Temerity & Secret Talk

Pluent

Kundalini Concrete

Circumnavigation (Or The Envy of Democracies)

 Affectation of the sages. Such airs! Such impertinence! We muster a common cause. A cold snap snaps shut. If I wake in time, I’ll be there. This oil has to be used. You take your cue from governments and bureaucrats. I take mine from hot air balloons. A tendency to over dramatise promotes servility. Dignity. Formality. Affection.

   This is an age of barbecue and beans, a comedy of inbetweens or rebellion in a cup. Certainly not a reality I’m familiar with. How tired I am of inarticulate drunks waving banners of peace over fallen women! I’ve pledged my allegiance to space travel and flightless birds, less a surrender of will than a submission to the inchoate.

Sugar Qoating

An explosion of light on the dream screen. There are various ways to interpret what amounts to a global revolution. Your part gifted by M&S. Peace is the ability to reside within oneself regardless. It matters that I know when your birthday is.

   Unable to distinguish the flame, I engineer an implosion. Omniverse. Now that I know I am infinite, I vow to no longer concern myself with matters beyond my reach. An extinguished gentleman. Karma. Power lies in the ability to ignore repeated requests to purchase recyclable carrier bags. An unfit mother. No, a full fat father. No, a son who has overcome the hollow reed of rejection.

   Of all the dreams I had as a child one stands out. Holyrood or Hollywood. A papal delegation obfuscating its way through streams of insignificance. I dream of genii. I dream of Joni. Revolution in Beijing is television in Bombay, or Mumbai, or Wemyss Bay, or Wombai. My mother is an expert in the field of nutrition. She used to bake birthday cakes of a deliqious sweetness.

The Great King

The anticipation of astronauts relieved by a mild antiseptic. A woman’s top lip. You choose bed linen in accordance with the season. Aromatic stimuli. This at least is my projection. Towards an elegant euphoria.

   What I dreamt once I may be about to experience as an unmistakable reality. How can I possibly communicate this without invoking the laws of my father the prophet Hezekiah? Once I dreamt of an unshakable reality enforced by a rigorous dogma. The spoils of diplomacy. Or denial. I have only twisted the essence and made us look inward. This is more about routing my being in the root of my being. Astronauts have trouble remembering the colour of grass in September.

   At least I’ve not been duped by insufferable evangelists. Or, if I have, at least I haven’t gelled with duplicitous suffragettes. The position of dogs in the springtime bothers me. A sudden burst of flower arranging. Tired of the trickle, I anticipate a deluge.

Stephen Nelson sings in unknown languages & regularly throws words & images on to a blog at afterlights.blogspot.com.         He can read minds at a distance of 10 paces.

inspired by my babysitter’s
boyfriend, i’m studying the paintings
of Lorser Feitelson. i have had a monstrous
week and a half. a week and a half (and a half) of
large spilling slices. they suck me in to dream
like crazy of L.A.

as though i were suffering from a slipped
disk, i’m cultivating inner tranquility and
bright, chromatic abstraction. i’m swelling,
gently undulating, changing in thickness as i sway.
the first i heard of someone behind me was a tic-tac
crunched by an incisor. i know that sound. i know that
smell. i know a curtain drppn n bg clsng zp. the trouble

starts because what makes me tick, also makes me talk,
and therein lies the rub (i wish).
i am an atomiser
from which you can squeeze
a thin spray of hope (i hope):
::……………………………  
………….     ………………
……….    ……..   ..   ……
..  …         …..      ..   . ..

the middle of the room is hardly
recognizable. i still have to panic
when i want something. still mushy
where it matters, you could say,
still lonesome after all these years. c
reamy silences like sssshhhh
(in a pram) but not right now
asleep at all, or having strange
dreams.

we’ll have to go
upstairs calmly, from where

i promise we’ll hear just as well.
you could hug me. because i am
an atomiser from which:
……… ……… ……………  ….
…………………….         . . . .
….. …     ……….     .. ……..
…. …. ……………….      …. .
… … … … …                   ….
the furniture is gasping but
ignore it, it only thinks it can
pass judgment, forgets we
already own at least ten percent
of its gurgling, aching sorryful
bulk i bet.  just a bunch of values
that we can refuse (pander instead
to our whims if it suits us)
so bright so bright they rot
(as i trip up on a confusing
linebreak) so bright they rot
ate longer than expected on
the hot rod, too soft, (ee), morose.

i am an atomiser from which
you can hug a thin spray of hope
i hope …………………………………
………….       …………..     ………..

i collect the autographs
of famous redheads. was d.h. lawrence
a redhead? was henri matisse? intrigue.

in the hope that they are shared,
i gargle my dreams so loud it’s obscene,

and you humour me, a couple of
licks short of sensitivity and kindness.

ken kesey? swinburne? silliman? getty iii?
blake? i got jane asher already and am holding
out for will clark. i reckon my hobby came from
somewhere but i can’t for the life of me
think where, nor why. irresolution+twitchiness.

i know your love is cap-
sized, louche & side
ways on your head,
gaudy, red, obscene,
its rim dramatically tilting,
lop-sided, sweat-stained,
old. at 

the same time, i know
my personality is like
a kilt. heavy, scratchy &
tartan. when you reel, it
feels like you’re shrugging
me off to the tune of my
fiddle. i flap about you.

Colin Herd lives in Edinburgh, where he co-edits anything anymore anywhere and reviews fiction for 3:AM magazine, poetry in the blog of Chroma Journal and exhibitions for Aesthetica.  Recent poems have appeared in 3:AM, Gutter, Pop Serial, Shampoo and Velvet Mafia.  colin-herd.com

Jennie Renton asked us to take over this website for a month and to do something with it; the best thing to do, we thought, would be to invite poets we know across lowland Scotland that we’ve either worked with, performed with, or whose work we like.  over the next four weeks we’ll be posting the works of a Canadian ex-pat, a text artist, a performance poet and an extreme found poet, among others. 

to launch this takeover, an impromptu night of readings, TROPIXTUALITIES, was held at Roxy Art House on Monday 16^th August.  for a hastily arranged event, it was a great and varied night.

we encourage the leaving of comments. nick-e melville and rodney relax.

our first poet is Dorothy Alexander.

Three poems from Final Warning

 – an ongoing series in which techniques developed out of found poetry are applied to a contemporary newspaper clipping. Poems are constructed from within a word pool formed by searching along and down through the base text. Letters, words, lines are then ‘re’placed in direct relation to it.

Found is posited here as an ecopoetic, not only because of its inbuilt credentials as recycler, but, more pertinently, for the non-hierarchical and inclusive nature of its processes. It invites acts of multiple attention (down to the smallest detail). It encourages heightened responsibility, in both writer and audience, for engagement with the word as depository and potential manipulator of meaning. My hope is that this dynamic of paying particular attention and taking responsibility serves as exemplar for engagement with larger issues and strengthens resistance to notions of outside agency.

The text used was an extract from the front page of The Independent on Saturday 3rd February 2007 whose banner headline was ‘Final Warning’, and which had five purported scenarios for global temperature rise by 2100 from +2.4° up to +6.4°.

Click on the fllowing links to see the poems:

sermons hurt/curb me 

variations of critical

premonition from the plastic room

Poems from Final Warning have been published in How2 online journal, Black Box Manifold and in Product Magazine. A selection was exhibited at the Skylines Ecopoetics Exhibition / Language and L=A=N=D=S=C=A=P=E=S Forum at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Natural World (www.mediaalive.co.uk/ecopoetics/) in June 2009. Links to other examples can be found at www.dorothyalexander.co.uk

Also see http://textualities.net/gordon-bruce/watson-sherlocked/

Sources

1. United Kingdom censuses: 1851 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891.

2. University of London General Register Part 3, page 711.

3. Encyclopaedia Britannica Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. 11th Ed, Vol X: Evangelical Church to Francis Joseph, Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, New York, 1910.

4. Athena (1920).

5. University of London, Senate House Library. Index to theses, ref 0-11297.

6. C. R. Chapple, ‘Watson, Foster (1860-1929)’, rev. M. C. Curthoys, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

7. Death certificate of Arthur Watson

8. The Will of Arthur Watson

9. Calendars of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration (England and Wales).

10. Bob Read. Searching for Arthur Watson in Textualities 1 - Magic Afoot: Rosslyn Lore and More, (Ed: Jennie Renton); Edinburgh (2006). ISBN 0955289602.

Arthur Watson: Publications
1898 Glimpses of the Anglo Saxon Boy. The Educational Review, June 1898.

1898 Sciopodes. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, October 1898; Vol 4: pp. 269-270.

1898 The Rebus. Antiquary, December 1898; Vol 34: pp. 368-373.

1900 Music Galleries. Musical News, December 22nd 1900; Vol 19, No 512: p 541.

1901 The Tarasque. The Antiquary, August 1901; Vol 37, No 140: pp. 234-239.

1903 Tumblers. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, July 1903; Vol 9: pp. 186-202.

1904 The Funambulist. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, October 1904; Vol 10:   pp. 217-231.

1907 Jugglers. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, January 1907; Vol 13: pp. 1-16.

1909 Conjurers: Part 1. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, April 1909; Vol 15: pp. 81-100.

1909 Conjurers: Part 2. The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist, July 1909; Vol 15:   pp. 176-191.

1910 Knives with music inscribed. T. Lea Southgate & Arthur Watson; Musical News 1910.

1928 The Speculum Virginum with special reference to the Tree of Jesse. Speculum (3) 1928   pp 445-69.

1934 Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.

1938 Mary in the burning bush. Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol 2, No 1, July 1938: pp 69-70.

1947 Saligia. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1947; vol 10: pp 148-150.

1947 Manuscript of Virginum Speculum in the Walters Art Gallery. Journal of the Walters Art   Gallery, vol 10 1947: pp 61-74.

1953 Catalogue of Trees of Jesse in XIII and XIV centuries. Typed manuscript, Warburg Institute

1957 The Imagery of the Tree of Jesus on the West front of Orvieto Cathedral. In: Gordon, D.J.   (Ed): Fritz Saxl, 1890-1948: a volume of memorial essays from his friends in England. pp 136-146.

It is a pleasure, not to mention a challenging and rewarding experience, to immerse oneself in this epic poem of discovery over and over again, fishing out a new catch every time. From the Ganga to the Tay twists and turns through the pages in rivers of narrative on the banks of which are colour photographs by the author herself and by Scottish artist Kenny Munro, with whom she has collaborated on a number of arts projects. As Munro has observed: ‘The mythical qualities of Indian rivers is profound, with daily rituals imprinted in community consciousness. Scotland’s rivers were also recognised as the life blood of mother earth, and considered sacred, but cultural evolution seems to have clouded our ancestors’ respect for Scotland’s most powerful river, the Tay.’
Bashabi Fraser’s unique calligramatic poem gives voice to the Indian River Ganga (Ganges) and the Scottish River Tay, personified and entwined in a dialogue which evokes the sacred significance of these two vital water sources. The cultures of the people who live on their banks are described from a multitude of perspectives: as befits a social scientist, poet, writer and commentator who is highly active in developing the links between India and Scotland, Fraser draws into this poem every possible thread from what has been a complex tapestry of exchange and separateness, similarity and difference. Folklore and religion are explored in such a way as to draw out the diversity of tradition, the power of the Hindu belief system being met by the Celtic. As well as aesthetic and artistic facets, she tackles politics and economics - unusual poetic fare, but her commitment is holistic. Showing how deeply the exchange of culture and goods has marked the India-Scotland experience, she explores experiences of the two diasporas - of Scots to India and of Indians to Scotland.
However, as a post-Midnight child, Fraser avoids easy criticism of the British Raj. Hers is a more nuanced attitude, inflected with the values of Patrick Geddes, whose correspondence with Rabindranath Tagore she has edited; the influence of these visionaries is palpable in her approach. Guided throughout by the author’s steady moral compass and the value she places on sustained ecological and social diversity, From the Ganga to the Tay brings out of myriad contrasts an awareness of the fragility of ancient wisdom in a nuclear world.

Marc Sherland

From the Ganga to the Tay by Bashabi Fraser is published by Luath Press ISBN 1-906307-95-4.

In the art of Bashabi Fraser the cultures of India and Scotland richly blend, and in this magnificent poem the two living traditions speak to each other through the riverine oracles of the Ganges and the Tay.
RICHARD HOLLOWAY

A rich blend of mythic, historical, and geographical storytelling, her poem explores aspects of India and Scotland from a radically unusual perspective, paying tribute to the close links between both post-colonial nations.
MARIO RELICH

Buy From the Ganga to the Tay here:
http://www.luath.co.uk/acatalog/From_the_Ganga_to_the_Tay_.html

Find out more about Bashabi Fraser at http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/contacts/bashabi-fraser

Bashabi Fraser discussing the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes
http://patrickgeddes.co.uk/interview_bashabi.html

Kenny Munro’s exhibitions and projects are described at
http://www.kennymunrosculpture.com/

ROBERT BURNS

To A Mouse
On Turning Her Up In Her Nest, With The Plough,
November 1785

Ad Murem
Nidis Aratro Eversis

from

James Grahame
Poems in English, Scotch, and Latin 

Printed for the Author by J. Neilson
Paisley
1794

The Burns industry in Scotland enjoyed a busy year in 2009, what with the Homecoming Festival, a three-day conference at Glasgow University, and the publication of three rival biographies, along with all manner of other sorts of events and tributes to mark, in case anyone had forgotten, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s birth.

James Grahame’s tribute to Burns, however, is not of recent date.  As Burns collectors will know, it was first published in 1794, and as far as can be ascertained this work has not been reprinted in modern times. Not that any claims are being made for it as ‘The Last Great Burns Discovery’ - that unlikely subject was more than adequately treated by Hugh MacDiarmid in 1934 in his irreverent short story of that name.

From the middle ages, when literary works were being created in vernacular languages across Europe, there existed at the same the practice of translating vernacular poetry into Latin. Indeed, at the height of the Renaissance, there flourished in Scotland a number of Latinist poets that included George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. Such was the interest in composition in this classical language that it concerned not just the creation of new, original works, but extended to the latinisation of work of other writers, for example Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid underwent this transformation by the English writer Francis Kynaston, who had also given the same treatment to some of Chaucer’s work. Coming as a late example of the practice, James Grahame’s tribute to Burns nevertheless belongs to that tradition. (An even later example is Alexander Leighton’s 1862 The Principal Songs of Robert Burns Translated into Medieval Latin Verse, and which won the praise of Thomas Carlyle.)

The volume in which Grahame’s translation appears was first published anonymously and printed for the author by J. Neilson in Paisley, the author having ‘imposed secrecy as to his name.’ It may be of interest to some that the poet’s great-grand-nephew was Kenneth Grahame, who wrote The Wind in the Willows, and that both were kinsman of the traveller, writer and politician R B Cunninghame Graham.

According to the hand-written note on the title-page of the British Library’s copy of Poems in English, Scotch, and Latin, (BL 11632f51), James Grahame, 1765-1811, was ‘a son of a respectable gentleman of Glasgow…bred to the law, he began his career as a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh’, and was admitted Advocate in 1795. Like Burns, he was a radical in politics, though unlike Burns, Grahame later became an Anglican clergyman. Grahame was satirised, as was Burns and others too, by Byron in his poem, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: 

                                    Lo! the Sabbath Bard,
                                    Sepulchral GRAHAME, pours his notes sublime
                                    In mangled prose, nor e’en aspires to rhyme;
                                    Breaks into blank the Gospel of St. Luke,
                                    And boldly pilfers from the Pentateuch;
                                    And, undisturbed by conscientious qualms,
                                    Perverts the Prophets, and purloins the Psalms.

Byron’s own footnote reads: ‘Mr Grahame has poured forth two volumes of Cant, under the name of Sabbath Walks and Biblical Pictures.’

In my transcription of ‘Ad Murem’, I was assisted by Latdict.com, ‘a free, online English-Latin dictionary for the poor and curious’. As for any infelicities in the transcription, mea culpa!

*

WEE, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
                                    Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
                                    Wi’ murdering pattle.

EHEU, parva nitedula, qualis nunc tremor implet
Pectora! ne subito celeri te proripe cursu;
Insectari te nollem rulla truculenta.

            I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
                                    Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion,
                                    An’ fellow mortal!

            Naturæ imperio humano fœdus sociale
Ruptum mi dolet, et justam me dicere cogit
Illam suspicionem, qua sit ut exsilis a me
Terrigena comite, in terram tecum redituro.

            I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
                                    ‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
                                    An’ never miss’t.

            Haud equidem dubito quin tu furere aliquando.
Quidni? animal miserum, te certe vivere oportet.
Granum e mergite tota, ecce petitio parva!
Grana a te sumpto, damnum haud dignoscere possum;
Et mihi quod superest cœlo fausto fruar illo.

            Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
                                    O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin,
                                    Baith snell an’ keen!

            Angusta illa domus mœstam dat fracta ruinam;
Structuram invalidam spectas dispergere ventos;
Nec virides ullas stipulas, illam ad renovandam,
Usquam suppeditant arva. Interea imminet asper
Mordaces referens ventos acresque December. 

            Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
                                    Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
                                    Out thro’ thy cell.

            Agros tu nudatos vastatosque, hyememque
Vidisti tristem properantem; spemque sovebas,
Obtecta hic ut contra aquilones degere posses;
At scindit nidos crudeli vomere aratrum. 

            That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
                                    But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
                                    An’ cranreuch cauld!

            Congeries hæc culmorum exigua et foliorum,
Trito dente fuit, multo et convecta labore;
Nunc operam perdisti, et tectis exul ademptis,
Frigus acerbum perferres pluviasque nivales.

            But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
                                    Gang aft agley,
An’ leave us nought but grief an’ pain,
                                    For promis’d joy!

            Sed non indicium tu, parva nitedula, solas es,
Quam vana est mens prudens et præsaga futuri:
Consiliis, quæ muribus et mortalibus ægris
Arte ineuntur summa, haud raro casus iniquus
Accidit: et, speratæ lætitiæ vice, crebro
Nil inventum est præter tristitiam atque dolorem.

            Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e
                                    On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
                                    I guess an’ fear!

            Attamen haud incertum est, præ me te esse beatum;
Hora etenim præsens solum te tangere possit;
Quum retro, inque dies mœstos mea lumina verto,
Et quamvis non prævideo, auguror atque tremisco.

 © Michael Lister 2010

   ‘Don’t expect too much,’ Joanna urges. ‘It’s what?  Thirty years?  It can’t be the same.’

   ‘I won’t,’ I say, but my excitement rises with every kilometre that takes us closer to the white house beneath the lemon tree.

 *

   I had been walking and hitching across Crete in late summer, living mainly on bread and fruit.  One evening as dusk was slipping through the mountains, I came to a track leading off the main road and down towards the sea. 

   The prospect of soaking my feet in the sea was irresistible.

   The track led through terraced olive groves, their glossy leaves and knotted boughs sapped of colour in the twilight.   By the time I reached the shore, the cicadas had fallen silent.  There was no moon and I decided it was too dark to risk bathing among the jagged rocks.  I sat down and ate the last wedge of bread, drank sparingly from my water-bottle, rolled myself in my blanket beneath a tree, and slept.

   Twice I woke and looked through the curtain of branch and leaf to stars crowding above the horizon, no sound but the quiet breathing of the sea.

   My third wakening would be a little after dawn.

  *

   ‘It’s somewhere around here,’ I say, measuring bay and headland against distant recollection. Suddenly there it is, a meagre scrape of dust and pebbles curling down through olive groves walled with slate-blue, pitted stone.

   ‘We’ll need to walk,’ I say, hoping this will be permitted.  ‘It’s a mile or so - remember when we would do seven miles before lunch?’

   ‘That was before your leg started acting up again,’ Joanna places a restraining hand briefly on my arm, ‘and it was aching this morning - don’t shake your head, I heard you groaning in the bathroom, trying to get it moving.’

   ‘It’ll hold up.  It’s as keen as I am.’

   ‘Try and be sensible, would you?’

   ‘Please nurse, the doc says exercise is good for it.’

   ‘The doc meant physio, as well you know.’

   I sigh and look miserable, which often works and does so again today.

   ‘Oh, for God’s sake - but if it seizes up… Hat and stick, then.  And slowly.’

   To a rasping chorus of cicadas, we start down the track towards the sea.

  *

   The red dawn picked out the outline of a man. The light behind him, and my eyes dazed with sleep, at first I could see neither his face nor expression, though he could see the both of mine as, startled, I stared back at him.

   ‘Theos!’ He was just as alarmed, hand rising in the Orthodox signing of the Cross.

   Then, he paused, bent and peered beneath the tree at me for long seconds; his hand fell away, his voice softened, quietened. 

   ‘Ochi.  Ochi.’  He stepped back.

   ‘Kalamera,’ I said hastily, wishing I had more Greek, wondering if this was trouble.  ‘My name’s Neil. From Skotia.’

   ‘Neil,’ the man repeated, quietly, shook his head slowly, as if clearing away the last of some waking dream, spoke in good English with an American accent. ‘Gave me a shock, pal, asleep there, beneath my tree.  Stand up, let’s have a proper look at you.’

   The early light showed his lean, lined face, sharply curving nose and heavy greying moustache - nothing else he could be but Cretan, Yankee voice or not.           

   He offered his hand with a smile.

   ‘I am Yannis, and you are welcome.’

   His hand was rough, scarred, as I would soon learn, by years of hauling on salt-soaked rope and nets.  I don’t know quite what he made of me in worn jeans and grubby shirt, but he could see what I needed.

  ‘My land, my guest,’ he nodded along the shore path.  ‘C’mon.  Wash up and eat.’

   As I tugged on my boots, Yannis looked back into the grove, crossed himself once more and murmured something quietly, perhaps a saint’s name.

   A few dozen steps away, so close I could hardly believe I had seen and heard nothing of it even at night, a small house stood some metres higher than winter storms could throw their angriest waves. With white walls, blue door and window frames it was no different from a hundred others I had passed on my journey, except that over its flat roof a lemon tree spread a sheltering cloud of green leaf and yellow fruit. I washed in aching cold water, spring snowmelt collected in the mountain aquifer and stinging my head beneath the pump’s spout.

  ‘Omelette,’ Yannis called me indoors.  ‘Not good as you’d eat in a New York diner, I guess, but not too bad.’

   Best food I’d eaten for days.

   *

   The track seems hardly used anymore, grown with summer-dried weed, pressed in by blue-spiked thistle and dried poppy-heads nodding on brittle stems. Olive trees are ragged and untended, leafy green creepers wreathing fissured trunks, branches twisting unpruned, the ground below thick with brush and weed. 

   And then, a wall. A high, breeze-block wall, streaked with slapdash mortar, stretching clear along the hillside to block the old track. We stand before this ugly intrusion, look both left and right where it frowns over neglected groves and dead trees lying ripped and crumbling among their living kin.

   ‘We’ll have to go back.’ Joanna tries to pre-empt what she knows from experience is in my head, but I say it anyway.

   ‘We can make our way round, I think.’ Instincts in charge, I peer into the grove’s shadowy seclusion, where a thinning of brush stretches like a ship’s wake.

   ‘You’d better take very good care where you step,’ Joanna says.  ‘I can’t drag you back through that.’

   The canopied shade alone is worth the effort. As we thread between the stubborn branches our feet catch on tatters of rotted netting splashed black with unharvested olives left to shrink and decay.

   ‘This is so, so bad,’ I complain. ‘They love these trees. It’s almost religious.’

   ‘Atheists around here, obviously,’ Joanna agrees.

   A familiar sharp pain stabs its warning into my leg.

  *

   ‘You sleep beneath bare sky, like a shepherd?’

   ‘Now and again - not every night.’

    Amused, Yannis shook his head, began to fill his pipe. We were seated over emptied plates in the subdued light admitted by the small windows. I looked around, saw the silver-mounted icon of the Madonna and infant Christ, faces stylised to give the child a precocious gravity, his mother a profound solemnity. It is as if they already saw the road to Golgotha. On the further wall, a portrait of an old bearded gentleman in black frockcoat and wing collar whom I would learn to recognise as Venizelos, below him a shelf holding a dozen ageing books and a parade of polished wooden frames with sepia and black and white photographs of people mostly in stiff, self-conscious poses.

   ‘Your family?’

  ‘Three generations,’ Yannis said proudly. ‘Grandparents in the old costume, father and mother in best clothes, 1920s styles.  Me, my young brother Manolis, before the war came here.’

   A young man and a teenage boy, relaxed with arms around each others’ shoulders, smiling into the camera, this earlier Yannis with a hint of reserve, his brother eager and open, guileless. 

   ‘You have a look of the island,’ Yannis lit his pipe, pointed the spent match towards me. ‘I saw that beneath the tree, even in the dark.  Not too tall, black hair, good nose.’

   ‘Big nose, you mean.’  

   ‘Everyone here has a good nose, unless they’ve blown in from Athens or wherever,’ he surveyed me benevolently. ‘Give it a few years, grow a moustache, you’ll pass for a cousin down from the hills.’

   ‘Where’s Manolis now?’ I looked again at the boy’s unaffected smile. ‘Did he go to America with you?’

    Yannis paused, sucked on the pipe, blew out grey smoke.

   ‘Who knows where he is. Only God knows everything.’   

   An awkward silence as Yannis too gazed at the photograph, then he grunted and

shook his head as if to clear his mind.

   ‘I feel like company, talk and company. Tell you what - stay here some days, help me with the fishing, eat good food, drink wine, fill your belly. You’ll be stronger for your journey, and I’ll have used English properly the first time in years.’

   And so I had stayed three days in the white house beneath the lemon tree.

 * 

   The raw breezeblock wall is suddenly lined in carefully joined limestone ashlar. We come out of the trees into the swollen heat where a slew of smooth tarmac hosts rows of smart cars broken by groups of slender white poles carrying the national flags of Europe and the Americas. A man sits on a bench in the narrow slice of shade afforded by an arched gateway, the white logo of his tan uniform announcing him a retainer of ‘RESORT ZEUS’.  Beyond him we catch glimpses of fountains, palm trees and clumps of oleanders, elegant buildings of limestone, shining glass, marble and porphyry.

   ‘Looks like money,’ Joanna observes. ‘Not your sort of thing at all.’

  *

   A little past the olive trees where I had slept that first night, Yannis’s small boat - which I think he called a ‘varkey’ - lay tied alone in the lee of a reef extended by a curl of heavy rocks to form a small, rounded harbour with room for maybe three of those small boats in its sheltered water.

   ‘My grandfather’s work,’ Yannis said proudly, patted one of those red boulders I knew I could never lift, not even were there two of me. ‘They were men in those days.’   

   Not a good sailor, I stepped awkwardly into the boat to sit uncertainly on the middle bench while Yannis stowed nets alongside the engine housing.  He smiled at my knuckles clutching tight and pale, paused.

   ‘You can wait on shore, if you want. Weed the lettuce patch, okay?’

   But I had said I would fish, and nervous or not, I was going with him.

   And once used to this little craft, dusk on that sea was unforgettable as the sun sank across blue water, a slight wind raising just enough of a wave to slap gently at the wooden hull, the smell of salt water mixing with Yannis’s tobacco smoke. Even the whiff of engine fumes could not spoil it. When we’d hauled in the net and had our slippery catch in a couple of pails, we turned out of the dark towards the town’s string of lights and people waiting by the quay for the scatter of  little boats bringing in their fish.

  Cretans are great talkers, full of courtesy and passion, but Yannis kept his exchanges brief, did not join the good-humoured chaffing I guessed was about where the worst and best hauls had been that night, how this or that fisherman had known where the bream and mullet would be waiting to throw themselves into his net.

   A man around Yannis’s age came up and spoke to him in a quiet voice, seeming, from his accompanying gestures, to be inviting us to come and eat at a bright-lit taverna facing the harbour.  The little crowd had turned to watch, faces silently expectant as a Greek chorus waiting on the play’s denouement, but Yannis only looked around in disdain, cast off the bowline and took us back to the night sea.  I said nothing, of course, but later, as he waited on the wood fire to burn down to hot embers for grilling a couple of bream, Yannis took a pull of his harsh red wine and began to talk.

   ‘I don’t like them, in that town,’ he said broodingly. ‘I thought, when I came back

   from America, maybe I would forgive, but when I see their faces, it’s impossible.  Because of them, I lost Manolis.’

   ‘How?’

   ‘The war. Not the one against the Germans. The war afterwards, against ourselves.’

   He appraised his glass, emptied it on the ground.

   ‘These memories need better than wine.’

 * 

   Potentially clients, we are allowed into the complex. I have to admit it’s impressive.

   ‘You see,’ the assistant manager is from Athens, speaks excellent English, as befits one who took his doctorate in business management at UCLA, ‘this is six-star accommodation.  If you bought one of our few, very few remaining timeshare units, this luxury standard would be yours to enjoy for as long as you wished.’

   He sweeps an earnest hand across the spacious plazas and gardens, shining palaces and finally an Olympic-sized swimming-pool towards whose further end a small white-walled house once stood beneath a lemon-tree.

   ‘And the shore?’ I ask. ‘When I was here before, it was all rocks, with a little harbour over that way.’

   ‘We dug out the rocks,’ he beams. ‘Sand now, perfect sand - thousands of truckloads. We offer the best beach on Crete - see?’

   The red rocky shore has given way to a silver expanse studded with reed sunshades and wooden loungers. I stand on the boardwalk edging the glaring sands. The old pain is tightening its grip.

   ‘I suppose you ripped out the harbour as well?’

   ‘No, no.’ The young man is used to awkward customers. ‘It’s still there. Quite a feature.’  

 * 

   Yannis brought out a bottle of pale raki, poured a shot for himself and one for me, each four fingers deep, offered no water.

   ‘The town was strong for the Communists. Manolis was idealistic and they worked on that, with all their talk of brotherhood and equality. I tried to persuade him not to go with them and join their militia. We fell out. He called me a fascist - me, who had fought the Italians and the Germans!’

   Yannis took a long pull of the raki, stared into the night.

   ‘I forgot he was my brother. I…struck him.’

   The bream lay forgotten. Yannis dropped his gaze, to the fire’s red embers.

   ‘What happened?’ I prompted. ‘What did Manolis do?’

   Yannis lifted the bottle and walk unsteadily along the path towards the harbour.

 * 

   The harbour is changed. The rocks are still there, but overlaid with a walkway with a brass railing. No trim little varkey with fishing nets.  Instead, a gleaming powerboat which has leaked fuel and stained the water shabby rainbow. I look beyond the limestone facing of the boundary wall to where the hillside trees slowly forget the hand of man.  

   ‘It’s a pity about the olive-groves,’ I say. ‘I’d never have thought Cretans would let

them go wild like that.’

   ‘We can’t find anyone to work them.’ The assistant manager seems hesitant. ‘The locals, they don’t care for this hillside.’

   ‘Maybe they don’t like the development,’ Joanna suggests disingenuously.

   ‘No, no, the truth is, they think the hill is unlucky, some sort of superstitious nonsense.’

   He sees our exchange of glances.

   ‘When we were clearing the trees, just there,’ he points a few metres along the sweep of sand, ‘the diggers uncovered the bones of a man. That’s what started it all.’

   I take a deep breath. My leg begins to shake as the pain bites deeper.

   ‘Nobody would tell us anything - very suspicious of outsiders,’ the assistant manager shrugs. ‘You were here before - did anyone say anything to you then about a young man going missing?’

   The sweat pools around my eyes as I gaze one last time at the harbour. In my mind’s eye, I can see Yannis drinking raki as he stares melancholic into the dying fire. 

   ‘No.’

   We go back along the shore. Where once grew olive trees, I pause, rest on my stick, bow my head, murmur a name.  And then another.

 © Keith Aitchison 2009

How did the project begin?

It all began with working on the Lyne Water in the Borders. One or two of the springs that feed into it have a lot of associated local folklore, which I realised ties into world folklore about wells and springs. I remember hanging over the edge of a well where one of the Lyne Water springs flowed out and noticing it had a very characteristic voice - almost like a speaking or chattering voice. I began to wonder, what if every pure source of water, like a spring or a well, has a different sound. How interesting that would be from the point of view of poetry and creating words, where poets get their words or sounds. Was it the case that every spring is different, just as every poet is different? That was what inspired me to start going to different springs, listening to them and recording their sounds, photographing them, drawing them in my notebook. I wanted to travel to them, find out what they’re like today, find out if people still visit them and what they have to say about them. I set out on my first field trip with a little recording machine and a tiny camera, the smallest I could get. I was on tenterhooks until I could establish that there was a difference in ‘voice’ between one spring and another - I could have been wrong, water pressure might have been fairly similar everywhere. I felt pure joy when I played back my recording of the second spring I visited and it sounded dark and slightly sinister compared to the more cheerful, chattering one that I’d heard first. Since then I must have visited 120 springs and wells and they are each totally different.

In The Spring Teller, is the teller the voice of the well?

The title has a couple of meanings embedded. A spring teller is a diviner, someone skilled in finding where water is, usually by dowsing. The word ‘teller’ contains the feeling of telling the story, communicating the rhythm and the individual voice of each spring. At the outset I knew that these poems would all be different rhythmically; it was almost as if the springs themselves were suggesting a whole new idea of poetics or metrics.

Divining. What on earth do you think is happening there?

I don’t know. I just know that it works. On my field trips I’ve always got a pair of divining rods with me. Some of the springs are very overgrown, you need to be prepared to search for them. I was taught to use divining rods by a friend who’d spent years putting up fences in the Borders and used divining rods to find the best place to put a fence stob. He taught me in a very practical way how to use them. Anyone can do it, the rods are like an extension of our own arms and hands.

I’ve heard that diviners can even tell quantities and depths of water.

Yes, they will ask their rods, how many metres down? Something in us knows it, but it’s difficult to get it spot on unless you have the rods. Very curious.

The idea of ‘healing wells’ is regarded as a bit esoteric. But I once read that monkeys in the wild use particular plants for curative purposes, and that really makes me wonder how they work that out. It makes me think that deep inside all of us is an inherent understanding of the properties of the natural world and that science is a way of drawing out that innate knowledge.

Traditional methods of determining the curative powers of particular springs were quite scientific. Any water coming from the water table through the rocks in different locations is going to contain different chemicals. People experimented with different waters to discover which worked for what - for instance, water containing iron could be a curative for people with anaemia. A condition called ‘dry eye’ used to be very prevalent in Scotland in the days when people sat around the fire at home being kippered by the smoke, and the application of water from certain wells was known to relieve that irritation. Interestingly, I met an American eye surgeon on one of my Highland trips who told me that an ingredient used to treat dry eye symptoms associated with modern air conditioning and central heating contains one of the chemicals found in water from these ancient ‘eye wells’. In the past, people who couldn’t afford medicine used these wells: the healing wells were the doctors of the poor.

The Victorians were very interested in taking a scientific approach to the power of water. The British Geological Survey analysed samples and recorded the chemical traces they found (although the constituent elements can be expected to have changed somewhat by now). There was also strong interest in the architecture of old canopies, or well-houses. I looked at some wonderful Victorian drawings of medieval well-houses before visiting them, often to find them looking a bit more battered. I like to get a sense of the history: which wells were famous, which were travelled to. I would go to wells that had been renowned in the past, wondering if anybody still visited them, or if they still existed. I have Ordnance Survey Explorer Maps for Scotland which give the names of springs in blue if they still have water, or in black gothic if they’re dry. Sometimes the springs have broken up down the hillside, sometimes they’ve moved - springs can get offended and move! Like in folklore, you know, if you say rude things to them, they dry up! But then they appear somewhere else.

Did you find it surprising how many people still visit these wells?

Wells are still fairly sociable places and yes, it’s surprising how many people go to them and take away bottles of the water. I love some of the recordings I have of wells where you can hear people laughing and chatting in the background.

Did you actually get down to writing while you were at the wells -­ did ideas float to the surface of your mind there?

Yes, and I was always writing or sketching in my notebook. I have built up quite an archive of the sounds from the wells, and hundreds of photographs, some of which appear in The Spring Teller. These are places that people have regarded with awe for hundreds of years - this pure, fresh water will once have been rain that seeped through to the water table long ago and reappeared, purified as it’s come up through the rocks, so you could be drinking rain that fell a hundred years ago, and so on, back through the water cycle.

 © Jennie Renton 2009

‘Biodiplomat’ Iain Orr, a former British Consul-General in Shanghai, shares his thoughts on diversity, islands and albatrosses.

Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence… It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine ‘truth’ here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw.
Alfred Wegener, The Origins of Continents and Oceans

Do you think there is such a thing as the collective imagination?
Yes, in that certain ideas are going around at any particular period. Take the theory of evolution. In the nineteenth century people were learning about more and more different species and asking questions about where they came from. They were starting to conceive of geological time. Biblical explanations of creation were becoming problematic. Nowadays, everybody is used to the idea that the land areas of the Earth have moved around a lot: you look at the globe and see how neatly South America fits into Africa. But for this to become ‘common knowledge’, it first had to be imagined as a possibility. The German scientist Wegener was the first to notice it and have the imagination to think of rocks as actually being able to move; that however solid rocks may seem, they can move like water - though obviously a lot more slowly. When Wegener made that observation in The Origins of Continents and Oceans, first published in 1915, he was pooh-poohed. But what he said proved to be accurate. This was the inception of the theory of plate tectonics, and a fresh way of understanding the world.

How that happens really interests me. A man who worked with a Tibetan herbalist told me that one day, collecting orange membrane from under the bark of a tree, he had asked how its medicinal properties could have been inferred. The reply was: ‘Clairvoyance.’ Although Tibetan medicine is strong on testing by trial and error, that doesn’t explain the original intuition.
Certainly, somebody has to start asking questions and an exploratory mind - scientific or poetic - will be sensitised to look for clues. In my experience, answers sometimes come through using a model, for example, a house with all sorts of rooms representing different ideas. In literature, simile is a model. For instance, when Burns wrote ‘My love is like a red, red rose,’ he was comparing love to something that is thought of as being beautiful - there’s the idea of a scent, of something that is rather intense; and in the background, the idea of the rose having thorns - love can bring pain as well. So far, the model holds together. In the poem the simile is functioning in a particular way and it doesn’t matter that it has limits. But remove poetic sensibility, and look what can happen. I remember once typing in ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ and my spell-checker came up with ‘repeated word’, and suggested getting rid of it! Get rid of the poetry!

It’s humbling to know that the world will change, whether through human agency or not.
Yes. And while people talk about climate change as a major problem, I think loss of biodiversity through population growth and our willingness to purloin the habitats of other creatures is just as important. Of course, there’s a limitation to that, in the sense that we are terrestrial. We can’t live in the ground…

Or in the oceans… nor can we directly experience the world in those terms.
That’s right. We don’t have the magnificent sense of hearing that some marine creatures have, or the chemical senses - a shark will know that something has been bleeding two miles away. It’s an experience of life that you can only try and imagine. In order to have coherent experience, you do need boundaries. A creature sensitive to every light or sound or electromagnetic wave would be overwhelmed by sensation. Limitation is necessary. Humans couldn’t function without it. Take memory - the most important thing in having a good memory is the ability to forget. If you couldn’t forget, you would be overpowered.

That’s how Sherlock Holmes said he solved crimes. By knowing what to eliminate, he saw what he needed to see.
And that again is probably something common both to the scientific and the poetic imagination.

Was it Michelangelo who talked about taking away the stone to find the shape waiting inside? Perhaps that’s what the process of gaining knowledge is, a paring back to something innate.
Yes, and in any language, there will always be the discipline of its innate structure. Depending on structure, the vowels and the consonants, you can get different effects in different languages. For a writer, language is the essential raw material, just as the basic arithmetical rules are for a mathematician.

It’s funny to think that spoken language is breath, your mouth moving the breath and creating sounds, communicating.
Well, you and I are having a conversation in the same dialect of English and we’ve got a shared cultural background, but you know, I had an extraordinary experience at the British Library at a live performance of part of the Kyrgyz epic poem, the Manas - recited, with musical accompaniment, in the Kyrgyz language. There was no simultaneous translation and yet it was extraordinary how much of the power of it came across, even for those who didn’t know a word of Kyrgyz. You can tell so much just by looking at a storyteller - there are so many ways in which meaning is conveyed.

A friend of mine saw a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Calcutta, which used seventeen different Indian languages. Although she only understood about two-and-a-half of those, she said it was perfect for a play that in many respects is about miscommunication. Which reminds me - my original intention was to ask you about your fascination with islands. Why islands?
Probably that goes back to childhood experience. My father’s first job after demob in 1945 was as Church of Scotland Youth Organiser for the West of Scotland and one of his tasks was to organise youth camps on Iona and so we spent summers there. It’s a wonderful size of island, about two miles long, a mile at most at the widest. As a wee boy I could actually walk right round it. Which comes back to the question of boundaries: the thing that defines an island is that it has very clear boundaries in a way that a town or city doesn’t. When you say ‘Edinburgh’, you may have a vision of the Castle but you don’t have a vision of the city’s shape, as it were. If you know an island well, you know it by its shape. And with a small island - where you can get up to the highest point and look in every direction and see the sea around it - you have a three-dimensional sense of that bit of land, defined by water. An island is a very powerful way of representing the idea of identity - of something that is, and has its own reality. One of the great appeals of a small island is that a question about it is likely to be answerable. You can stand on Iona and ask, ‘How many people live here?’ and the answer is, literally, within grasp. Whereas, if you asked that question on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, by the time you counted, generations will have been born and died.
Islands are worlds in miniature. As a boy, I loved going round the beaches and looking at the sea anemones in the rock pools, and finding the lovely wee cowrie shells that you get on Iona; I felt aware of the fish in the sea and got to know all the different habitats. Islands hold an abiding romantic appeal. I was brought up on Treasure Island and Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe, so perhaps that’s why islands have such a powerful appeal to my imagination.
In a scientific sense, islands are a bit like the canary down the mine: how they are faring is a good measure of how human beings are affecting the planet. It has to be said that of the birds, mammals and plants that have become extinct in the last five hundred years, something like eighty percent are island species (which is partly to do with the fact that the isolation of islands is a driver for speciation). There are so many island species under threat - and the same can be said for many human communities and cultures.

I gather that one of these species under threat is the albatross.
In my imagination the image of the albatross is very powerfully present. In flight, with its huge wingspan, riding the currents of air, it’s a most wonderfully gracious bird. In my last job at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I was concerned with environmental issues in remote British territories such as South Georgia, the Falkland Islands, Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island, where albatrosses nest. They are in great danger from long-line fishing fleets - the bait attracts them and then they get tangled up in the lines. Of course, there’s a very easy solution - to weight the lines so that they are held deeper. But persuading rogue fishing fleets to do that is difficult. The albatross is an iconic bird and if we lose it, it would be a loss for the whole world.

© Jennie Renton

First in Science & Intuitions

This is the account given by a certain Curate Johnson of the village of Wywurth regarding an incident which was said to have occurred, during the late summer in the Year of Our Lord,

‘That cannot be,’ cut in Rotherfield. ‘How could they have read it, if they were in complete darkness?’

The vicar shrugged.

‘Perhaps one of them was blind, and could decipher the course of the ink by touch.’

‘Hah! Very likely! Typical theological dissimulation.’

‘Shall I continue?’

‘Yes, yes. Go on.’

The manuscript remained in Wywurth Local Museum until 1940 when, as a matter of security, it was removed to a place unknown. Since the related paperwork was destroyed during the war, the fate of the so-called Saelig Manuscript (sometimes also known as The Daughter of the Wind) is now unknown. There have been reported sightings from as far afield as Azerbaijan, Pantelleria and Odessa, but the author has no means of verifying these alleged sightings. The sections which appear in this book constitute, in part, translated copies from the original manuscript, but since the author was unable to complete this process, he has had to rely on his memory and on accounts related to him by various country folk. Unreliable as they may be, they are reproduced in seamless manner, because the author believes that oral histories hold deeper truths than it has ever been possible to apprehend through the written word.

I, who do go by the name of Henry Francis Johnson, am curate of this ancient parish to the good vicar known around these parts (and no doubt also in the parts hereabouts) as ‘the hunting parson’, the Reverend Brightling Fulthrope. I am not an educated man, that is, I am not overly-educated like our good Vicar Fulthrope, yet I did attend the Dame School and am school’d by mine own good hand, and I do know of life’s viccissitudes to the span of any man in this short sparrow’s flutter. Herein does this poor, mortal hand relate a tale of absolute and wondrous verity which did manifest as happenings one summer’s night and day, some seven years ago this Lammas.

A sight most common around these parts is that of a tallship wi’ topgallants fluttering along the line of the horizon like the great wings of an albatross. In one day’s span, they cross the edge of our world and then vanish as though they had never been. On this Lammas Eve of which I write, the wind had dropped so low that the sea was more akin to lake than ocean. It was as though for the full twenty-four hour, the incoming tide did not turn. The ship sailed in the Devil’s direction, from west to east, but barely had it reached one third of the way across this line of coast, when it seemed becalmed and moved no more.

I was busy attending to St Cuthman’s. The tower was the oldest part of the building and had carried heavenwards the prayers of thousands of folk, rich, poor, learned and illiterate; it had survived Dissolution and Reformation, Civil War and the shadow of Boney’s fleet. But now, without the attention of a master stonemason, there was little doubt that it would not retain its current form beyond the end of this century. The bells, in particular, were in dire need of repair; they had been forged of iron in Saxon times and the metal was very near rusted away, so that the danger (should the ringers be bursting with barrel liquor) of their coming loose and tumbling upon all and sundry was not so very far from truth’s oratory.

Though the shadows were growing long over our small parish, the wind still had not got up and the sea remained becalmed. As I walked towards my humble dwelling at the opposite pole of the village from St Cuthman’s, I saw that the ship had moved not one half of a degree, compass-wise, along the horizon. However, it seemed larger than before and this seemed strange to me, until I realised that in the absence of a prevailing wind, the incoming tide was drawing the vessel straight towards the shore. Though there was no breeze and the Lammas Eve remained warm, yet as I gazed across the darkening waters, I shivered.

I have never married and next Gooding Day, God-willing, shall I reach my sixtieth year. Unless there be a drowning haar over the coast, from the back window of my house it is possible to make out on the Great Hoe, the Giant Man of the White Way, carved by some pagan ancestor of ours in a time before books, perhaps even before words. To my front is nowt but the sea and the invisible darkness of the French coast. Oftentimes, on Figgy Sunday or All Saints’ Eve, have I knelt and prayed out-of-doors, facing southwards, I know not why, and sometimes, though my eyes be closed and my palms clasped in reverence of our Saviour, yet I find that I can see, as through an elder copse, things which in this physical world of ours remain invisible. On one such night, I did see the Bendin-in of the great mackerel nets. Though, in my reverie, Vicar Fulthrope did bless those nets and the fishermen who cast them on the waves, yet the corks which kept the long webs afloat and concertina’d through the water, all of a sudden changed into bones. The mackerel, which danced in the thousand, turned from silver to red and the bread, cheese and beer of celebration lay uneaten on the beach.

The very next day, a great storm did blow up and all but one of the fishing-boats sank, with the loss of twenty men, some of whom had reached to within a few yards of the shoreline. Though God be in everything, yet sometimes, I think that the sea is without God. Please do not suppose that I myself am mired in those peasant fears which, this past fifty year or more, have been banished from the heads at least of those who have letter. Though I be but a lowly official in this very ancient Church, I am yet one for science and the new ways of thinking: I have seen too many of our poorer folk shackled like pack animals to superstitions. I carry no shepherd’s crown in my pocket. On no occasion have I so much as drawn breath on these matters in the presence of the Reverend Fulthrope, who is most opposed to such wantonness of the spirit in his parishioners. All is best left to the Almighty, who will see all books balance justly on the Ultimate Day. Nonetheless, as I listened to the water lapping on the stony shore, I fancied that I could make out the creaking of the ship’s ropes and timbers and I had the queerest apprehension of some dreadful misadventure hanging like the shadow of the new moon. I drew my cassock around my waist and hurried home and drank a jug of hot, spiced ale, that my sleep pass without fancy.

I was woken from darkness by the sound of banging. I thought one of the shutters had come loose, so in night-dress, and porting pewter-and-candle, I went out to make certain. One shutter had indeed come away from its fastening and I battened it back down. Since the night was warm and windless, it struck me as odd that a shutter should have come loose. My candle fluttered. I held my breath. A pale moth crossed my path. The sea was dark and heaving and there was no moon. I let my breath run out into the darkness. There was a hand on my shoulder. Sharp, cold, bony. I dropped the pewter. The candle rolled along the ground, came to a stop and sputtered, but did not go out. Prayer would not come. I turned around. Stepped back, a cist-length. My eyes had not yet grown accustomed to the pitch black of the night, but I was just able to see the top half of a man’s face, disembodied, floating. Then I realised that a black scarf was wound around his mouth and nose. I was able to discern that he was tall, clad all in black and that his limbs hung somewhat loosely about his frame. He was slightly breathless. His hair was bound in a second scarf.

‘Curate Johnson, I’m darned sorry to wake ye, sir. I didn’t intend to scare ye.’

‘You know my name?’

‘Never mind about that, sir. Just a-mind what I say. There’ll be no harm comin to thy good self nor to any body on this night’s world.’

His voice was not familiar to me. I know all the parishioners of Wywurth and most of them in the hamlets round abouts, too and yet, there was something about his form, there, in the summer darkness…

‘I knocked on thy door, good curate, but thee must’ve bin good and truly clasp’d in sleep’s swarthy arms, for thou didst not awaken. So I was a’tryin to tap on the glass of yon window.’

‘What do you want, man, at this ungodly hour?’

He stepped towards me. I moved back, but halted when I felt against my bare heels the beginnings of the slope which led from my cottage down to the sea’s edge. He held up his hand.

‘Don’t thee fret, now. It’s just we want ye to cast open the doors a’ the church a’ Saint Cuthman’s for the night.’

‘What do you want with the church? There is no lead on its roof, and precious little gold on the altar. Just a few flowers and some old hymn-books.’

‘Never you mind on that. Just bring with ye the keys an come wi me.’

So I went indoors, quickly changed my clothes and drew down the heavy, iron key-ring from its hook above the fireplace.

I had taken care seldom to have been in St Cuthman’s alone at night. Mark you, as I said earlier, I’m not a superstitious man, but there are limits and the brain is a funny thing once it gets going. By the Lord, even our own minds are not within our control!

The place smelt as though it had been closed, not for the few hours since I had locked up earlier that evening, but for centuries. I knew the interior of St Cuthman’s like my own hand, yet somehow, on this night out-of-joint, everything seemed unfamiliar. I wondered whether I might be dreaming - the ale had been good and strong - but the night air on my face had been too real and the oak doors of the church had been still warm from the sun’s touch. And there was something else. At the insistence of my ‘guest’ we had taken a circuitous route, skirting the field enclosures to the north. On several gateposts were hung linen bags, filled with what looked like large joints of meat and loaves of bread - freshly-baked, I could tell from the odour. My companion had removed these bags and given me some, while he carried others himself, so that by the time we reached the church we both were panting and sweating like dogs.

‘I am not a young man,’ I said, and sat down in the nearest pew.

How strange the place looked! The altar was half-hidden in shadow, while to north and south the transepts were carved hulking things, more Saxon in style than truly English. There had been an old Saxon church on the site of St Cuthman’s, but that had been burned down during the Danish raids many centuries ago and of the original, only the tower and bells remained. No-one ever ventured up the tower after dark; apart from the rational danger of losing one’s step and falling, there was a story concerning a haunting by a White Friar who was reputed to appear on particular dates in the old ecclesiastical calendar. Apparently this monk did no-one any harm, but simply wrote all night at high speed using a metal stylus or such-like. In the morning, scrolls of vellum had been found blowing across the floorboards of the belfry of the tower. I have never seen any of these; over the years, successive vicars are said to have burned them in secret. I do not believe in this rubbish, and I repeat it here merely to illustrate the point that, especially for a country person, as my companion most certainly was, to be venturing in the old church at this hour on Lammas Eve meant something very untoward was going on, here, in this village of Wywurth where I was born and where, no doubt, in the balm of the soft, sheltered soil of St Cuthman’s churchyard, I shall await the universal Resurrection.

The man had not waited with me but had gone on ahead and disappeared behind the High Altar. Suddenly, there were shadows everywhere and the sound of scraping heels and, aye, in that House of God, there was cursing and taking the Name in vain. What seemed to me like hundreds of men, all garbed-up in double scarfs just as the first, were entering through the old doors and heading for the tower, the entrance to which lay behind the high altar. They carried sacks and barrels, some so bulky they had to be hoisted upon two men’s shoulders, and beautiful gilt and silver caskets, the like of which I had only ever seen as a child in picture-books of fairy tales. Some of the boxes they carried had stamped on them words in a foreign-looking language. The parts of their faces that I could see were coarse and some bore terrible scars, as if from cattle-brands, across their foreheads. None acknowledged my presence - for which I was moderately grateful - and though I scrutinized them as much as I dared, I was unable to recognise any as being from hereabouts. The largest of the objects which they brought in was an ancient plough, so heavy it took fully twelve men to hoist it onto the chancel floor.

After what seemed like hours, they had all left, apart from one, the man who had made me come here. He now approached me, limping as though from some old injury.

‘Good curate, sir, you are free to go - but mind, now, go only the way by which we did arrive here and at all costs avoid the main street of the village.’

I nodded and rose.

‘Tomorrow - today - is Sunday,’ I said. ‘The bell-ringers will be up early to sound the Sabbath and Vicar Fulthrope always inspects the bells before they are rung.’

The sound of the man’s laughter echoed like blasphemy through the dark stone church.

‘You needs not worry about that,’ he said, and though he still wore his scarf I could tell that beneath it he was grinning from ear-to-ear. ‘Just say nothing to man nor beast and no harm’ll come to you or to nobody. This church be a horn a’plenty!’

And so saying, he turned away.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I will need to lock up. If I leave it like this, the vicar will ask questions.’

‘Just go on home, Mister Curate, and remember this night as a dream. Be thankful I didn’t send ye up the tower where the White Friar busies himself.’

‘I don’t believe in the White Friar,’ I snorted. ‘That’s no more than a tale invented by smugglers to keep good folk away on certain nights.’

He came towards me and took hold of my collar with both hands. He was a good six inches taller than I and his breath smelled of red wine and Latakia baccy. His expression had altered. The bonhomie had vanished.

‘Now, don’t you go blabbin about! Don’t you be a damn’d fool!’

He glanced around, as though he was aware of the blasphemy which he had just uttered and which had been absorbed into the sandstone. His next words were just as taut, but spoken in a whisper which was more like a hiss.

‘In a bricked-up priest-hole at foot o’ the tower, there lieth a skeleton which, come Hallows’ Eve, doth talk and sing. No-one goes by the wall there. Tis said by those who sip from Chanctonbury Ring that the cold bones do converse wi’ the bees and that the wing’d ones take the form of a naked young woman and dance a hornpipe on a dead elder branch to the music o’ an invisible, devilish fiddle! Tis said that the Queen o’ the Beggars is married on a black river barge to the King o’ the Rooks and that the ghostly choirs o’ Didling do sing full-throated at the walls.’

He was working himself up into a frenzy and his body was shaking all over. I noticed that he had cut himself just above the left eye. It was not a deep cut but it had bled and the blood was freshly crusted over.

‘Would you let go of my coat, please?’

Slowly, he relaxed his grip. His hands fell to his sides and he slumped like a pig’s bladder in that Heaven-and-Hell game where all the village fight over a ball, running and falling and wrestling for miles through the wealden clay. I knew then that he, too, was not a young man and, moreover, that he had led a life of dissolution.

‘Tis harder for us land smugglers than for the ones who wade aboard ships. We are more like to be caught. There are precious few watchmen in the sea.’

‘Why d’you do it?’

 ‘There’s always the possibility that we might strike gold. Besides, everyone needs to eat. E’en a curate!’

 ‘Yes, but we all have God.’

‘I never once saw God put bread into a starving bairn’s mouth. Never once.’

‘There are honest ways of earning a living. Millions do it.’

‘Millions are slaves.’

‘And you? You are free?’

He sighed, and his scarf blew outward from his face in the shape of a cloud over a hillock.

‘Beneath the life which you see, there is another life and beneath that, another, and so on, until, like the great traveller, you ask yourself, what is this life, but the thinnest film on the surface of a lake, blown away as easily as by the flap of a dragonfly’s wing?’

He stopped talking and the silence of the ancient church swamped everything; pews, transept, altar, vestry; and its source was the door, hidden in darkness, which led to the tower. I felt the centuries pile with the corpses into the wooden pews, those upturned faces, illumined through the bodies of stained-glass saints. Bearded Saxon kings, transported miraculously to Golgotha hill. Forgotten music lingered in the blown sand images, in the creeping of the tides, in the scratch of stylus on skin.

I whispered, ‘Who are you?’

The man receded into the shadows. I wasn’t sure whether it was I who had stepped back, or he who had moved closer to the altar. I could no longer make out his face.

‘Yesterday, I conversed with the bees and danced with the mackerel Today, I run with the smugglers. Tomorrow, I will fight in an obscure war in some exotic land.’

‘Who are you?’ I repeated.

He shook his head, and went behind the High Altar.

I should have turned and left that church which once I thought I knew. I ought to have hurried back to my low cottage and closed the door against the darkness and against all of history’s knowledge. I could have buried myself in dreams of another life, or of lives untold. I am a humble man, a curate of the church of St Cuthman’s in the village of Wywurth in the Pevensey March of the county of Sussex. My entry is of this world and my exit shall be of the like, of that there is no doubt. Yet perhaps in the life of every man, there is a moment when thought and action become one, where matter and spirit are united for a brief shadow’s span beneath the arc of a new moon. Before I could stop myself, I was tearing after him along the cold flags, some of which were the roof-stones of the hollow tombs in the undercroft, and up the tower, up the spiral staircase, now crammed almost full with boxes and crates. It took all my strength to clamber up to the top of the tower. I pushed open the door to the belfry and then, barely pausing to catch my breath, I climbed up the ladder to where the old pig-iron bells swing in the wind.

Up here, there was a chilling breeze which tasted of salt. The floorboards were half-rotten, and I steadied myself against the cold metal arc of one of the bells. At first, I could see nothing, but then as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I made out his form, standing by the opening which lay between roof and walls. He was facing away from me and was gazing out over the village and beyond, towards the rustling leaves of the forest, and the lake which lay like a dark eye at the centre of the land. The floor was covered in boxes, crates, cases and sacks of all kinds, some of them stamped across with large letters, black and red and quite unintelligible. I wondered how he had managed to get all the way up the tower and across the pile of smuggled goods so quickly and so easily, but then I supposed that he was used to it, hiding, dodging, dancing. He struck a match and lit a long cigar. The white smoke curled upwards and assumed form most lithe and danced at the belfry window, and I felt a great sadness. He did not turn to face me, but I saw that he had removed both scarves. Long, black hair swirled around him, intertwining with the smoke.

‘In the depths of winter, when the lake is frozen over, I can see my own face, rising.’

‘You are no smuggler.’

‘I have been many things, I have travelled far and wide,’ he said and his voice was seamed with emotion. ‘And yet, always I return to this place of my beginnings where the words are written in blood and feathers.’

‘Does the vicar know of this?’

He laughed. ‘The vicar will receive a case of good French wine and a box of fat Cuban cigars. There will be no service today, as he will be ill; nothing serious, he will make a rapid recovery.’

‘And this has been happening…’

‘For years, good curate. It is an arrangement.’

‘I had no idea.’

He spun round. ‘You are outside of the text, Curate Johnson. You shall die when the time comes and your death shall be an ordinary one.’

I shuddered. He had shifted his position in manner subtle as a conjuror, and now was leaning against the massive iron bulk of the major bell. His form did not wholly obscure the bell, however, so large was the holy monster.

‘Not… not tonight?’

He shook his head and I thought I saw the flicker of a smile.

‘You will live awhiles yet, I fancy.’

I nodded, more than a little relieved, for that courage which had drawn me up here had quite slipped away.

‘Hidden within a tomb is a casket and in the casket is a head.’

‘A head?’ I repeated.

‘Sometimes the head is of brass, sometimes of flesh and bone. When the time is right, it sings of many things; of that which is past and forgotten and of that which is unknown and yet to come.’

As he spoke these words in a low, almost soporific voice, something odd began to occur around the bell.

I rubbed my eyes in an attempt to clear the image. Yet my vision was quite lucid, as was my mind: this was not a dream. I struggled on.

‘What have you to do with this… this head.’

He had moved back again to the window.

‘I am in the song, nothing more.’

‘You are sung into existence?’

‘As are we all.’

The surface of the iron was changing, shifting, as though it were a plate of molten metal. And in the grey haze thus evinced, I swear I saw the naked form of a woman, tall, and beauteous to behold. She grew larger, until her face filled the image. Suddenly, talking to this strange man seemed the only way for me to keep a hold on reality. My tongue was stuck to my palate. I forced it to move.

‘You said that I was outside.’

‘In a manner of speaking, yet we are all caught in the bat-and-trap of stroke and dot.’

‘Are you…’ my voice trembled as I said this, ‘are you the White Friar?’

He laughed. Now that he had on no scarf, I could see that he had an inordinately large skull and that his hair was tousled as though he had lived for years in the wind.

‘I am a traveller: one moment smuggler, the next, merchant or lover or dancing spirit. Why not a monk of the Most Saelig Order of Saint Benedict?’

The woman had become smaller again and now, facing her, was the figure of a man, also naked. They were swaying together, or dancing, I could not decide which.

‘Is something distracting you from our conversation, good curate?’

‘I don’t know,’ I began, and then an impotent anger welled up inside my chest. ‘I think that you are mad; either that, or a prankster.’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I am both. Do you see the casket at your feet?’

I looked down and sure enough, there at my feet was a silver casket which I hadn’t noticed before. He handed me a key.

‘Open it!’ he commanded.

I glanced quickly towards the bell, but the image had faded and the surface had returned to hard, cold metal.

I followed his instructions.

Beneath a velvet flap was a roll of something that looked like an old piece of wood. Carefully, I drew it out. It was a scroll of some sort, tied with a ribbon in like manner to a deed or other such legal document.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He said nothing. I could barely make out his eyes. I undid the scroll.

The sheaves fell from my hands and scattered on the floor. There must have been enough to fill a book. I scrambled around, trying to collect them up as they blew across the belfry. He laughed again.

‘These, dear curate, these pieces of skin after which on hands and knees you scramble, are the last remaining works of Master Aelfric, great architect of Wywurth, he who sang churches in the shape of love.’

I was breathing so heavily as I gathered up the sheaves, that I had no idea what he was saying.

‘Do you understand?’

‘I… I’m sorry. I’m not a young man. Coming up here… all this.’

He rushed forwards again and though this time he did not grab my collar, his face was so close to mine that I could almost feel the stubble on his jowl.

‘Stretch yourself. For once in your miserable life, leap off the belfry and fly!’

I stepped back, alarmed. I tried to steady my voice.

‘Why have you come here, this night?’

‘Why have you?’    

‘I was dragged out of bed!’

‘Like stone was I dragged from vellum, through love, death, music.’

‘There is no music here.’

‘Listen…’

He brought his arm around in the shape of an arc, as though in that one sweep, he were gathering all of the country; the moot lands of thane and ceorl, the swans’ roads, the bone-houses, the spheres of spinning poste-mills, the trace of a dancer’s steps on stone, the dark hiding-places of priest and smuggler, the flow of generations across land and water into the forgetfulness of the House of Life that is the final honouring of the dead. And in that arc, as though from a great distance I found that I could hear the trip and stamp fantasie of naked soles upon the bare stone flags of the long gallery, the ash and lime songs of scops and the scratch and tear of skin against pig-iron bell ringing dully on winter’s morn of the Dark Strangers, and I was cleaving rock on a hillside in a strange and distant land and the guns of hell were screaming all around me. And a voice boomed in my ears and shook the bones of my skull till I feared it surely would split apart.

‘And then turn to the east and bow humbly nine times, and say then these words: ‘Eastwards I stand, for favours I pray.’ Then turn three times with the course of the sun, then stretch yourself along the ground and say a dark bede.’

And in the midst of all of this, I did fall into a swoon and when I awoke the man was gone and I was lying, half-frozen, on the belfry floor. My mouth was filled with the pungency of ripened corn, and the cool breeze carried with it the taste of stale pig-fat, mixed with salt blown off the tops of new-risen waves. My thumb and the first two fingers of my right hand were covered in dried black ink of type most pungent and the small joints ached as though I had been writing all night. I massaged my fingers back to life, blowing onto them in a vain attempt to warm the flesh. As I prepared to make my exit from the tower, I walked past the bell. It was then I noticed that inscribed upon its dark, iron surface, was the image of two elongated, figures. I moved closer and brushed away an accumulation of dust and dirt which had accrued in the lines and hollows. As curate, I had ascended the tower of St Cuthman in times numbering the hundreds, but never before had I set eyes upon any such image. Yet this imprint seemed to have been burned into the substance of the bell for many long centuries, so pronounced was it, and yet so faded. The style belonged to the period of Good King Alfred, when those of our ancestors yet to have ben brought into the ways of Our Lord are said to have carved the ungodly horses, men and demons up on the white hills of the South Downs. On the bell were etched a man and a woman, their forms set in relation to each other in such a way as to connote that they were dancing. The face of the woman I recognised from the night before, though still I did not know who she was; however, as I ran my index finger along the lines, it seemed as though I had known the man’s visage for longer than I had known my own.

I hastened down the steps of the tower and quickly locked the church and made my way back home, carefully avoiding the village. That Sabbath day, no bells were heard in Wywurth and no service was held. When next I ventured into St Cuthman’s, it was as though nothing had happened. One evening, a few days later, I found a large cask of red wine and a box of cigars at my doorstep.

The first of the night birds began to sound out. The vicar put down the book. The two men looked at each other. There were no words between them. Both were back fifty years, floating on the face of the river which flowed over stone and reed. A silly summer’s day in deepest Sussex. The Pevensey March.

At first, the three of them sang as one, Edward’s voice being almost a Russian bass, while John’s was towards the baritone and Caroline’s a mid-alto. Though none were trained singers, they were all young and filled with health and happiness and their lungs pushed the air through their throats so that to each one of them the noise of the river was almost drowned out and all they could hear was their song.

       As I walk’d out_one day, one day, I met an a-ged man by_ the way;

His head was bald, his beard was grey_His cloth-ing made of the cold earthen clay, His cloth-ing made of the cold earth-en clay.

I said: Old man_what man are you? What country do you be-long un-to? My name is Death; hast though heard of me_All kings and prin-ces bow down un-to me, And you, fair maid, must come a- long with me.

I’ll give you gold,_I’ll give you pearl, I’ll give you cost-ly rich robes to wear, If you will spare me a_ lit-tle while, And give me time my life to a-mend, And give me time my life_to a-mend.

I’ll have no gold, I’ll have no pearl, I want no cost-ly rich robes to wear. I can-not spare you a_lit-tle while,_Nor give you time_ your life to a-mend, Nor give you time your life to a-mend.

In six months’ time this fair maid died. Let this be put on my tomb-stone, she cried: Here lies a poor,_dis-tress-ed maid;_Just in her bloom she was snath-ed a-way, Her cloth-ing made of the cold earth-en clay.

And so the boats sailed on through the forest, along that stretch of river where the current slackens as the land beyond its banks broadens out and grows flatter. The trees - yew, elder, willow, oak - were in full, dark leaf and the branches overhung the oxbows which had been formed many thousands of years earlier when the great glaciers far leagues to the north had melted and the river been created, much as in the tale of Noah. And the land and the waters, both, had moved again and had changed since Saxon times and by the long reign of Queen Victoria, the sea, once some seven leagues distant, had swept up to the very foot of the hill on which St Cuthman’s Church had been built.

The boats began slowly to drift apart.

Edward ended his song with great gusto (it is possible to sing thus about death only when one is in the first flush of life) and then stared up at the sun through the leaves. The creaking sounds of the boat’s hull filled his ears, and he fell asleep. He dreamed of a great tower, around which were being played games of Nine Men’s Morris and Bat-and-Trap. He dreamed of Gooding women, their breath turned to smoke in the frozen air, carrying meat-and-raisin pies and sugar-loaves shaped like conical tombs to one another’s houses through the snow on the Day of the Feast of Saint Thomas Didymus; of Wealden houses where, at dead of night, lovers crept downstairs and through the servants’ gate and ran towards the owl eyes of the dark woods; of the bottomless lake where the ghost of the green nicor screams in coiled poisoned agony; of eleven thousand virgins chanting and skipping to draw the seeds up through the corpse’d earth; of shoals of gleaming, silver mackerel caught in the long, corked nets of fishermen in boats bedecked with ribbons and flowers; of magical Yule babies roasting in elder log fires; of shepherd’s crowns, grinning on the mantelpiece; of a naked man climbing up a cliff-face to collect honey out of a cranny; of the horns of spiced ale blown over swarms of bees as they hived on living branches; of ancient, wrinkled demons who danced around the Ring of Chanctonbury and who offered ten-foot long suet puddings and fire wine to the eleven thousand virgins…

When he awoke, his boat was stationary. He levered himself up and peered over the edge. The other boats were nowhere to be seen.

Panic rose like a spring flood into his throat.

They must have gone on without him.

Edward had ended up at the end of a stagnant oxbow. Gnats and dragonflies danced courtship rituals across the transparent skin of the grey water. Deep down, near the shifting layers of river-mud, the water had remained unchanged, unmoving, for centuries. The prow of his boat was wedged in the mud of a bank, too steep to climb. It would take all his effort to push the boat back into the water and row all the way back to the river proper. But he was unable to make out the main body of the river. He had heard that Mychelham Water had never fully been cartographed. Even the horn-rimmed men from the Ordnance Survey, with their dividers and compasses and stiffened suits had had difficulty; the mud was so shifting, the land around it so oily and fickle.

As he tried to trace the chain of events, the whole day reduced to a blur.

They had gone off together, the three of them, in their rickety rowing-boats. At some point along the river, he had fallen asleep. He tried to catch his dreams, but they were elusive as river reeds. What if the others had drowned? He shuddered. But the river was slow-moving and both Caroline and John were excellent swimmers. The three of them had often leapt into the forest lake and for a delicious, skin moment, had died in its dark, freezing waters. But rivers were different; like snakes, they changed form constantly while yet remaining the same, they sought out points of weakness, then wound their reeds around ankles and necks. Edward felt so drained, he wondered if he had the strength to row the boat homewards. Then he had the vision of a dream, which seemed real: John and Caroline, naked and joined on the felled trunk of an ancient yew. What once had been the upper end, the growing end, of a tree was now submerged beneath the waters of the Mychelham, while the thousand year-old trunk reared into the sun-scaped air, malevolent, green shoots sprouting from its centre. And as their bodies shifted, one upon the other, their skins rubbed into the bark and merged with the skins of other, earlier lovers. Each whorl of wood bore the rune-marks of such conjunctions, all the way back to when the abbott had leaned against its trunk and dreamed of three long-boats dancing in the spume of the river-mouth and of a Roman fig-tree sagging with fruit. The faces of all the lovers, past and future, were turned as one toward the slowly-flowing water and their breath was the air which danced across its surface and formed bubbles that pulled carp and trout and roach up from their dark holes and into the sunlight. Then the vision evanesced and Edward was left, cold and sweating and alone in the bottom of a rotting boat. He felt a fist of rage in his belly. Possessed by his own dark spirit, he leaned over the rim of the boat and spat into the river and watched the spittle swirl and merge with the cold water. He picked up the oars and began to row, not knowing whether he was going up or down stream, towards home or away from it. He needed to immerse his body in an act of total physicality. He did not notice the pair of rowing-boats, half-sunk like crocodiles in swamp, nor the massive tree-trunk toppled into the river, nor the shape, like an archetypal majuscule, of two lovers pressed upon its surface, nor the runes which their corpses carved into the wood.

It was at the moment when he knew his body could row no more that Edward found the river again. He let the oars fall into their metal sockets, slumped back and watched the wispy clouds sail through the blue. Gradually, the pain in his chest subsided. And it was then that he had heard the song.

The vicar shifted in his seat. His body felt as though it was turning slowly to wood. Rotherfield spoke first.

‘You saw us that day, you saw us and you told.’

‘I saw nothing. Yes, it’s true. I did love her. Even though I always knew that she would never want me, that I would never dance in the notes of her song.’

‘So, was it repentance, or revenge?’

Edward shrugged. ‘The worst betrayals, the ones for which we suffer all our lives, are those of which we are least aware. Ultimately, we betray only ourselves.’

‘I went to war, became no more than a worm in the swarming mud. I volunteered for death. That’s why I stood up and watched the man in the greatcoat. Even now, I don’t know whether he really existed.’

‘That’s not what you said. You didn’t mention standing up yourself. And you said that, later, he handed you his card. What about the prison-camp, the ruined church, Saint Cecilia? The brass head, the wooden house in Constantinople? The chants, the manuscripts? Caroline.’

Rotherfield pointedly ignored him. ‘I thought, if he’s able to stand erect, then so shall I. And on the prison hill, when I turned the card over, it was blank.’

‘We heard you were dead.’

‘I was never more than a ripple on the surface of time. I was already as nothing.’

‘Not to Caroline.’

‘Life goes on: she married the law-giver.’

‘And plays the church organ.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard her play.’

‘She plays with such sadness. Her fingers dance runes along the wood, the bone.’

‘She no longer sings?’

‘Never.’ Edward took a deep breath. ‘John, we are different people now, different than we were then.’

Rotherfield shook his head. ‘I think not. We dance the same dances and sing the same words, over and over again.’

 ‘There was something wrong with each section of this book,’ Edward cut in. ‘Were I to submit the text to an Anglo-Saxon scholar, a Tudor specialist and an expert in early nineteenth century south coast smuggling, I’m certain they would expose it as a fake - and, I might add, written by a man who lived a fake life.’ He paused, then raised himself up and half-arched the upper part of his body over the edge of the table. ‘You wrote this, didn’t you? You are its author.’

A crescent moon had just emerged from behind the clouds. Rotherfield gazed up at it. ‘My body was never found.’

‘Caroline received a box of Latakia cigarettes and a musical score for church organ. A score which she has never played. Cigarettes she has never smoked.’ The vicar picked up the book and brandished it at the woodcutter. ‘And decades later, from the sale of Birkin Mansion, the last inheritance of Caroline’s long-dead father, the last remaining stone in the doorway of the old Saxon earls of the South, there came this book. She couldn’t bring herself to destroy it. Perhaps she had hoped that some stranger would buy it and take it far away.’

‘I think it’s time I left. Dawn will be upon us soon.’ Rotherfield rose. ‘But before I go, I want to ask you one question.’

The vicar’s face sagged, as though all of his years had descended upon him at once. He remained silent.

‘Did you really see us?’

Edward shook his head. ‘I heard your song, smelled your love on the river-wind. And in the dark reeds of the oxbow, I foresaw your death.’

Rotherfield nodded. ‘Then you, too are in the text. In the last chapter. Read it, when I am gone. Then give it to Caroline. Ask her to play the score ‘The Palace is Beautiful’. It is a perfect unity of the mundane, the human, the instrumental. No living soul has heard it for three thousand years.’ And gathering up his axe, he limped away. And as Rotherfield passed through the outer gardens and orchards and approached Mychelham Water, his form took on the aspect of a shadow, a moving pyramid that merged with the uncertain light and became imperceptible.

In the distance, smoke from fires lit by drovers rose into the opalescent dawn. There was a hint of charcoal in the fresh morning air.

Edward bent and lifted the small pile of logs, walked stiffly into the house and locked the door behind him. Going straight to his study, he placed the wood in the grate, took a taper from the mantelpiece and lit it with his cigar-butt.

When the hearth-stone was burning to the touch, he grasped the book and flung into the rear of the fire. 

Note: ‘The Dream of the Rood’ (anon), p. 232, is translated from the Old English by L. Iddings; ‘The Wanderer’ (anon), p. 235, is E. Hickey’s translation. Both appear in Translations from Old English Poetry, Ginn and Company, Boston, 1902. ‘Death and the Lady’, p. 268, is from Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs.

Saelig Tales PART 1

Saelig Tales PART 2

© Suhayl Saadi

http://www.suhaylsaadi.com