The Oracle didn’t send this one, or if she did, it was without me consulting her. Life is so busy at present; I’m juggling too many projects, too many visitors, and several back issues over the last three weeks. Excuses, I know, so here is the poem I wrote for yesterday’s Broken Spine prompt (blood), topical for yesterday and today.
For this one night
Night dark is spangled and netted with stars, crisp glitter, tears in our eyes, the cry of an owl.
Almost I can believe I see beyond, to the place that is always summer of plenty and laughter, where love never fades.
In the wind that blows between one year and the next, I hear the whispered voices, never forgotten, the soft tread of feet that know the way home,
and in the wavering candle flame, sparks rising to confound themselves among the stars, I feel the flutter of so many gentle hands.
I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but I wrote a book about Pasiphaë, taking apart the nasty Greek myth and putting it back together in a plausible historical context. Legend Press are publishing it next February, and it’s currently on promotional pre-order at Waterstones. Offer runs until the 19th, so anyone in the UK who’s tempted, you have another 24 hours.
I haven’t been keeping up with this blog lately. Too many other commitments that eat away at my time. I have missed two weeks of the Oracle’s advice and will remedy that as soon as I get a minute.
In the meantime, this is an excerpt from The Darkest Tide, introducing one of my favourite (despite appearances) characters, Arawn, the misbegotten High King.
If the excerpt intrigues, you can get hold of the book on Amazon. I won’t put in the links but just look for The Darkest Tide, Book I of the Ys trilogy.
Arawn stood in the shadows of the bedchamber listening to the laboured breathing of his son. Aeron was eighteen years of age, his father’s unopposed successor as High King, and Arawn knew, as surely as he knew that the sun set in the west, that his son was dying. Healers bustled about his bed, laying poultices of herbs on the blackened flesh, making healing spells, thickening the air with the slow combustion of foul-smelling plants. But the boy was dying. Arawn had seen it happen too often to pretend otherwise. Th e curse of the Fomhóire, they called it, and it had no cure. The boy moaned, a pathetic, feeble noise, as if he had not the strength to cry out his real pain, and Arawn turned sharply on his heel, grinding his teeth to stop the tremor of his mouth. He strode through the dark, smoky hall and out into the fresh spring air, relieved to get away from the smell of decaying flesh. The High King’s house was built in the manner of the country, wood-framed and high-beamed. But, unlike the houses of the petty kings, the interior was divided into separate chambers, dark and airless and strangely damp. Privacy was something the common people seemed not to appreciate, but the Fomhóire and those descended from them had never been able to rid themselves of their dislike of communal living, the smells of enclosed humanity, the heat and noise, the heaped piles of furs, the dogs rooting among the leavings, and the constant clamour of warriors and children as they clattered in and out of the halls. An ancestral repugnance for humanity remained among the chaos of all that Arawn had acquired from the mingling of bloodlines. The Fomhóire were eternal – sluggish, plodding, mindless certainly, but eternal. Nothing disturbed the course of their existence, no fears, no thoughts but to serve their master. Except for misadventure, they would trudge the earth forever. But by Arawn’s time, those first Fomhóire were long dead. Their creator had never intended they should reproduce themselves, never intended they should have any control over their destiny. They sowed forbidden seed, and they dwindled to shrivelled bags of sea debris. In their descendants, the mingling of human blood, with its sparks of magic, its weaknesses and self-doubt, anguish and longing, had produced creatures both more and less than their forebears. The descendants of the giants from the sea had rid themselves of unthinking service to a despotic master, they thought their own thoughts, content to walk the earth as masters in their own right. But their immortal blood was diluted, tainted with the ephemeral nature of human blood, and what precocious old age did not reap, the black flux took. Arawn ground his teeth in anger at fate that had set him before a board where the moves of the pieces were preordained, where he was condemned to lose. The morning was dull, and clouds hung low and full of rain. The cold, salt-laden wind whipped over the cliffs with its scents of the deep ocean, and Arawn filled his lungs greedily. Standing on the stone wall that circled the rath, he could look down on the heaving ocean, see the fountains of spray as each wave crashed against the cliffs. His pale eyes, colourless and dull in the light of the sun, reflected the steely grey-green of the deep water, his skin and hair different tones of the shallows, of weed streamers and grey sand. The nostrils of his broad, snub nose dilated as he breathed deeply, his thin line of a mouth parted slightly, like a man saved from drowning. Coarse hair twisted through with gold and copper wire hung stiff and still, and only the fringe of his light wool cloak fluttered slightly in the wind. The High King’s ringfort was perched on the sea cliffs; the ocean battered against it on the seaward side. On the other, a patchwork of broken rocks, whin and ling gave way to a green plain that stretched inland as far as the eye could see. In the south, the green carpet wrinkled over a string of low hills, and in the north, the green gave way to purple, then black, as the land rose sharply into gloomy mountains, their heads wreathed in cloud and grey veils of rain. As Arawn watched, a group of riders came into view from the north, their horses running with the plodding, tireless gait of Fomhóire mounts, both horses and riders stark black against the steely backdrop of the barren mountains. A shadow moved from the eaves of the hall and a clansman came to join him on the wall, his short cloak tugged by the wind, lank hair of a pale, lustreless brown whipped across his face. ‘How is the boy?’ ‘The same.’ Arawn took a deep breath. ‘Still dying.’ The clansman kept a short, respectful silence, then pointed to the approaching riders on the plain below. ‘Mac Lochlainn. He should be bringing something to raise your spirits.’ The High King turned, his pale eyes, too wide-set in his toobroad face, glinted dully in a sign of anger. ‘You have sons, Darrach, have you lost even one of them?’ Darrach shrugged. ‘At birth, one perhaps.’ ‘Can you not imagine what it’s like to lose them all? Aeron should have lived. I thought, after eighteen years… I would give all the milk-white girls in the kingdom to be able to keep just one of my sons.’ ‘But I have little of the sea people’s blood in me. ’Tis the strength of the father’s sea blood that makes the birthing hard on the women. Unless they are half sea folk themselves. Maybe Mac Lochlainn’s kin will foil the curse and give you one that will live. They’re mountain folk, and if the girl’s like her kin, she’ll be strong. She might even survive the birthing. I’ve known mountain women bear babaí of a monstrous size —’ ‘Spare me the details of your prize heifers! Has she the blood of the sea people in her veins, this mountain girl? If not, however Talannach she may be, you know as well as I do what will be the outcome.’ Darrach shrugged again. ‘The Ó Lochlainn are loyal, wellbred people – a kinswoman of theirs has every chance of carrying sea-dwellers’ blood.’ Arawn’s eyes narrowed as he watched the riders, close enough now to distinguish the smallest, slightest rider, a single splash of white in their midst, half-hidden by the flying black cloaks and hair of the escort. ‘Let’s hope you’re right, Darrach. I am weary of waiting. This is the last one of your stubborn stock I will try.’ ‘She’s not the only sheep on the¬—-’ ‘Enough! I must have sons. I will have sons, even if I have to bed half the Northlands to get them.’ ‘Tír Thuaidh?’ Darrach raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you want with those ill-dressed barbarians?’ ‘Those ill-dressed barbarians are docile as pigeons. They hand over their talented children to their Keepers without a murmur. The Northlands are awash in what they call seerlore, and my ignorant codfaced cousins have not the least idea how to use it. I will have that power, Darrach. I will take every one of their odd-eyed womenfolk if I have to, and I will get sons on them.’ Darrach sniggered. ‘Is it heirs you want, Arawn, or an army?’ Arawn turned his dull eyes on his clansman, a glare that reflected the dim light of the shallows. ‘I and my sons will rule this broken world. The Beast will never have it. It has made me neither fish nor man, and though I live in a king’s hall, instead of progeny, I engender only the black flux. I will take the power the ancients used to enchain the Beast, and I will snatch this world from it, Darrach. I will spit in its face before I crush it entirely.’ ‘And should their Talannach blood prove as feeble as our own, and…’ ‘I will not watch my line dwindle to the level of rustic chieftains, wallowing in black blood and useless female get with the faces of mackerel! I will destroy it all, and the Beast will watch, helpless. But if I win, I win eternity for me and mine. Will you take the wager with me?’ ‘To lay waste to Tír Thuaidh and enslave the barbarians?’ Darrach’s sullen face shone with a flicker of excitement. ‘I will. You will get your magic, Arawn, and who knows? It might even work.’
Today is release day for the first book in the Ys trilogy, an alternate 10th Century historical fantasy. It’s published by Northodox Press and you can order a paperback copy here.:
A wish is lost in the ocean sleeping, and ships that sail never bring love back; the summer’s past, for all my weeping, and roses fall in winter’s frost.
A wish is dead as soon as spoken, and I would follow if I could. The word you gave me then is broken, and I cannot see the way ahead.
For the sea is wide, and the years yawn wider, the salt stings cold as any tears, and the stars look down, a mute reminder of all that rolled out on the tide.
And it leaves no trace on the sands of morning, your parting promise to return, but I’d give a world, the sun adorning, to glimpse again your sea-soft face.
I’ve been monumentally busy, but the Oracle is always ready to listen when we ask. This poem uses almost all the words she gave me. Not sure what the message is, but I’m listening.
Dusk, before winter
The ache you left, how deep does it go, deep as death? And the chanting beneath the night clouds is it for me?
My feet drag as I walk to the lake, unwilling to take the fatal step into the dark water, beyond the light.
I listen for music, not the cry of the owl, the voice of a lover perhaps,
but the sky, shot with the last gold of the sun that has set, is mute.
I haven’t posted here for a while; life has been busy and tiring. Time to hear what the Oracle has to say about things, and, as usual, she already knows the news. Not anyone I knew personally, but a mother is a mother.
A piece of news, soft and sad
The words blow away in this brisk wind too many leaves already dead and sloes shrivelled like prunes.
We tread on rotting fruit where wasps and hornets sugar-skim making for the green morning.
A mother died before the light and never saw this new day colouring slowly with summer
but the jays shriek anyway and blackbirds sweep the hedges a cat whisks her impudent tail
because of the day the green of it and the sweet rain passing.
I missed posting last week though I did consult the Oracle and did write a poem. We had one of the children staying for a few days, it was fierce hot, and I was struggling with a new round of line edits. I sent off the corrections yesterday (finally), so it’s time to catch up.
The dimming of the light
I hear an echo these summer days in the swash of waves on the rocks below the cool cave where she whispers her words.
I hear a weary faded colour peach perhaps or old rose like the pinched sinewy patterns in poplar bark.
We gave them warnings in the purple dawns lava flowing electric green plagues of tourists like the Northern Lights the death of grass the silent spring.
If they prefer their trash to the sight of morning hares or moonlit hares a meadow specked white and yellow rain on new green leaves the smell of the sea new-cut hay of a river flowing home there is no hope.
Rain sighs into the sound of weeping. Night falls.
Death drips slow as honey from this melting sky, and the day-lit moon dissolves like a pearl in acid.
I watch yellow leaves drift in a restless breeze, hot as deserts that pulls this way then that, but always away from the green that fades like a childhood memory, of sun shade dapples, cool on the skin, of petals cupping morning dew.
And I hear the murmuring among the trees, the papery voices of the dead and dying, Who will be next?
The Four Swans 