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Date Posted: 17:12:09 07/28/08 Mon
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Inside for story>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "Here's another of Bridget's bits, tucked inside the first reply." on 16:54:25 07/28/08 Mon

Copyright 2008 Cindy Brandner

I cannot know with what eyes you read these pages of mine. What do you see when you look at it? Filthy pages made from plants, filled with bits of withered brown, perhaps I seem hopelessly primitive to you, perhaps you are at such a remove in time and space that you cannot understand what it is to live in tune with the change of the seasons, the tilt of the planet, to live in such intimacy with your own environment that it is you, and you are it, and none of it is magic, it is only life as we now, here, live it. The land and the life it sustained was all to us, and when it failed us, we too failed. I cannot think of the people I knew without thinking of the land and the trees and the plants and the wee hills, and the cottages that seemed a natural outgrowth of the soil and the curve of the land, of the sweat and labour and sheer love that went into the dirt. How a tree could be a marker for each month of the year as you watched it change and circle, and live and die. What it was to feel the earth wake beneath your feet each spring, a true miracle, knowing your very breath depended on that re-awakening. To feel that every dark shadow in the forest, every sough of leaf and bud, was speaking to you. Rooted to the land and the moods of nature as we were, knit us as a society in a way that would seem foreign to cultures that clustered in the hiving activity of cities.

The land was asleep now though, creatures both small and great had burrowed in the soil or inside the trees, or had sunk deep in the silt of the lakes and streams, to dream the heavily blanketed dreams of winter.

Samhain was two nights past, and I was the only soul abroad on the land, and is the way of such nights, every noise I made was magnified until it seemed that a troop of fairies must be in march behind me, the frost sweetly crumpling beneath their feet, as well as under my own. My breath echoed, reverberating even down to the moles curled up tightly in their burrows. I had not been able to get away until the late afternoon, and now twilight was stealing with smoke and guile up out of darkly rooted trees and creeping down the hills in roped coils of blue and grey.

My grandmother lived past a screen of hawthorne trees- long said to be the boundary between the world of man and the world of the Good Folk. Beyond that boundary few dared to venture, but the women of my family had lived in the forest for a very long time, glad for the isolation and privacy it provided. The pathway to my grandmother’s house ran through a tunnel of stunted willow, twisted and gnarled and black with age. Willows always gather near water, and here beneath them the ground was generally soft, black mud, but this time of year, one could walk on the surface and not sink. Long, fronded fingers reached down to pluck at my hair, while mist exhaled up under my skirt, cold chill breaths, as though something bloodless lived below the watery muck. It was a spooky trip even on a bright day in May, but on a chill November evening it was enough to bring the blood in your veins to a standstill. But tonight I longed for my grandmother’s touch, her stories, the security that being in her presence had always brought to me.

I pulled my shawl tight about my shoulders and envisioned the interior of the cottage to warm myself. It was low and snug, as if a contented old gnome sitting upon its elbows was slowly sinking into the earth. Shelves clung to every wall, filled with murky tisanes, crumbled leaves and jeweled berries, dried to a dark potency. The fireplace was made of river stone, and a fire had burned in it from my first memory. The main room was both kitchen and the room where visitors would come, for always had the Irish hearth been both heart and lifeblood of the home. There was only one other room, a bedroom, just big enough for the woven rope and straw mattress upon which Nan had slept from the day of her birth.

I too had been born in that tumbledown cottage, with its crooked windows and crumbling frame. Born amongst the cauldrons and bottles, the besoms and cats, the herbs and simples. I see the image I have built in your mind, a witch’s cottage buried in the dark willows with small puffs of green smoke sparking from the chimney. It was near such, to be certain, if one subtracts the green smoke. For people did say my Nan was a witch and I suppose in the original sense of the word, she was just that. For the old words from which witch had derived- wik and wid- merely meant to prophesy, to consecrate, to bend and to fold, to be wise and to share that wisdom. Women had always understood these things, and had made the rituals of daily life sacred- birth, death, sex, love, food and so many of the ceremonies that attended these things became associated with something dark and evil, and the women who practiced them were persecuted. Wise in the way of herbs and trees, and with a knowledge of all the thin times and places where the world’s air was sheer enough to peer into the next realm, my grandmother was better at healing than the male doctors, and so she became a natural target. People spread mad stories about her; that she had lain with a fairy man many years past and so acquired her knowledge and dark arts. It was this that was blamed too for my mother- for they said she had been born not right in the head, that she was a child of neither this world nor that- so who could possibly blame the poor thing for her madness. Who could blame her when she ran off directly after my own birth, to become of thing of shadow and myth, the strange figure, perhaps, that so often lurked on the edges of the forest, of my consciousness.

The truth was she did not want to be a mother, she was half wild, always had been my Nan told me. And so it had fallen to my grandmother to raise me. Thus I was brought up with magic and the old knowledge of herbs and healing, of the power inherent in a woman, if she could disguise herself well enough in the public eye, and practice her arts in secret.

I came to the gate then, hung between two willows, a gate that squealed like an old hag abed with a young stallion- or so Nan had always described the sound. I could never pass through that gate without a visual image though, and it always flushed my cheeks red as rowan berries. I pressed my mittens to my face to cool it. I could smell the peat smoke now, a warm smudge of scent on the frosted air. The cottage was just up and around a bend in the road that was well-shadowed by a troop of blackthorn trees. Here the murk was so thick, even the moon shied away from attempting entry. There was a dead man that lived beneath this clump of trees, a dead man that had met with an ill end while he still walked amongst the living. He had been a bad man, whose soul was the colour of corroded pewter and he did not understand that he was dead, but I wasn’t about to tell him. He had slit his own throat here staring at the cottage, in my great-grandmother’s time. Nan never told me why, but she said her own mother could always see the man there, in the still of a winter evening, staring toward the cottage, looking straight into her own eyes.

Long frail vines had grown up around the tree trunks where he lingered, diaphanous as smoke, with a strange, unpleasant smell to their grey-white blooms. When I was a small child I used to run past this spot, certain his hands would come up out of the bog, seize me, and pull me down into its black sucking depths. To be honest, I’d never really let go of that particular fear and still scuttled past this spot quick as you please, with one eye on the ground for long, grasping fingerbones.

Tonight though I could not sense him, he, like much of the world, must be sleeping, for even the dead have need of oblivion occasionally.

I approached the cottage with relief, as accustomed as I was to the feel of spirits on the air, still in November the world is such a thin place that one often feels chilled by them, for they are everywhere, able to touch us in passing, able to hear our thoughts and intentions before we are even aware of them ourselves.

My Nan came from a very long line, a line that had snapped like a bent spine when my mother came along. A long line of women that had practiced medicine and magic, though we had never called it so. Had she been born in another place, in another time, she would have been worshipped and feared for her powers, here she was merely feared, and often reviled. No one ever openly opposed her, until much later, until death had settled its fine, powdery hand across all the land and the great silence of the soil began to swallow us all whole. No one could have saved us then, except perhaps, for the British, but the people still believed in the magic of the land, and thought that somehow she had turned it against them, turned the potatoes to great streams of poisonous black muck.

On this night though that time was far distant and the fields still gave abundantly and smelled rich with fertility. I could smell the thick scent of plant decay from my Nan’s garden. The herbs of that garden were arranged in a great circle, following the pathway of the sun, or the wheel of the year. Herbs were arranged as to their various uses, the herbs for blood related illnesses at the top of the round- hyssop and motherwort, sage and angelica, followed by herbs for the heart- yarrow and rosemary, with the hawthorne- both leaf and berry, herbs to draw out bruising- comfrey and arnica, herbs for the head and the soul- clary sage, geranium, St. Johnswort, borage, valerian and chamomile. The final arm in the spiral were women’s herbs, for fertility and for preventing fertility, for bringing on the bleeding and for promoting labour in a woman gone past her time- raspberry leaf, blue vervain, the root and leaf of the dandelion, mugwort and tansy. Then there were the herbs for love charms, for spells to bind either man or woman to you and charms to thwart an enemy, herbs to turn aside evil and bring luck, and one low herb that crept along the ground, said to bring the dead back to walk amongst the living. The poisonous herbs were separate, with the deadly nightshade plants outside the wheel and in a pattern of their own that followed the path of the moon from dark to full and back again.

Even the smoke blackened thatch of the cottage was thick-filled with herbs hanging to dry. As was the small stone stillroom she had built behind the cottage. I had always associated my Nan with the scent of herbs, pungent and thick with green juices. There was the scent of lavender in the creases of her fingers, the whiff of smokey sage by her knuckle joints, the acrid haunt of aconite about her wrists, the dark chill of hemlock within the rough pads of her palms. I loved all those smells, even the ones that held the aroma of death, and many of them did. Taken in small doses though, those herbs were often the ones with the greatest power to heal. She smelled too of the great ocean that hid away over the hills and she said this was because the world itself was woman, with her vast oceans filled with salt and life and movement. Each woman therefore her own small planet, moving to interior tides, succouring life in her inner ocean. Understanding intuitively that there are many levels to creation, and many ways of viewing that which is called reality. For my reality is not yours, nor yours mine, Brigit, she would say to me. It would take many more years, though, for me to understand the absolute truth of that statement.

The cottage came into view then and the warm glow of firelight spilled out over the deep windowsills, beckoning me in. I sensed though that my grandmother was not inside. No matter, I would simply go in, Nan was likely on a mission of mercy, a Tinker giving birth in a ditch would receive as much attention and care as would the landlord’s wife and so people came from all around to have my grandmother tend to their ills.

I had my hand on the latch and was already anticipating a hot cup of tea, when movement caught my eye far to the right of the cottage’s northernmost corner. Beyond the immediate area of the house, the bog swiftly consumed all signs of civilization and the wet land put forth all sorts of odd vegetation- small, stunted trees that looked like evil dwarves in the twilight, water hyacinth that suddenly seemed to creep across the pale grasses, (?), but that was twilight, an edge time where the normal rules of the world did not necessarily apply. But still I knew someone was out there, and it wasn’t simply an errant squirrel that hadn’t bedded down with his acorns for the winter, and yet, I could not say the eyes felt totally human, either. The prickle at the base of my skull wasn’t telling me anything other than to be wary.

I swept the area quickly, looking in an arc, seeing nothing out of place, but the feeling of a watcher only grew stronger. I closed my eyes for a moment, orienting my other senses and quelling the panic, willing my skin and the sixth sense, the one that went far beyond the body, out into the night air around me. No noise, no movement and yet, I knew he was there.

I opened my eyes and there he was, a tall figure dressed in green, but such a green that he blended with the night shadows and the twisted and worn trunks of the trees. Where he stood the grasses looked odd, though at first I didn’t understand what it was about them that drew my attention, it was later I would remember and realize they were green, when they ought to have been brown and sere on a November night. But by the time the knowledge arrived, it was too late, as if often the case with useful knowledge.

At first I thought he might be a gelt- one of the fabled warriors that had disappeared from the field of some great battle, driven mad by the blood and violence. They were said to live away in the woods, never to find rest nor peace, until the day the blood was magically washed from their hands, and the land took away their madness, absorbed it back into the soil and left them with a fragile sanity. In the old tales, such men flitted through the treetops, their unbearable pain having made them light as air, their feet never touching the ground until their minds were restored. But this man was standing firmly rooted as a tree, a part of the elements that surrounded him, as natural as water, or the silver grey lichen that lifted on the wind.

He was still as stone, a statue in the midst of the dark night and yet I had never sensed such life force in a man before. I knew I should go into the cottage, bolt the door firmly and wait for Nan to come home, but I felt drawn to the ragged figure as if some invisible chord were stretched betwixt us and he was slowly raveling me toward him. At the same time I was afraid, barely able to breathe, my lips numb and yet, still I was unable to stop myself from putting one foot after the other. He was well away in shadow, but I knew his face, for hadn’t I dreamed it every night for the last month? The high cheekbones and full lips, the eyes unfathomed as water, eyes that could, as quick as that, turn to ice. His hair was black, dark as an otter pelt, his skin fair as the hawthorne flowers that I’d worn in my hair for the Bealtaine faire. His clothing was simple homespun and yet looked finer somehow, as if it would have no more substance than the air, were one to touch it. Despite the chill of the night and the thin clothing, he did not look cold. He had a scruffy beard, yet the skin beneath it looked fine as milk, as ungrained as marble.

I took several more steps, no longer able to feel my feet, nor, it seemed able to will them back to the security of the cottage. The light of gloaming clung to his face, a caress as intimate as a lover’s, there within the hollow beneath his cheekbones, the small pool of his throat and the column of his neck. The dark loved him, even then, I could feel how it loved him. Through all this his eyes shone out, a blue that twisted my breath in my chest, and gave it back in a manner such that I knew it was no longer my own.

I was not to know it that night, nor for many nights to follow, but I had come as close to the truth of the man in that brief summation as one possibly could.

How to say now, through the lens of so many years, what I felt that night? Destiny, fate- they seem small in the face of it, yearning perhaps comes close to the feeling, such yearning that a lifetime could not encompass it and my heart felt cut open with the weight. I thought I might die there, but even as I put a hand to my breast, as if somehow I could stanch this wound he had opened within me, I kept walking toward him.

I felt very odd. Once a gypsy caravan had camped in a field outside our village and in the evenings a few of us children would linger in the woods on the edge of the field and listen to their music, which was mad and fired the blood like spiced wine. An old man, wizened as an apple left on the bough long after the frosts, had come over to us and drawn us with a gap-toothed smile and welcoming hands to the circle of their fire. There was a woman there, with gold about her wrists and ankles, and hair like night, that came and asked if I wanted my fortune told. I did not. I hadn’t the silver for it, even if I desired it. But she told it to me nonetheless and I had felt like this, as though my entire life lay in the control of Fate, as if I could never run far nor fast enough to get away from life running at me…I felt something of that now, but ten times more powerfully, as though this man was Fate itself, here on the edge of the bog and the woods.

He smiled, just a slight curve of his mouth, and yet it was as though the sun had suddenly come out on me on this dark night. One hand came up, strong, long fingered, if somewhat dirty, and I knew quite suddenly that I had held it before, clasped between my own…begging…crying, suddenly there was a terrible sharp pain above my eyes, and then my grandmother’s voice broke the night, broke the spell and the man was gone, with neither noise, nor movement of grass nor branch, to tell of his going.

“Brigit!” her voice was sharp with fear.

I gasped as though ice cold water had been thrown over me. Though the man had disappeared so silently and so swiftly that it seemed he must be an appartion, the parting was visceral, a wrench so violent that for a moment all went black and I couldn’t see.

I turned to my grandmother feeling that I was under a spell, or coming up slowly through thick, turbid water, and yet my sense was that the light was leaving me rather than coming toward me.

“Brigit, come in the cottage now,” her voice wasn’t quite as sharp, but the fear was still there, its scent deepening the air between us. She took my hand, sensing my inability to see and led me into the cottage quickly, snapping the door shut behind us and bolting it immediately.

She sat me down near the fire and I could hear the click of the shutters being clasped firmly over the windows. The dark had never bothered her, so it had to be the man’s presence that had her so rattled.

I could see the dim flicker of the fire now and knew my sight was returning. Why it had gone as it had, I did not know, but I was oddly unconcerned about it. My mind was still occupied fully by the man, the half-man, half-wilding- why did my entire being seem so utterly certain that I knew him, had always known him, had been expecting him for a long time it seemed, indeed my whole life, were my senses anything to judge by.

“Brigit,” my grandmother’s voice broke the last vestiges of the enchantment into shards, it burst wide, my sight returning entirely, and I could tell by her tone that she had said my name more than once, before I heard her.

“Why- why,” I stuttered, realizing suddenly how terribly cold I was, “did you call me back like that, as if you were scared? He wouldn’t have hurt me you know.”

“Who wouldn’t have hurt you?” My grandmother turned, her eyes narrowing, kettle in hand.

“The man on the edge of the trees there- he came for me, I know he did.”

She sighed heavily and looked suddenly an old woman, as though just the sight of the man had aged her years in the space of only a minute or two.

“I didn’t see a man,” she said softly, “but if you did…well then it’s time that I told you about him.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see him? Why were you so scared if you didn’t see someone there?”

“Brigit, not all things can be seen, but still they may be sensed, aye? But first I’ll make us tea, I need to steady myself before I tell you what I must.”
***

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