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Date Posted: 16:26:42 12/21/10 Tue
Author: cg
Subject: And all that being said, I am going to post a snippet, because it's Christmas and I feel like it. :) >>>
In reply to: cg 's message, "I just wanted to wrap up the year of postings here by saying Merry Christmas, Happy Yuletide and Happy New Year to everyone who visits this wee cottage on a regular basis." on 14:44:26 12/21/10 Tue

copyright 2010 Cindy Brandner

Violet Stephanova Mattveeva was extremely annoyed with herself. For many weeks now she had been conducting an internal argument between her own good sense and native Russian suspicion against her inevitable downfall in any situation- a large dose of good old-fashioned curiosity. The object of this curiosity was the man that her lover had called the only true friend he had ever known.

Physically she had avoided entering into the charmed circle this man seemed to carry everywhere with him, even in a freezing Russian winter. She felt that many in the camp had lost their minds and reserve far too quickly. For all they knew this James had been planted inside to ferret out their secrets and before they knew it they would be headed to Lubyanka to have their secrets ferreted out in a much less charming manner.

She found herself objecting to everything about him, and studying those qualities at the same time. Surreptitiously of course. To begin with he was not Russian, he could not even know what it was to be Russian, to always have to separate the personal from the public. To have two lives, that did not mesh together at all, that barely even touched at the edges despite being lived in one body.

He did not have the open book quality, however, that most Westerners had. He knew how to wear a masque and to wear it so smoothly it appeared entirely at one with the man he presented to the world. She wondered what had made such a thing so? For Andrei had told her that Jamie had all the world could offer- wealth, women, intellect and beauty. Well the latter two were already apparent to her, she had never heard a non-Russian speak like a native, but this man did. The beauty too, despite his shaved head and lack of proper nutrition, could not be hidden- in fact it was of a sort that seemed ridiculous- that the universe should lavish such care on one individual whilst others ran about with harelips and bulbous noses, hunched backs and wandering eyes. She had felt something of the same when she met Andrei, as if his physical beauty were an affront to humanity, for he too had been carved by a generous hand. But there was something more to this man, a strange sort of light that drew everyone in his aura- she saw the results of it even in Nikolai, who was as hardened by tragedy as anyone she had ever known. It was, she knew, what saved Jamie from much harsher treatment at Gregor’s hands, and what had pulled Shura and Vanya to his side almost immediately. He inspired an intense loyalty, and though she found it annoying, she also could feel it herself. Thus far, she had resisted the lure. She was determined to do so for as long as she was able.

It was his ability to tell stories that proved her undoing. At first she avoided the fire at which he sat, and he only told his stories to a few, but gradually the circle grew, and the spinning of his tales grew in accordance. She understood that he was gifted this way, as though the fairies of whom he sometimes spoke, the dark ones of his own land, had both blessed and cursed him in his cradle. Some nights she drew close enough to hear a sentence or two, of things both dark and light, of eastern winds and sweet spices, and magical birds risen from ashes, of mares whose milk poured across the heavens and gave rise to a foaming river of stars.

He seemed to draw his words from the wind and the earth, the water and the fires- and he moved his hands in accordance with the rhythm of those words, and creatures came forth and lived in the ears and eyes of his audience for that enchanted hour or two: deer with silver-white coats, wolves made from star-spittle, great slumbering mammoths who, when awakened, could shiver the earth with their roars and silken-eared hares that contained the wisdom of the ages. There were astrologers and princes and stubborn girls with hair like crow feathers and nimble minds, there were dwarves of good intent and shape-shifting wild things that could not be counted upon in times of trouble. There were fields of blue poppies that gave clouded, lovely dreams and sleep that lasted a hundred years and more. There were ponds of black lotus that pooled like ink, in which shadows lived and frogs lurked that held golden keys within their oily bodies.

She herself had been named for the shyest of flowers, that grew in shade and had no scent, except quixotically. Her own father had told stories well, had made them for her out of what fabric she knew not, for Soviet Russia did not lend itself to enchantment.

But this man made stories for the lonely, to draw each shade into the warmth of the fire, then give them something they lacked, even if the lack was not understood or felt before. She knew how he paid for his hours at the fire, and how the cost, for him, unlike other men, was likely quite high.

He knew the old Russian tales, and understood quite well the Russian need for blood and bones and caves, and cold dark forests, for bears that governed great iced lands and deformed old women with spiteful wisdom gnawing through their gaunt frames. He understood the peasant that lurked under the most sophisticated of Russian veneers and so gave these tales earth and grain and hovels dug into hillsides. He told of a great Mother that slept in such silence, that even a spider’s weaving might be heard within it, and when that Mother awoke it was with torrents and twisting roots and smoking soil.

Some nights his stories felt like mist, curling around her senses, intoxicating but invisible, other nights it was as if threads both dark as secret mosses and bright as spun gold, wove themselves into her brain and her heart, pulling her inexorably to the fire where he sat. The stories wound one within another, the teller speaking through the mouth of one far older, and that one speaking through gold-furred foxes, arctic-eyed wolves and old women who knit the threads that held the world together. It was as confusing and as wonderful, as the results of drinking too much vodka, mixed with cloudberry wine.

She drew even closer to when he told tales in which his own land figured, tales of bright, shining people who lived beneath the hills, and mermaids with glass green eyes and night-furled hair that lured men into vast cold waters, where soul cages slept at the bottom of the sea. Of a land where the green was like no other, and small cottages were wreathed in earthy smoke and fresh misting rain. There were enchanted pots with strange brews in these tales, and strange lineages of common folk who had mixed and mated with the Fair Folk and bore strange children as a result. Stories of swans frozen into winter lakes and stolen feathers that kept them from flight. And always, always in these tales of his own land, there was the sea, as present as a missing mother, tracked silver blue by the passages of whales and mermaids, dazzling with seals’ diamonds in the daylight. She herself had never seen the ocean, but she dreamed of it often, so to hear it woven so casually through his stories, was to understand that it was part of him, just as his blood and breath and golden hair were.

But the night he lured her fully and finally, as a master would pull his falcon to his arm with a note or two, was the night he told his own tale. How she knew this story was particularly his, she could not have said, but somehow it had a dark ring to it, a truth that could not be denied, for it came from a deep wellspring within this man, and he did not look happy, nor quite comfortable in the telling. There had been something in his voice though, some strange incantatory quality that had made his listeners shiver and hug themselves tight and look over their own shoulders into the dark night.

I am the Crooked Man and I come by crooked ways, along the phantom roads of a country that is no more. I walk by night, under the moon, both dark and full. I have seen all the foibles and furies of man, his tempests and his tragedies. I have known what it is to lose all and gain it back, only to lose it again. I remember a time when my country was still in the mists, before history, when the white stag roamed in the forests and the wolves called from hilltop to hilltop.
I am the Crooked Man and I carry within my bones the shells of the seas and the dust of the heavens. In my blood are the waters that covered the land long ago, the ice that gouged the canyons and hills, the valleys and streams, the lakes and rivers.
I am the flicker in the corner of your eye, there and then gone, seen only in passing and then dismissed by your eyes and your head, though your backbone will know better. I stand at the dark crossroads- you know, you have seen me there, deny it though your daylight self will. I am the chill that quivers your flesh and makes you look behind on dark nights.
There is a world beneath the one you know. You have felt it, occasionally thought you had glimpsed it. The real world such as it is called, lies over this other one lightly. The other can be sensed, known, entered even, but most are blind to it, for it is safer that way. But the world is a labyrinth and one turn down the wrong path, one fork too many and people lose their way, disappear and are never heard from again. Or are they? For in the labyrinth there are ones who watch, ones who wait. The human world will have its remedies for such, the coat turned inside out, the cross upon the chest, the chanting of familiar prayers, but those things are as dust in the world that lies beneath.
At night the worlds merge, the old pathways open, and other ones walk abroad, sometimes making mischief, sometimes doing things far worse. Maybe you have heard them, maybe you have heard me- your name said quiet on a slipstream of shadow

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