’
Then the girl turned to lay her eyes upon him and he was lost. She came to squat before him, her eyes like fire-lakes, swirled with feeling. Her voice, faintly husky and pitched low sent shivers of pleasure down his spine. ‘Don’t make me wait for ever,’ she whispered. Then, lightly, she was gone. Anger (13) A terrible rage took hold of him and he put out a superhuman strength to break his bonds, growling and foaming like a chained and rabid mastiff. With a final, chthonic howl, he tore himself free. Scarcely pausing to take a few great gulps of air, he set off like one demented in the direction whence she had departed. She was nowhere to be found. At length, sobered into a deep-burning, acid determination, he came upon a white, octagonal pavilion, surrounded by water. There was but one access, across a railed footbridge guarded by three giants. Fear (14) These resembled, in some monstrous distortion, the Northmen who had taken him captive. With red eyes glowing like coals, gleaming fangs bared, they lunged slavering towards him, avid to tear him apart. In mortal terror he fled, pursued by their panting, rumbling shapes. Then he ran into a tree root at ankle height, was dashed to the ground and lay senseless.
He came to in the desert, lying face downwards at an almost dried-up waterhole, too weak to move, all memory eclipsed. Dawn was breaking. Almost before the light had come he was found there by traders who revived and fed him. Then they took him far into the desert and sold him for a slave in an old-mud-walled city hidden among tall palms in the lost heart of barren, eroded mountains. Shipped out again, this time he travelled in a big caravan, securely fettered, to a white town at the desert’s edge, by a broad brown river. There he was sold privately to a rich merchant: clever, learned, but without heart.
He found himself living in a beautiful house, built low around a rectangular pool in the centre of which played two fountains. Arched colonnades of rose-earth colour surrounded it on all sides whilst jasmine, trumpet vines and damask roses covered the walls, and carp drifted in and out of the lily pads.
Eventually, his learning being discovered, and since he had by now acquired a little of the local language, he was made to give instruction to the children of the house. The merchant being seldom at home, he was left at the mercy of the wife, a virago whose superabundant energy and dominant will had no better outlet than the management of her household and the entertainment of women of a style and situation similar to her own. Domination (15) She terrorised the numerous servants, none more than her children’s tutor, a foreigner in looks, ways and manner.
Something in him had superseded his old reflex of resisting the design of life the moment it ceased to fit his convenience. He did not therefore make immediate plans for escape. So he found himself submitting not to the abstraction of a principle, but to the actuality of a person. She was a tall, handsome, coffee-skinned woman with brown, slightly almond eyes and a winsome smile – if ever she chose to use it. Also, it was perfectly obvious, her exuberant vitality was dampened neither by the rare attentions of her husband, nor the routine activities of her daily round. Nor indeed by the occasional rendezvous which, rumour and intuition both suggested, she managed to contrive. Having got him firmly under her thumb she could, her body language began subtly to suggest, bestow upon him favours such as would leave no full-blooded man indifferent.
Then he had to put out all his mental and moral strength to exert control over himself. Control (16) He would not, he well knew, be the first to sample her charms today and the embrace of death tomorrow. By a combination of good fortune and application he had managed by now to endear himself to the children, especially the eldest son, her favourite. Otherwise, in resisting her invitations – however subtly presented – he would have been at gravest risk. In the end she began a passionate and dangerous liaison with a leading actor from the theatre and he was left in relative peace.
The ferocious heat of high summer was by now almost upon them and part of the household, including himself as preceptor, made ready to travel up into the mountains to escape the furnace of the city. Here it was, among the verdant sloping meadows, that his body at last broke free from the restraints which his spirit had long forced itself to impose.
Abandon (17) His owners’ teenage niece was not only at that age where the urge for sensual fulfilment and carnal knowledge is at its white heat, but was also a creature in thrall to an intensely passionate nature. To her sidelong, hypnotised glances, her stealing blushes, the thousand unveilable signals of her body’s urging, he capitulated with only the most token resistance. In that secret mountain glade, where evening found them compelled, magnetised into each other’s bodies, they shared a great, tearing act of abandon. All caution, sense and calculation gone, outside of tenderness, within only the magic circle of the rut, they drove towards release. It seemed to him then that he experienced a kind of implosion, an instant beyond description, and at the climax saw the face of the medicine woman.
Then he was on the blue grass in the rose garden, his whole body convulsed with the reflex of vomiting. It was as though the intensity of his physical sensations had been transferred within as a catharsis that tore through his entire being in tidal waves. The tiger was there, soothing him with its body, as he clearly felt for the first time. After a while he was able to sit up. Only then did he realise that for the first time he was not only conscious of where he was, but had retained full awareness of whence he came. Next came all the memories from the three worlds. And of she whom until that moment he had, mercifully, forgotten: for how else could he have endured to live without her? All the while, as his body impacted each new spasm of memory, the great blue tiger worked for him, lest his body lapse under the pressure of putting his fragmented worlds together. Then with a rush of terrible pity he thought of the young girl in the glen. ‘The seer is with her,’ purred the tiger softly, ‘otherwise she would die. She will forget, just as you did. Perhaps her body will guide her to a man with whom she can know love, and she will be happy.’
They rested yet awhile, soothed by the fountain and a solitary nightingale who gathered his small spirit for them into a splendour of melody. For even the great tiger had momentarily depleted himself. ‘Come, my friend,’ said the latter at length, ‘Tonight you have a tryst with destiny, and destiny will not be kept waiting, once she has decreed her readiness.’ He marvelled that for the first time he was hearing the tiger clearly and without effort. So they came to the footbridge; the tiger subdued the giants with his amber eyes so that they slumped to almost man-size and slept, their heads on their chests. At the entrance to the pavilion, the great feline halted. ‘it is time to bid you farewell and Godspeed, my friend. We shall meet once more, at the end or the beginning. Now go in.’
He stood for a long moment, watching that royal progress among the dappled silver light, until blue velvet melted into its own and a shiver passed through him. With an effort of will, he turned once more, pushed aside the heavy brocade curtain, and entered the pavilion.
And she was there, reclining on silken cushions deployed about an arbour in the centre of a small pool in which swam red and gold fishes, gracefully flicking their tail fins. The eight sides of the pool repeated those of the inner walls of the pavilion, which were draped with soft fabrics in darkly vibrant colours. Lotus flowered upon the water, all this lit in opal light, alive with rainbow fire as though the entire scene were situated within some self-lit gemstone.
Psyche (18) Then, as his eyes sought hers, for one hallucinatory moment he felt himself pass from the world before him, felt the time-blind magnetic falling star of another gaze upon him – the gaze of a woman who compelled utterly; a woman beyond every artifice he could ever possibly imagine or construct.
And then he was back at the portal, staring with astonishment at this slip of a girl, so seemingly familiar to his hidden imagination, as she lit a long cheroot placed in a carved silver holder. Her deep, slightly husky voice broke into peals of laughter at his expression. ‘Come, join me,’ she said, ‘and smoke also, if you dare again to indulge in that costly pleasure. Sit with me and take a glass of our wine – otherwise your inhibitions will have you gape at me all night like some moon-struck loony.’
The other eyes were gone, as though they had never been.
The cost of smoking… he had been a heavy user of the coughing weed, as they call it, and now could do no better than to abstain totally. Apparently, she was set upon undermining this defensive arrangement. She placed wine and cheroots on a small marquetry-worked table in front of her, so that by the time he had crossed the pool on the stone flags positioned to this effect, all was ready for him. Reclining across from her, he took a mouthful of wine, declining the smoke, to her great amusement. Despite the lightness of her tone, he was at once aware of some invisible line which separated them and which he sensed was absolute. It seemed rather an emanation from the force-field of her body which, without being in any way threatening, would have annihilated him had he tried to cross it.
Involuntarily he found his eyes upon her breasts, which swelled rich and full beneath the thin shot silk of her long dress. ‘I’m making you look at my body, stupid,’ she interrupted his perusal with a giggle. ‘In fact, I’m making the body that you want to look at.’ She paused, assessing him a little wistfully. ‘You are a strange man. You are of a most passionate nature, yet you seem so suspicious of all that belongs to the clamour and thrill of the body and the senses. Oh! I must NOT lecture you – I am a heedless young girl with more breasts than brains, and I have to shut up and simper.’ This eruption produced an expression of such confusion in him that for a long moment she became helpless with laughter, to the point where he himself became affected and could but laugh, if a touch ruefully, with her.
Led thus into an atmosphere less strained, more intimate, the hours passed quickly between them. He came to sense that her gaiety, true as it was, nevertheless skated on the fragile surface of sorrow, until at the last it broke through. Then it had her sing for him, a lament which struck the heart of his being like the definitive arrow loosed by a master-bowman. Impression (19) Under its impact, he felt himself burst from his core like the stars of a great firework in the night sky, so that when the last trails of light had fallen and been swallowed by the darkness, he was back in the familiar garden of a town in the Northlands, the last after-image and memory of the night obliterated with the rising light, yet his dreaming mind indelibly imprinted.
And she, with eyes darker than the human heart for sorrow, went out into the blue and silver forest to seek solace curled against the tiger.
Without knowing why, he was yet not the same solitary traveller who had once roamed these familiar northern roads. For now he felt in himself the need for kith and kin, therefore fell in with a group of travelling musicians and artistes who earned their living visiting the town and country fairs. They were hospitable people – wary towards strangers, but good friends and true once they had taken a person to their hearts. Coming as they did from the far south, their skin tinted with the colour of those distant sun-filled lands, they felt themselves to be outsiders here among another race with customs, traditions and habits of mind and feeling much different to their own. Thus perhaps it was that they recognised in him something of a kindred spirit, coming as he did from far away.
Like wandering players everywhere, they were easy-going in morals as in manners, so that he could flirt with the women and work, drink and indulge in horseplay along with the men, no-one being in the least put out. Relation (20) They were warm, talkative and good-natured, yet never overbearing. Under their impact, the frozen isolation of his forest years began to melt away.
She was full of life – funny, vibrant, seductive, hot-headed. But she had something more: intelligence and sensitivity. Widowed early, her children taken away from her in the same accident in which she had lost her husband, she had known pain. Not only in the agony of that terrible loss, but in the instinctive unease at her exceptional misfortune which caused this superstitious people to keep henceforth a certain distance from her. Misfit and outsider, they were drawn together.
She gave him the security to open his heart to her and the understanding (when he began to do so) which earned his gratitude and respect. She seduced him not only into her body, but into a certain gaiety, lightness, outgoing attitude which until then had seemed so foreign to his nature. Passion (21) They would chase each other around the little caravan, shrieking with laughter and having mock pillow-fights – this turning out usually to be the prelude to passionate love-making. For the first time, he found himself able to join sex with affection. And she had the strength and wisdom to be able to handle even this potentially combustible initiation.
‘I care about you, I enjoy you, I respect you, but I don’t love you,’ she told him. ‘As for you, you are grateful to me, but you don’t love me either. You don’t have to pretend, either to me or to yourself. You give me enough. At first I hoped, a little … my grandmother reads the cards; I consulted her.’ She was silent for a long moment, then added very quietly, ‘grandma said to me that there are forces involved with your destiny which I could never, ever compete with, and which will take you away from me. Also, there will be someone for me, later…’ Whether or not she knew more, she would say nothing further. He could not, of course, remember the blue land, yet he had to recognise that there was, from time to time in his rare moments of foreboding, a kind of bare, windswept emptiness. Even as he clung to the security of their connection, he could not make himself wholly believe in its duration.
Hyperactivity (22) Then from a meeting of the elders came an announcement which turned his world upside down. The people were going to make the great trek south to see their homeland again – after an exile of almost a generation. This was family business, and he was not family, and not invited. In the short run his rising grief was held in check by the spate of frenetic activity which followed this decision: tackle and vehicles to overhaul, draught animals to replace, surplus gear to sell off, extra performances to put on in order to lay in provisions and fill the coffers… For three months he worked alongside them from daybreak until far into the night until, with devastating suddenness, the day of departure was there. Putting a brave face on it, though not without many a tearful embrace, he said his farewells. Cruellest of all, to his sweetheart, who would not join him: ‘These are my people.’ It might not sound much, but it was everything, and could in no wise be gainsaid.
So it was that he plunged, for the first time in his life, into the cycle of grief and the desperate attempt to run ahead of grief – lest grief should catch up with him and overwhelm him. He could no longer escape by roaming the woods alone, as had been his wont. For now he needed people and their warmth, which solitude and all of its thoughts, meditations and daydreams could not replace. People he found in the only place available – the inns and taverns where he sought, if not oblivion, then at least respite from the pressure of the emotions which threatened to unman him. Because this new loss was triggering, slowly but surely, the buried memories of that other abyss into which he had been plunged. Memories of the desert, the children at the river, his life as a preceptor began to assail him. Those of the tiger and the blue land would not be far behind them. The fragments of his different worlds were pulling together, and this time there would be no tiger standing by to cushion the shock.
Between bouts of drunken conviviality he would drag himself off to some solitary place in the woods where he could release some small part of the constantly pressing anguish and find at least temporary relief. On one of these occasions, he dreamt vividly of a weeping woman wearing a rainbow sash. Grief (23) There was no action, only the extraordinary acuity of that feeling of grief. On the cusp of waking from the dream, he heard an inner voice say to him ‘you are about to take the first step.’ The rainbow, he tried to reassure himself, was a sign of hope, an indication, perhaps that he would make it through. Like a crab whose armoured shell disintegrates, he was becoming exposed to the world of emotion. ‘About to take the first step’ was not something which his mind could grasp. And yet, obscurely, if the words dismayed him, they also, on some level, brought a grain of comfort.
His money did not take long in running out. Having precious little heart for gainful employ, he found his old reflexes reasserting themselves and it was not long before he had once more taken to the great forests. Coming off the drink, painful as it was, proved the least of his problems. For the memories of the blue land now began to recur with a vengeance, though always in the form of vivid dreams from which he awoke either raging, weeping or in terror. At first he made heroic efforts to bring his rampant emotions under control in order at least to be able to hunt and scavenge effectively, and so survive. Possession (24) When dreams could no longer contain the flood, his waking life too became invaded by tigers and giants, unicorns and nightingales. Always, behind these images, lay that emptiness without an image: presentiment of a loss so great that, were it ever to break through into memory, would destroy his last vestiges of control. Yet that same emptiness called precisely for that – his recall. Truly he was as one possessed, and feared for his sanity.
Whom did he find, at his wits end drawn by a somehow familiar lament to the little shelter under the forest oaks? With whom did he couple in the first bright greening of the leaves? Was it some wild child of the woods, gone like himself beyond the mortal ken? Was there a tenderness, relic of a love once lived inconsummate, in some far pavilion of the altered senses?
Would that he did not leave her – bleeding, tormented, seeded and alone – without at least a hand that gently twined her hair; a palm that softly ran the inner contour of her thigh; a tongue that lapped the salt rain of her eyes…
Before he was gone.
At what moment the white-crested ultramarine of the northern torrent became the roaring yellow-brown of the flash flood in the wadi, he never exactly knew. Nor even, for sure, how he had got into the torrent in the first place. At length, bruised and battered from the stones along with which he had been tumbled down its twisting channel, he found himself swept onto a gravel spit. The water, the transition from northland to desert, or the combination of both returned him to his right mind. Physically, he was weak to the point of extinction but his mind, at long last, was clear. And he knew then that he had been with her.
He had held in his arms she who was his life’s only meaning, and he had not even known her. He had pitted himself against overwhelming forces and had been brushed aside, like a twig in a racing river. In despair, he lost all desire to live, became indifferent to his fate. He wandered away into the desert to let dehydration take his life. Despair (25). Days melted together until in the last extremities of abandon he came to a noisome well at the back of beyond. Only a frayed end of rope hung upon the rusting pulley. He sank down under the scant shadow of its blasted wall and prepared to make his peace with life, knowing that if he survived the night, at dawn he would see the light rise for the last time upon this old grey world.
* * *
The Flow-Singer at this moment tilts her head and smiles. No matter how important in our story is the unfolding drama of the man in the wolf’s-head cloak, the unfolding of a tale, she reminds us, involves many a current, eddy, whirlpool and backwater. So, we leave now the course of one life and row back up the river of time, pick up the flow of other lives:
He was a black man in a black man’s country. The Hero (26) Yet, passing by upon the old mule, he elicited wide-eyed amazement. His rich, heavily curled hair and broad, triangular nose were such as no native of these parts had ever laid eyes on. Above all was the light in his obsidian eyes, and his mien which spoke of a race of immense antiquity, an antique luminescence such as only the utterly proud and free are heir to, and which dies ever more from the bustling roads men walk. Men such as he have sung the very stones into existence and will one day sing the world again, into forms as yet undreamt of in the minds of men, the souls of women.
All men carry within them a primal scene: a hallmark moment which expresses the bent of their nature, the shape and quality of their personal power. This man had stood on the red soil of his native land, at his feet a bull slain by a lion – though of what dreaming was this beast, he did not know. The men of ability among his people had told him that he had lived this event in a manner never before experienced: ‘Two worlds crossing’ they had called it.
He rode now in the prime of his young manhood, nonchalantly, possessor of enormous reserves of inner strength. A man trained and dedicated since boyhood to a singular task; neither bigot nor fanatic – rather, exemplar of a way. His destination, still far to the north, he knew only by reputation: Two Rivers.
Herbs – as he would later be known – dismounted under the great baobab at the centre of the village. Here, at this important crossroads and way-station, he would find traveller’s lodgings. Here, he could tell, he would have his first effective opportunity to learn Rivian, the lingua franca of the Southland, and learn it he must, fluently.
Furthermore, he had recognised among the local flora enough of the herbs of his native land to know that he could pay his way by his skill as a healer.
* * *
To the south-east the desert gives way to rolling parkland savannah, interspersed with patches of dense bush along the valley bottoms and in the sheltered hollows. Looking eastward from the high places you can see on clear days the great chains of mountains, hazed blue with distance. Travelling always in the same direction you come out on top of the escarpment, whence the track plunges hundreds of feet to the glittering water below. Opposite you, a swift young river comes leaping through a narrow cleft in the steep hills to fling itself into the broad, placid progression of the Long River, meandering away north and south as far as the eye can see. At the confluence of the two rivers, clinging to the steep, rocky bluffs is a walled and gated city, older than memory, built of cream stone. It has gardens and squares, orchards and vineyards, while to its bazaars and markets come travellers and traders from every distance. Even men born under pale blue northern skies are now occasionally found here, trading furs, metals and richly worked stuffs for gems, spices and carpets.
The people of this land – tall, lithe, high-cheekboned and black as onyx, gaudy as birds of paradise in their multi-coloured cottons, love above all things music and the dance. Life is easy here and laughter, like water, runs in a constant babble through every steep lane of the city.
In the second hour after sunrise, on a crystal bright spring day in the year of our Lady fourteen hundred and sixty-two, at the South Harbour Pie Shop, proprietress ‘Mummy’ Self (27) (possibly the biggest, almost certainly the fiercest caterer in Two Rivers), the following sound was to be heard:
‘Boys!?’ More a trumpet call than a shout, this blared across the assortment of heads bent in concentration at the rough, worn wooden tables. The three burly stevedores advanced from the door to the counter bearing deferential greetings for the huge black woman brandishing an enormous ladle.
‘One long kebab, one special breakfast, One hot lamb pie, Mummy.’
‘more chilli than usual, the hot lamb – is that cool?’
An outbreak of discreet sniggering from some of the more remotely-seated diners. The spokesman for the stevedores looked a trifle nervous, as well he might.
‘Er, yes, no, er hot chilli is cool … I mean… whatever you say, Mummy.’
Definite laughter could now be heard. Mummy decided to consider herself satisfied. She patted the hapless stevedore on the arm with the ladle, causing him to wince. ‘Don’t worry, son, just enjoy.’ She paused, then leant forward with a conspiratorial wink and said, in a whisper strong enough to bend double a palm tree: ‘that’s not a recommendation, so much as a requirement.’
Both for quantity and quality, Mummy’s food had a reputation which extended up and down the river for miles. Mummy didn’t do half measures – not in anything.
At the foot of the merchants’ quarter, perched on a flat headland above the other river port, North Harbour, is an elegant square, bordered by once-gracious houses in an older style. These are gently decayed now to a degree of quaint bohemianism which perfectly suits the painters, actors, musicians and dancers who make it their home. At the open end, a precipitous, deeply-worn staircase levers its way up to the level of the cobbled pavement. Beside the place where it gives out into the square stands a secluded neighbourhood bistro, the Rat Diamond.
The ebony woman in the deep red dress lounged against the angle of the wall, the soft fabric of the divan cushions sending the faintest sensual tremor through her body. The Wanton (28) She shifted her gaze languidly, taking in the other drinkers. She had the long, slim, compact body of a dancer, its pent-up energy visible in the constant ripples that ran through it, protesting her idleness like a high-mettled racehorse grounded for too long.
“My dear, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. What on Htrea are you skulking under the sign of the rat for – I haven’t been in here since….” The newcomer pouted comically, as if trying to use body language to convey the unmentionable.
Red laughed. “Leave it out, Parasol, your one-time exploits in this place are legendary.” She ran amused eyes over the elegant, olive-skinned woman with the wide-brimmed hat, long white gloves and silken sun-shade. “Apparently one time a dozen river-boatmen came in here, paid off after a straight month at the oars and you made a bet with the gang boss that you couldn’t service the whole…”
The last words came out rather indistinctly as Parasol had thrust a gloved hand straight into her friend’s mouth and having grabbed the plaited and beaded hair with the other one, was attempting to crack her head against the wall.
They were separated by a silver-haired woman with burning eyes and a whiplash voice, brandishing the discarded sunshade. “Sit down and shut up or get the fuck out of here, Ladies– afternoon at the Rat we do Quiet and Genteel - got it?”
The two women dusted themselves off and, giggling, went to powder their noses.
Parasol applied lipstick, with deliberation. “Actually, I need a favour.”
The other laughed. “I didn’t think you were visiting the Rat for your health.”
“Business, Baby. D’you ever hear of a Northland merchant name of Trader – big, red beard – was here in ’56.”
“I was a school-kid in ’56”
Parasol pouted at her reflection. “Mmm. Come to think of it, Trader’s not the type who would go knocking up school kids.”
“There you are, then.” Red tossed her head, sending her plaits flying. “Y’ want to book me for a do at your place?”
The hat nodded.
“Just cabaret, or escort as well?”
Parasol finished her mouth and turned. “One drink after the set will suit. Next new moon. Can you get the SweetRiverBoys to back you?”
Red took her friend’s arm. “If you’re waving that kind of money, I’ll talk to Slim,” she said. “By the way, what are they like in bed, those Northlanders?”
* * *
The view was sublime. They were camped in a sheltered hollow just below the top of the pass. The sun was sinking fast now, sending smoking, violet shadows across the slopes of the mountains all about them. It was already deep dusk in the lowlands, rolling away southward to the edge of sight. The big, red-bearded man moved his calloused hand gently over the polished wood of his stout staff. The Patriarch (29) Then he clicked his tongue to the great grey wolf: “Let’s go!” and moved down into the hollow.
Half an hour later, he turned from the fire to rest his vivid emerald eyes on broad, powerful features, topped off by an unruly mop of chestnut hair.
“They settling OK?”
Mops gave an affirmative grunt and unslung a big mountain hare from his shoulders. He was a master of the catapult… He skinned it, fast, and in no time had it bubbling in the pot. Trader meanwhile had gone off round the shoulder of the hill with the wolf to check on the men’s camp, the feeding of the pack mules and the guard rota for the night. It was high, wild country.
Usually, they slept and ate with the men, but not here. Here, they needed space. Of all the stopovers on the year-long journey, this was the one which never failed to move them to the core. The mountain wilderness was behind them; now they would wind down the switchbacks to the big river, whence easily on to journey’s end at Two Rivers.
“I miss the farm.”
Mops looked across at his childhood friend in the firelight. “Farm”, he knew, meant family. Trader came from farming stock, and he could never quite reconcile himself to his love of travel and adventure. Mops, a bachelor by choice and temperament, had no such divided loyalties. Not for him the settled life, the one woman making a home. He was never more at home than rutting in the hay-barn with some buxom village girl, or tucked up in his bedroll under a vast canopy of stars, like tonight.
Trader knew all of this. “I envy you sometimes,” he said softly, taking a pull at his wine flask and passing it across.
Mops shook his head. “Sometimes, friend, I wonder if you aren’t more of a family man than even you can handle. Perhaps I should talk to Mummy – she may have a sister…”
This impromptu salvo somehow tickled the imaginations of both, setting the two travellers howling with laughter.
A shooting star suddenly blazed its trail of white fire down the sky in the direction of Two Rivers. The wolf blinked and laid his head on his paws.
* * *
Something woke Mops, but without fear. Projection (30) He felt at once that dawn was close – the faintest of light traced the eastern horizon line. His friend sat gazing into the newly-roused fire. Behind him the great wolf, motionless, seemed to be moulded out of velvet darkness. As he hovered still on the perimeter of sleep it seemed to him that for one hallowed moment he looked out upon the timeless dream of man. As if, out of the flame of spirit, the first conscious being was shaping a creation upon which – even as he constructed its image – the first light of the first dawn came breaking like the first wave of ocean upon the shores of the conscious self.
Warm tears of gratitude wet his cheeks, for he felt himself a blessed being of that world, one small creature under the sheltering sky.
* * *
Trader strode across the ancient bridge, under the portcullis and up the steep, winding trail to the south gate in the old walls. Achievement (31) Here, at the entrance to the city proper, he paused for a long moment. Midnight, the grey wolf, followed an urgent nose into the city, whilst Trader leant on his staff in the shade of the wide gate, ruminating. Mops was with the men half an hour down river, helping to bed down the animals at their usual caravanserai.
Even now, in the prime of life, Trader could still summon again the thrill of standing here, just twenty-three years old, at the culmination of their first journey. Then, as now, he saw his old Dad’s eyes shining in the firelight of a lonely winter hearth in the deep north, heard him say:
‘When I stood there at the gate of that great city, my heart was fair bursting with pride and joy. The tall tales I had heard as a little boy had come out of the firelight stories and lay there, right at my feet.’ Those words fitted the moment exactly. With a sudden grin, Trader pushed into the bustle of the street, making his way towards the High Lady on Grand Parade. He had a feeling he might just run into Parasol there…
* * *
The ‘one drink’ with Trader after her dancing at Parasol’s turned out to be the prelude to a long night. Trader waited for her and they walked through the night streets, talking animatedly, and laughing.
Red, whose life had been lived pretty much in and with her body, found to her amazement that she was fascinated by Trader’s stories of the North, life on the road, business deals, the larger-than-life characters of the travelling world… As for Trader, of course it was flattering to have a sexy young woman willing to hang out with him. More than that, however, Parasol had twice in the past acted as go-between for his and Mops’ business deals and he had a high regard for her shrewdness and judgement. And Parasol, who knew perfectly well his family situation up north, was nevertheless putting Red in his path – or vice versa. He was intrigued.
They parted at dawn. Red looked into his eyes and said: ‘I’m dancing at the Metropole on Saturday. Will you come and watch me?’
* * *
Parasol finally found her moping backstage at the deserted Classic, the theatre where her friend’s company was based. She was at her fiercest. ‘Look, Red, It’s been a month – about three and a half weeks too long in my opinion. During your meteoric career, you’ve bedded half the trash in town – the pretty half, I will grant you that – now a noble and splendid Trader hoves into sight and suddenly Madam has her legs permanently crossed….. Don’t tell me you’ve caught….’
Red flung herself away from the newcomer, refusing to face her. ‘No, I’m clean. Climb off your high horse and leave me alone!’
‘Me on my high horse! That’s rich, coming from you! For goodness sake, what’s eating you?’
Resistance (32) ‘LEAVE ME ALONE!’
‘Wait a minute! Do you need one of those potions the old girls use? Too much action dried you out?’
What came out, finally, in a yell of frustration and a slammed down palm was: ‘I’m in love with him, you stupid cow, what do you think!’
Parasol held her from behind. After a long moment, ‘Baby,’ she said, gently now, ‘I know you, and I know.’
Turning, Red buried her head in the other’s shoulder, crying quietly. Eventually: ‘I’m just really scared. Is that so terrible?’
Parasol offered a scented lace handkerchief. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I think it might be time to proceed to the stage after the timorous young virgin, don’t you?’
Red disengaged herself, giggles joining the remains of her snuffles. ‘So he’s serious, is he?’ she asked, looking for a moment barely more than a girl.
* * *
‘There’s an inn I know in the North Country that has one wall painted with a huge picture of a young lad walking along a tightrope high above a valley. Balance (33) To help him balance, he’s using a long pole. At one end of the pole there’s a little house, at the other end a cockerel – they’re not real, you understand, but they each represent something. It’s like these are the two things he’s using to try and keep his balance as he walks along the rope.’
‘So what do they mean – the house and the cock?’ Red bent and kissed his bare shoulder. This was a new thing for her – philosophising after sex – and it amused, even pleased her.
Trader grinned. ‘I suppose you’re never sure, and that’s one reason I like that scene. I could say, for instance, that the cock is about sex and the house is about family, but I feel as if it’s more than that.’
‘So, male and female?’
Trader returned the kiss, his eyes soft in the darkness. ‘Oh yes, smart girl,’ he grinned, ‘you might well be right.’ He checked the eyes glowing from the deepest dark of the room: Red and Midnight, he knew, had reached their own understanding.
Through the open window came the sound of the Brown River, surging down towards the confluence with its placid elder brother. From Artist’s Square, at the front of the building, rose the faint sound of children chanting in one of their traditional games. Red and Trader could smell grilling fish.
‘I didn’t want to love you,’ she said with a catch in her voice, ‘but in the end, I couldn’t help myself.’
‘Where I come from,’ came the rejoinder, ‘there are no women like you.’ Pause. ‘ Are you hungry?’
* * *
Summer’s end, South Harbour.
A mountain of shining ebony loomed above them. ‘One fish pie, one traveller’s.’ A beaming smile came with the piled plates of steaming, spicy food.
‘What would we do without you, Mummy?’
‘Starve. Rolls or flatbread? Two of Homebrew?’
As ever. Business good, Mummy?’
‘Can’t complain. Always do, though.’ A laugh like a drunken elephant. ‘You boys heading north soon?’
Mops jerked a thumb. ‘He’s staying, and I’m going south: up river to Redstone Ferry and then into the hinterland.’
Mummy digested this for a moment, looking back and forth between them. Then, eyes sparkling, she grabbed the red beard and gave it a tug that forced its owner to stifle a roar of pain. ‘Good for you, Trader. That’ll be one less hot gal roaming the streets. Bun in the oven yet?’
The big man laughed. Come off it, Mummy, Red with children? Pull the other one!
‘Two?! This I must see!’ The giant proprietress made as if to check his intimate credentials, setting off a wave of mirth in the immediate vicinity. Satisfied, she went for the rest of their order.
The two men eyed each other for a moment, Mops winking conspiratorially. Then they fell to.
* * *
So Trader had stayed on, completing an entire cycle of the seasons. Now spring was in full swing, Mops and the men had returned laden with goods and they must all go north with no further delay. They needed to make the great autumn equinox fair at White Domes by the Almost-landlocked Sea, and to do that they had to cross two chains of mountains and the high plateau between.
Red was wild with grief yet also, somehow, ready to regain her freedom. So it was that, in the storm of love and pain that was their parting, unknowing she conceived their child.
That night she had what her people called a Great Dream – dreams such as one may have barely half a dozen in a lifetime, and from which one wakes profoundly moved, knowing that something of great importance has happened. Formation (34) In this dream was a black man whose great mane of hair made him not of any race that she had ever known. With him was a brown, red-haired boy to whom he was showing big tracks in the sand. In the dream, she knew that the boy was her son and Trader’s. But the strange man, she somehow knew, was the face of her destiny. She woke knowing she was pregnant and was overjoyed: certain that the unknown man of her dream would take care of her.
* * *
It was twilight at the well and he was near to delirium from dehydration, fever and exhaustion, compounded by that all-pervading despair. Then there was a movement in the world, slight but perceptible, and she was there. Contact: Hope (35). The familiar warm, slightly husky voice spoke to him then, and though his mind could not meet her words, her tone and her presence soothed the searing pain of his soul, returning him to hope. Riding on the waves of her soft singing, he was borne away into some gentle oblivion.
Remember, I am she upon whose beauty no mortal man can look without becoming enslaved. Only in the delirium of unseeing and unknowing could you lie with me, seed in me a girl-child who carries half the fate of the worlds. You will meet her, once, before you pass out of Htrea.
So there came up out of the dawn, to that God-forsaken desert well, a black man with arcane eyes, leading a battered mule. With water came the return of life and clarity. Dozing, waking, fainting and dreaming across the saddle he came at last to the city of the two rivers. He regained full awareness to find himself in a plain but tastefully furnished room, lying on a real mattress on a carpeted floor. Beside him sat a woman with beaded plaits, large gold earrings and a brilliant red and yellow print dress. Her eyes sparkled. ‘Welcome back to the world,’ she said with a large smile.
He drank a little soup, prepared with many healing herbs, and slept again. She, however, went to her other new arrival, cast herself off into the bottomless deeps of his eyes, felt her body grow incandescent under his empowered hands.
Red was amazed.
She knew that Parasol was kind-hearted, but hardly in a way that would risk cramping her style. Yet here she was, dropping in virtually every day to render one service or another to Red’s resident convalescent. One day, a glowing Parasol arrived, to look suddenly like a lost child when told that Wolfie – as she was already calling him – had got up and gone out. Red’s eyes lit up, she took her friend by the shoulders. ‘Parasol, you’re in love! You, of all people! Unbelievable! I’m so happy for you, welcome to the club!’
The other looked at her a moment in complete bewilderment. Then she gave a kind of squeal: ‘Oh, please!’ and stamped her foot. Finally, she ducked her head abruptly into Red’s shoulder and burst into tears.
‘I throw myself into my act with such intensity that sometimes I almost believe my own performance.’ Parasol said to herself, in the deep recesses of her own heart.
And so it was that Parasol the hostess took Wolfie the hermit into her bed, her vast social circle and her life, and taught him the virtues of civilised living. She enjoyed the sex in its rough, untutored way; amused herself also in destabilising the prejudices and received opinions which had taken the place of thinking in his existence hitherto. And somehow, by an animal cunning picked up in the forests, Wolfie for his part sensed that, in some unfathomable manner, Parasol – who threw herself into sex, cuisine, friendship, clothes or her piano playing with equal abandon – had yet some inner, inviolable sanctuary that was entirely closed to him.
So when, a few months after Wolfie’s arrival, Parasol met Mummy, The Captain and the One with No Name, it was in a tiny room in the back of the courtyard behind a smithy. They were in Blacksmith’s Row in the craftspeople’s quarter, and not one of them would ever have been recognised by their familiars. It was, they there agreed, an auspicious moment for the first crossing of the one called Wolfie. ‘Be careful,’ the Nameless One said to Parasol, ‘not to be trapped in your simulation of grief. You will have to grieve.’ Mummy saw her uncertainty. ‘The trapper and the trapped, my dear – it should be simple, but it rarely is. Put on your overalls and come down to South Harbour for a pie and mash, if it gets too much.’
The houseboat moored alongside Marine Parade in the heart of Caféland was smart enough not to stand out from the others, but no smarter. Mummy stood at the quayside supervising the loading of pies and sundry other provisions. When all was stowed away, a big man in a woollen cap and sea-boots came rolling down the gang-plank and stood next to her, eyeing the boat. She handed him a beer; they clinked glasses and took a long pull.
‘Safe Journey, Cap’n.’
‘Yeah, I’ll drink to that, Mummy.’ He paused, his eyes clouding momentarily. ‘We’re not there yet.’
For some time, they stood in companionable silence, sipping their beer. Then Mummy nudged him, ‘Here he comes,’ catching sight of the distant approach of Wolfie out of the corner of her eye. ‘You take it easy now.’ She squeezed his arm, grabbed his empty glass and was gone.
It is not recorded, in the tales told by the Flow Singer, by what lanes of sea and sky they wandered, nor what passed between the two men, as they voyaged over sea and land, night and day, sky and star: until, across the waters of a still, blue lake, they closed on an island with groves of trees, a stately white house high above its shore. Beaching the punt, the Captain, with a gesture of his head, indicated the long steps of white stone that led up to the wide terrace above.
In extreme turmoil of spirit, his passenger climbed the steps, crossed the terrace and there at the open door, utterly disoriented, found himself looking into the eyes that had held him a timeless moment at the door of the pavilion: the eyes of a woman.
He saw now that whilst the left eye looked from beyond time, the right held the shadow of an unimaginable longing. He knew, with absolute certainty, that the being before him was the very incarnation of woman herself, and that unless she chose to release him, he would stand spellbound upon that terrace until the end of time.
Speechless, he found words from his inner being: ‘What would you have of me, My Lady?’
‘I am the flame that goes before you, Pilgrim, and the road that will lead you on for ever. This is my gift to you; repay me by loving those of my daughters whom you meet by chance along the way.’ Then she lowered her eyes, releasing him again into the dream of becoming.
* * *
The punt, with an almost imperceptible hiss, cut the mirror surface of the lake: the island receding astern, the pilgrim in great turmoil of spirit.
‘Why did you take me there?’
The Captain, leaning comfortably on his pole in the prow, chuckled. ‘I’m a ferryman, remember. I take you where you want to go. Do you have a problem with that?’
‘But that’s not where I wanted to go,’ rejoined Wolfie, shaking.
‘It is given to few men,’ returned the other, barely above a whisper, ‘to know what they truly want.’ Turning to face out into the open ocean, he drew around himself again his deep cloak of silence.
In this crucible of foam and spray; cloud-fall, star-breath, phosphorescence was forged and tempered the soul of Wolfie, whom they call also, in the rubric of the old west, Seven Roads.
So they found themselves upon the moat: to the right, the stone walls of the octagonal pavilion; to the left, the worn flags set in the wall from the waterline up to the rose-garden above their heads. And then he was in her arms, the rich, oiled cascade of jasmine-scented hair exploding through every atom of his senses.
We may visit still, in the portrait galleries of time, two records of their love. Inflation (36) In one he stands erect, looking down at her. He bears upon his features the stamp of Eros – envoy and herald of the mortal world. His eyes touch her with all the protective tenderness that men have ever vested in the women they have cherished, since time began. It is a look of pure spirit: a recognition that the soul of woman also, if alone and unrecognised, is condemned to eternal darkness and silence. And to this, the beauty that is Psyche abandons herself without reserve.
In the other, we see the fury unleashed in her by insensitivity, infantile dependence, loss of the centre of self. Deflation (37) In her is let loose all the rage accumulated since the dawn of womanhood against mean-spiritedness, vanity and pretence. All that with which men falsely clothe themselves has been stripped away. Now, naked and vulnerable as a child, he cowers beneath the onslaught of her rage.
So did they live and love, one brief high season of the heart and senses, by garden and woodland; by stream, lake and meadow, in a land made of their feeling in all its ebbs and flows, heights and deeps. Until finally, she bade him be her guest that evening at the pavilion, to which they had never yet returned.
There, through the inner sight lines, she showed him how the big blonde midwife was assisting the dark-haired woman’s peaceful birthing in the firelight of the log cabin in the snowbound north. And how, in a plain white house on Artist’s Square in Two Rivers, open to the warm night air, another birth was taking place, this time to a dark-skinned woman with beaded plaits, surrounded by the chatter, laughter and encouragements of a gaggle of Southland ladies.
She came to him then, gazing deep into his eyes. ‘Love me now and release me fully into the material world,’ she whispered. ‘But do not follow, there where the sight of me could only enslave you.’ Reaching up, she closed his eyes and added, huskily, ‘and I will see you later, my blue tiger.’
Soul (38) Then, in the emotional maelstrom of their parting, form became an alchemical crucible, in which all that he knew melted and flowed out into the inconceivable. Lights, shadows, airs and melodies, love and pain were there beyond all possibility of containing, so that what had been he and she fragmented like tears of glass. Then there was music like snow, with blue-violet shadows and lights like the coloured-glass fairy lights of Two Rivers city. Perhaps the snow was her body, for she was there; and the soft, falling silence was her substance and her feeling. Safe: as a tiny child is safe in the warmth and protection of its mother’s arms. As the harness bells jingle sweetly, the sleigh runners hiss beneath, and from the fur-cocooned warmth one somehow knows, though there are no words to say it, that the snow goes on falling through the healing and holy darkness.
* * *
INTERMISSION
In the placid firelight of a log cabin on the snowbound north hills was born to Psyche of the jasmine locks and Wolfie Seven Roads a little girl named Elfi. And into a web of laughter and song, on a warm Southland night in Two Rivers, to Red and to Trader of the Old North a boy called Polo.
In the courtyard behind the blacksmith’s shop, the One with No Name brought Wolfie down, like a kite from the far skies, back into the form of the planet Htrea.
From the deck of a houseboat moored on Marine Parade in Caféland came the soft chink of glasses and the words: ‘So far, so good.’
‘And to a job well done, Cap’n,’ responded Mummy quietly, taking a long pull of Best Southland.
From her white terrace in the starlight Our Lady reached out to touch those two new beings with her protection. Thus began the first day of the second age of the world.