Month: October 2018

For what might have been a month, after passing through the gates of Horn with their intricate filigrees of beasts and battles, they camped at the foot of the mountain. There in what they thought was a true heart-wood glade, they pitched their tents and tethered their tired horses. 

With charcoal from the fire and sticks of finely pressed colour that they had carried with them, they covered every part of their shelters in what they could remember of the language of their intentions. And yet, despite those careful efforts, each night outside the circle of the fire that which was unknown still moved among the trees, seemingly intent on testing, then breaching the camp’s boundaries. 

In the repetition of those dark hours, their ability to rest also became elusive. Instead, there were drifting fragments and patterns that plagued the corners of their unfocused eyes: then often, having reached an almost feverish point of exhaustion, each would suffer sudden agonising spasms in the muscles of their legs or at their throats; and all, apparently, without clear reason. 

Time itself did not move there properly either. If they could have caught its passing in some tangible form, it would have been as a sketch of a bird with damaged wings that rising up from the page, would slowly drag itself across the clearing, finally to hide somewhere deep among the discoloured bracken and detritus of the forest floor.

She had been working on the idea for some time now; insofar as time could be determined. It was about the appropriate forms, a choice of intricate rituals with which they might manage to honour their dead. He had been an older man than the others but still he seemed  in good health. When he collapsed on the strand by the river that sunlit morning they were all surprised; and even more so as despite all they could do, he coughed and choked and shook his way toward a final end. 

They found they could not bury his body there: the strand itself was rocky and the sand beneath far too hard and compact for digging. Instead they contrived a kind of litter from an old blanket and some hastily cut timber; and dragging behind his horse he had made the first part of that journey back with them.

Someone had found a jar of pale honey in their saddle bags. At the edge of the clearing there grew a large clumps of bitter smelling herb or weed. They tore off handfuls of the plant and mixed the two with some of their now brackish water, then soaked the blanket and tightly wrapped the body. Then they hoisted it to their shoulders and gently carried it to the western edge of the glade. There they laid it down in a drift of leaves where the shadows of the wood would always deny a passage for the sun.

When they returned, she was hunched on a flat stone by the fire; and without moving, she called out to all of them quite clearly: 

“He deserves to be farewelled: but I think that somehow, at all costs he must be kept from the gates of Ivory”.

“What are you suggesting? He cannot return”, Roland replied from where he now stood,  just behind her: ”there is no resurrection of the body in its last corruption”.

“How can we really know?”, she said: “here in this place of so many edges, even that might just become possible”.

Without replying, Roland turned on his own boot heel and left her there alone. Having no obvious thought for any other occupation, she again began to pursue her own thoughts: and by that mental effort, she found the strength to make other,  more complicated additions to her drawings.

Finally,  having found nothing and understood nothing, they broke camp and left that forest on the side of the mountain by passing once more through those self-same gates of Horn.

Time is passing … and now had passed …

The clearing is empty, and sans their now cold fire pit, unchanged. A wind begins to blow: picking up speed it animates the drifts of leaves at the forest’s edges.

The drowsing corpse, having been uncovered, lifts itself up, and shaking off the blanket, rolls onto its side. Its eyes, fixed on the path that leads to the gates of Ivory, are wide open and unblinking:  it supports the weight of its pale head with one of its withered arms …