Tonight is Soven

So I shall be putting up a poem I wrote yesterday (and put up on Facebook).  I may put up a picture of my candy delivery costume.  (Hey kids, you gotta face the monster if you want to win a treasure of great price!  Though I do tend to smile at the really little ones.)
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All Hallows

The Goddess came in dizzying flight tonight

Air and the sound of blood

Rushing in veins

Spilled every moon

Wild hair and smell of mortality

Rust

And iron

From Her spine

Full wings ripped off in rape

Sewn on again

To painfully fly to meet the enemy

Protect her children

From external iron

Cauldron full of life spilling

Food and those who eat

And are eaten

Running swimming flying out of the depths

To run back home to the dark

Thank you

Oh life that embraces darkness that we might live

Let us be like our mother

Giving ourselves to you that you might live

And on and on

Tide in

Tide out

Like a heartbeat

Bloodbeat

Not a tidy dinner guest

As every woman remembers

Her every orgasm at once

And flies shrieking

Hoping

Dreaming

With leaves and feathers in our hair

We fly away from out Mother

Toward our Mother

Ourselves

And when the veil is thin

And death crackles in every leaf

Female and male we fly up

Like smoke

Like a ghost of rain

To feed the Woman of Snow

To come

Not a pleasant time of year

But pleasant

Full fed, full drunk, full of life

Hoping it is enough

To take us through the dark gestation time

Our weary bones grin

From Goddess fangs

Eaten and reborn

There will be life again

No matter what we do

Or what we destroy

We echo our Mother

We create and eat ourselves

Flying in the spin of stars

In turn eaten

To be reborn in death of a star

Supernovae

Flying

All Hallows

October 30, 2016

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A soul-cake! A soul cake! I pray thee for me one to bake!

As the New Year softly fall

chiming bills both clink and call.

If you've not a soul cake free

then thin-rubbed coin would gen'rous be!

#41 - Yes, Please

Only Limyé touched him as he wept until he had nothing left, no tears, no energy.  He looked up, in time to see the black-haired girl blow a kiss across the heart in her hands and droplets, butterflies, scarlet and black butterflies made of blood and ache fluttered out and to his out-flung hand.

He was lying on the pillows and the children were distantly playing, in the stream, everyone all around just there.  No one was quivering in fear of what he might do.  No one was crying with him.  No one looming over him shouting for him to stop. “It is not all about you in this world,” Limyé said quietly. 

Everything was edged in a rosy pink colour now and Ahrimaz felt like he floated just above the pillows.  There he was, below, looking like a skinny, ragged, bearded. version of himself.  “I would like to show you something,” the black haired girl said.

“All right.”

She didn’t touch him but they floated up through the ceiling of the salle and up through the rest of the building.  So small compared to his own House of Gold.  Then below them was all of this Inné.  Also small. Fewer streets were paved and they ran hither and thither as though someone had let a cow wander the hill and declared every meander a street.

Then he realized that all the lights he saw were people.  Not their physical selves but the light that Aeono saw.  And, he supposed, the light that Liryen saw.  Some people were dim and small, others flared like burn-metal blazing white.  It was a song of light, it was a tapestry that twinkled.  “There needs to be dark,” he said, “or you couldn’t see them.”

“Yes,” she said.  “And living hurts, until you grow up enough to realize that it needn’t.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He could see his world, a shadow to this one, both darker and brighter, higher contrast, like a backdrop to this quieter, bigger world.  Bigger?  How? There was a sense of vast distance all around as though he could not comprehend it all.  More worlds? More lives?  As the gemstone of a planet turned beneath him he could see in this world a fiery conflagration across the sea, and groups of sparks of souls in the sea itself. “But…”

The world was wrenched sideways again as it expanded into the past and the future and all the lives and deaths, all the prayers and songs and screams, all love and compassion and gratitude.  Gratitude. For life. For death. Gratitude. Love. Compassion.

It was as though all of creation was trying to climb into his chest, into his heart, into all the narrow, pinched off, burnt and scarred places and as they ripped open, as they split asunder he opened his mouth and rather than a scream a single word emerged, whispered into the vastness. “Please.”

He tumbled and fell toward the globe, toward the country, toward the House of the Hand, limbs loose, chest open, hair and lungs ripped at by the wind of life, rising, floating up to the Divine, down to the Divine, out to the Divine. There was no word for that direction.  It just was.

His whole body jolted as he opened his eyes, feeling Limyé’s hand on his shoulder

“Do you think he could bear being touched?” he heard Yolend say with his living ears.  He lunged to catch her proffered hand, and clamped down on Limyé’s, curled around them, hugging, cherishing their solid touch.

Yes, please,” he managed to say, even as he’d said to… oh.  The black-haired girl was his image of Her.  Even as he’d said to the Goddess with him.  “Please.”

#40 - An Alien Creature Far From Home

“What’s an elephant?” That was Ahrizael, like my crown prince, a bit younger than Ahrimiar.  He had a huge glass of blueberry juice in one hand and a deep fried cebolla, dropping crumbs, in the other.

“A tribe of creatures… not human… from so far west you couldn’t see their lands if you stood on a promontory and stared through a seeing glass…” Ahrimaz turned aside to Yolend who was closest.  “Do you have seeing glasses?” Upon her shrug he turned back to the little boy.  “… and stared as hard as you could, you’d not see it.  Elephants have a hand in the middle of their faces, on the end of a long, long grey nose, and two long, long teeth on either side of their mouths, pointing up, not down, like war cats.  Two of their ruler’s youngsters came with a Rigan ship to visit our lands and I really, really wanted to keep them.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Well, they were young, right?  And their ruler wanted them back.  The Rigan captain assured me that these two were small.  They grow big enough to reach the chandelier up there without trying hard.  I didn’t want to start a war with creatures that big.” Ahrizael’s eyes grew very round, trying to imagine a creature that big wanting to fight.  “So one of them… his name was Jagunjagun, gave me a ride on his neck, around Innéthel.  It was…” he paused, then shrugged.  “…amazing.”  He bit into his pie, finishing it up in three bites. 

“He still writes to me, or did, now and then.  Not in Innéan, but in picture inks that they press onto a dried-leaf paper.”

Pel was staring at him suspiciously.  “Elephants.”

“I swear, it’s as I said.  Though it could have been the monkey-man who came with them who spoke ten languages who might have been translating for them, who – in truth might be the intelligence behind them – writing.  Personally I thought there were about as smart as Sure here.” Ahrimaz offered his gravy-sticky hand to the dog to be licked clean.  “Their 'translator' was so dark that he makes Yhom and Imaryans look sickly pale.”

“It sounds terribly un-aggressive for you,” Yolend said and leaned on one elbow to sip her wine.  “Especially if they couldn’t get word back to their people.”

“I thought of it.  I considered keeping them and sending word that they’d died.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I… don’t recall.”  Ahrimaz stared down into his juice.  The older of the two elephants had been injured by some crazy hill people bowing to neither Cylak or Inné, and even his physician hadn’t been able to  help.  “I sat with Jagunjagun’s friend while they were in Inné… actually heading for Riga-Dham to take ship and go home.”  Didara had been bigger than Jagunjagun and had laid down in the emptied stable, on the straw, with a groan and a rumble that had shaken him to his hands and knees.  He’d known, somehow, that she was grateful for the place to rest and he’d sat, ignoring politics, ignoring everything but sitting in the crook of her foot, just under her chin, staring into her enormous eye with eyelashes as long as his fingers as she’d wept in relief, and then later in pain.

“My physician, Etienne, assisted Didara, while they were in Inné,” For all the good it did. There had been one spearhead missed and that ultimately killed her.  Jagunjagun wept on me when she died.  He sipped his juice, breathed in more of the smoke from the censer though it didn’t seem to be able to touch real grief.  “Then I wished them well and waved them home.”

“Interesting.  We should send expeditions to the Elephant’s Countries.”

“You’d find a lot of interesting things,” Ahrimaz said, thinking of Didara’s gilded skeleton standing in the central hall of the House of Gold, and was surprised that  he felt warmth welling out of his eyes.  “I don’t want to bleed—“ and saw a single clear tear on his hand. He set his cup down with a click and threw his hands over his eyes.

At last.  True tears. For an alien creature lost and dead far from home. “It’s all right, Ahrimaz.  We will think no less of you.”  That was the old man speaking and that undid him completely.

#39 - Even Without Elephants

Scorching son of a bitch bastard found me standing on the threshold of the cell.  Unable to make myself go outside. By myself.

Pelahir set his shoulder against the hall doorframe and crossed his arms but didn’t say anything.  Ahrimaz felt as though he chewed and swallowed live coals but wasn’t going to let him see his weakness. He turned away from the door as if he'd just been thinking of what to write next, set his pen down, pulled up a smile on his face and stepped out.  “Let’s spar, shall we?”

“Certainly,” he said and smiled back.  “You know that you can leave if you want to?” Scorch him.

“Of course.  Wenhiffar told me so.  She also mentioned that there are hordes of raconteurs waiting in the outer rooms of the House, eating our food, writing their stories here rather than in the Broadsheets’ offices.  How many broadsheets’ and newspapers and book printers do you have?”

Ahrimaz fell in beside Pelahir and they strolled up to the salle as though they were the best of friends.  Ahrimaz’s hands itched with the need to lay them on the man, clutch him, hold him, hurt him, love him. He wasn’t quite sure which was the strongest impulse and to hide his twitchy fingers knotted them tight in the small of his back, as if he sauntered along in a garden, or along a folly walk.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught Pel’s glance and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.  “You’re attracted to me and Yolend both,” the Cylak said quietly.  “It’s all right.  Neither of us is going to jump on you, hold you down and ravish you.”

“You mean like I did your counterparts in my world?” Ahrimaz asked harshly.  “The week before I woke up here I’d just started torturing you and had given Yolend a black eye.  Shashi, poor blighted thing, would run screaming from me if I came into the room and startled her.”

“Just as you say ‘I am not him,” we can say ‘we are not them,” Pel responded and held the door of the salle, the disrobing antechamber, open for Ahrimaz with a courtly wave of his hand.  “Yolend would kick your ass if you tried to lay a wrong hand on her.”

“And you as well.” Ahrimaz said.  “And Shashi would say something that would likely throw me on the ground wailing.” He smiled, more than a little grimly.  “That is surprisingly reassuring.  However I got here, I got put in a place where not only am I not allowed to harm anyone else, I’m not able to harm anyone else.”

Pelahir hung his brocade coat and waistcoat on a hook by the door.  It was the first time Ahrimaz had actually seen him in full Innéan court garb rather than his own country’s leathers and feathers.  “What’s the occasion?”

“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?”

“Forgotten what?  And why is the salle so ashing dark?” He stepped from the disrobing room into the dim salle and just had time to gasp before a flint struck in the dark and a candle flared. Then a dozen candles.

“A small surprise, you Shithead,” Pel said from behind him as he gaped at brothers, wife,  lover, father, mother, healer, teacher… he wrapped his hands around his head and sank to his knees in silence… his children all held candles illuminating their faces.  “You’ve forgotten your own hoofless birthday.”

Limyé handed off his candle to be placed in the great candelabra with the others and Arnziel cranked it up, creaking, swaying and flickering to light the room from above.  The healer wrapped his arm around Ahrimaz’s back where he crouched.  His hands came down off his head and grabbed onto the floor as if his fingers were claws and his head swiveled back and forth like a bewildered war cat, as he took in the feast spread on low tables in the middle of the salle and the training river set as a trickle of gentle noise behind it all.  “Breathe,” Limyé said softly, holding a censer under Ahrimaz’s nose.  “Breathe in calm and peace.  Everyone here is of good will toward you.  No one blames you for anything.”

“They can’t love me.  That’s not allowed,” Ahrimaz rasped but the sweet smoke fuddled his senses, and everything was taking on a rosy tint.  Edges were softening. “I’m not him.”   

Limyé offered him a sugar chip and he took it, automatically.

“We know that. But we are allowed to like you.” Ahrimaz was vaguely aware that Pel had taken hold of his elbow and he and Limyé were steering him like an errant paper balloon to tether him to a cushion at the main table.

Everything seemed so… nice.  So calm.  The children, giggling, didn’t enrage him.  It was funny and he began to giggle himself.  “You’ve drugged me!”  It was so funny.  He wouldn’t be able to bear it if he weren't floating on the fuzziness of the drug.  The little girl he’d met in the snow danced around the outside of the room, all black and white and red, carrying his beating heart in her hands, but she was smiling and she was being careful with it.  He couldn’t help smiling.  It was so beautiful.

He could feel the pain he lived with, every day, the jagged wounds and pus-filled bags of filth in his head and in his heart, but it no longer seemed so immediate.  Someone handed him a plate of food that he stared at for what seemed like forever.  “My favourites!” 

“And there will be petit-fours for after the meal,” Wenhiffar said.  “You’re not my son but you have his tastes, it seems.”

“I’m not supposed to indulge myself like that… like this… this is for babies.” But he gathered up a butter-crust meat pie and bit into it, finding that it had venison and red wine gravy. He couldn’t keep talking with his mouth full so she… and everyone else just kept on talking.  It was so… pleasant.

“Babies generally get it right.  It’s grownups that mess up their heads,” Rutaçyen said, waving a blue-painted rattle toy over the baby’s head.  She had the new baby in her lap.   

Ahrimaz just gazed at her, sitting next to her twin, with the child and he couldn’t howl, he didn’t want to weep.  It was beautiful.  The memories of the maggot-ridden dungeon faded then faded again like a painting hit by flood and dried in Aeono's sun.  This just felt good.

People had the new broadsheets out and were reading bits to each other, Ahrimiar the younger, the Heir, his alternate's boy, finger tracking along the line bravely read out “.. the family says that this man is their son, for as long as he is in our world.”

“And so it is,” Ahrimiar the Elder said.  “Happy birthday, Ahrimaz, my other son.” And that didn't hurt either.  He wasn't even afraid of the old man, when he was in this state.

“I should be angry that you drugged me,” he said dreamily to Limyé, “but this is helping.  It’s letting me remember how to feel good again.”

The girl with his heart in her hands smiled and held her hands up over her head.  Ahrimaz suddenly realized that no one else, save Arnziel, could see her.  He caught Arnziel gazing at her with astonishment.   

The blood in her hands poured down over her and flowed away in the river, while his heart hovered there, under one of the little waterfalls, being cleansed and purified.  He took a deep breath and saw it begin to glow, just slightly, while in his chest he felt an easement as if a whip lesion had kindly, tenderly given way to whole flesh and unmarked skin.

 
He took another bite of his pie, licked the gravy running down his hand and smiled at Arnziel’s slightly stunned look.  “I think this is going to be the best birthday party I’ve ever had, even without elephants.”