The Hanged Man: Part 3: Samhain
Post #20: In which we realize other stories led to ours ...
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It didn’t rain that morning but the sky hung sodden, thick with humidity. They built up the fire and the hollow under the cliff warmed. Morfran felt chilled through and sat wrapped in blankets. The old man left him there and returned to the sea, reappearing shortly with several fish and seaweed. Morfran pulled out his cooking pot, put in some water and cleaned the fish, cutting them up into the pot. His grandfather showed him the seaweed, made him smell it and taste it, told him how to best find it, and they added that as well. This they let simmer over the fire. The old man retrieved his drum from the ruins.
Though naked, he didn’t seem to feel the cold and refused a blanket. He was scarred all over, one of the consequences, he told Morfran, of living in the sea. Webs of skin grew between his toes but otherwise he looked like a normal man, though he wasn’t large. Around his waist he wore a chain of gold links.
Morfran felt himself to be in chaos. He wanted to ask a dozen questions but was unable to articulate a word. He was Morfran of Bala Lake. He was Morfran and the sea called something in him to life. Now he was Morfran and he was grandson. He was grandson. He’d come home at last but he couldn’t find a sense of joy or reality. All was unfamiliar.
His eyes fell on the drum and the old man, seeing the direction of his look, handed it to him. The frame looked like curved bone, finely crafted in a wave-like pattern that mingled birds and fish. Carved pegs of the same material held the drumhead taut over the frame. The skin was something he couldn’t identify, neither goatskin nor calfskin. Tentatively, he tucked it into the curve of his right arm and struck it with his left cupped hand. He liked the sound. He tightened the pegs and got a cleaner, less vibrating note. He loosened the pegs and it gave a deeper, more resonant sound. He liked this best and played a couple of different rhythms, alternating parts of his hand and the force with which he struck. For a few minutes, he was absorbed in making friends with the instrument and when he looked up again into the old man’s face, he felt calmer, more like himself.
Without thinking, he said, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
The old man smiled. “That drum in your hands is made of bone that supported living flesh. Now that same bone is supporting a shark skin, and together they create music. When I play the drum, I play my own song intermingled with the song of the creatures from which the drum is made. The bone is still bone. The skin is still skin. But they’re transformed into something new. Nothing is lost. Last night the drum and I played the night sea’s heartbeat, the clouds, the new day and the cycle of life and death. Together, we sang. At last, I released your mother from my grief, and something new comes to take her place.”
“You didn’t know, then?” asked Morfran.
“I knew nothing. She left here and I never saw her or heard of her again. All these years I’ve waited and wondered and grieved and watched over this place because it was the last place she was. When I came upon you in the night and watched you sleeping, I wondered… I hoped… but I didn’t dare believe until you opened your eyes and I recognized my own eyes. Then you told me of Bala Lake and I knew.”
Morfran sighed. “I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t brought you grief. “
“You bring me a great gift of release. Now I’ll no longer be in doubt and fear for her. And you bring me the gift of yourself, a greater gift than I dreamed of. Even her return wouldn’t bring me such joy.”
And then, for the first time in his independent, self-assured life, Morfran thought, Will I be good enough? Will I please him? Will he like me?
With his eyes on the fire, he said quietly, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m lame. My leg is twisted.”
For a moment, they were silent. The contents of the cooking pot simmered gently and sent a salty appetizing smell of fish and seaweed into the damp air.
“I don’t know if you realized it,” said the old man slowly, “But in the water, I possess a tail. I’m not human. I don’t live on the land. I’m of the sea people. I can change my shape.”
“But I can do that too!” said Morfran.
“I noticed,” said the old man dryly.
Morfran looked up and the grey eyes, so like his, were alight with laughter. He laughed too, though his eyes burned with tears.
“What’s your name?” asked Morfran, wiping the tears from his face and smiling, for the question sounded ridiculous to his own ears.
“Ah, yes, I haven’t properly introduced myself, have I?” laughed the old man. “I’m Marceau. Your mother’s name was Melusine. You may call me Grandfather.”
After they’d eaten the savory soup, they set out along the beach to collect more driftwood. The day continued to press down, heavy and damp. They walked in companionable silence. The ebbing tide left pools among stones. Marceau crouched over these with Morfran, pointing out sea creatures and naming them, describing something of their habits and suitability as food. They made their way back to the fire, dragging driftwood along in their wake, and settled down again.
“You would hear of your family, Grandson,” said Marceau.
“My mother. I long to know about my mother,” replied Morfran.
“Your mother is one half of your parents, but you possessed another parent with a shape and a story.
“He killed my mother with his brutality. He was an evil man. I don’t want to know about him.”
“Nevertheless, I begin with the story of your father’s parents, your grandparents. A child isn’t born evil. Didn’t you ever wonder why your father turned toward evil? Never mind. I see you haven’t. Listen.”
“Your grandparents lived far to the North, in cold water where the seals live. In this place lies a scatter of islands and on one of the larger islands a few hardy people settled. Your grandmother came from fishing and farming folk who lived in a harbor village. Wresting a life from sea and land is harsh work, but for generations your mother’s people did so. Life revolved around seasons, weather, tides and fish.
Your grandmother was fair and beautiful, like many of the people in that part of the world. She was strong and tall and used to hard work and she loved the sea. She was the only girl among brothers — I’m not sure how many, but I know at least one of her brothers was lost at sea. Naturally, the work of the household fell onto her and her mother while the men went to sea. The men of that place worked on land, growing food and tending sheep or goats, and went to sea as well with nets and lines. It was a hard life. Spring comes fleetingly so far North, and summer lasts only a few short weeks. Can you imagine how welcome those weeks were after long cold winters of storms and ice and lantern light, heavy peat smoke from fires that never stopped burning, and fear for the safety of men bobbing about on the water chasing fish?
One summer when you grandmother was a young woman, she took a lover. No one knew who he was and she wouldn’t name him, but there was evidence, you see, that couldn’t be hidden. It remained a mystery, because none of the likely young men stood up with her in her shame, and there’d been no hint or rumor, not a word of talk. In such a small place with so few people it was remarkable that no one guessed. One of the young men of that place wanted her, a lad with a reputation as a fine fisherman. He intended to ask for her hand in marriage and he’d saved money for some time so he could build her a little stone house of her own. When word of her trouble came to the town, he approached her family, declared his love and said if she’d accept him, he’d marry her immediately and give the child his name.
Well, it was the best choice the poor lass could see. She was exposed before everyone, but at least she’d be properly wed and give the child a name and family.
She was a strong woman, your grandmother, and she told me her husband was a good man who loved her true and never made her feel dirty. They spent the rest of their lives together, in spite of…well, everything.
So, they wed and hastily built a stone house on a hill above the harbor looking over the sea. They owned a handful of sheep and a bit of land. Your grandmother knew well how to make bread and ale, clean and card and spin wool, sow seed and reap corn, clean fish and help mend nets. All in all, they began married life comfortably.
Early in the spring on a night of storm a healthy son was born. Men were lost at sea that night, but not your grandmother’s husband, for he paced outside the house while the midwife attended the birth, though the child wasn’t his.
So, years passed. Your grandmother’s husband went to sea and came home, went to sea and came home. Barley, oats and corn grew in golden waves there on the hill. They sheared sheep, brewed ale, baked bread, made cheese and gathered honey. There were lean years and better years. The child, who was your father, grew strong and throve and your grandmother tried to be the best wife and mother she could and live down her youthful shame. In time people forgot the little boy’s origins. I don’t suppose your grandmother ever forgot, though.
She worked hard but now and then she’d take an afternoon or an evening to herself and walk along the shore. She loved the seals and sat quietly watching them as they lazed among rocks in the sun. They didn’t seem to fear her and sometimes allowed her to come quite close.
Now you must understand, Morfran, that fisherman and seals are not friendly. A seal will rip holes in nets and steal fish, creating much work and hardship for fisherman, and it is, as you can imagine, an unequal contest. Some fisherman, though, were quite handy with their harpoons and much admired in the village for the number of seals they killed, and the sealskins helped earn a little money. Your grandmother’s husband was one of these, and because of his skill in seal hunting they lived more comfortably than some of the others did.
But your grandmother had no quarrel with the seals and they didn’t fear a woman on land as they would a man on the sea.
This is what the village could see. But when your grandmother was an old woman we met and became friends, and now I’ll tell you what the village didn’t see.
Morfran, your grandfather was a selchie. Do you know this word? A selchie is a creature who is a man upon land and a seal in the sea. One summer day your beautiful young grandmother, in some hidden threshold place where land met water, met a selchie and gave herself to him. He was a leader of that race, a king, and he wore a chain of golden links. He possessed great dark melting eyes and smooth brown skin and black hair. He wasn’t a large man, for the selchie folk, like my people, like you yourself, Grandson, are dark and small and strong. He was young and passionate and for her he embodied the violet and green mystery of the sea. He must have seen her as a goddess embodying the opposite mystery of the earth. Her beauty was the golden fire of ale and honey, green fire of growing corn, dark fire of peat. They could no more turn from one another than the sea can draw away from land or land refuse sea’s caress. And so, your grandmother gave her wild heart to the passionate sea creature and conceived your father.
Their time together wasn’t long and when they parted, she didn’t know she carried a child. It made no difference, of course. He couldn’t live as a man on land and she couldn’t live in the sea and so that was that. She kept her secret well. Selchie don’t raid nets and lines as seal folk do, but she feared every seal in the sea would be slaughtered if anyone discovered her lover. To a fisherman a seal was a seal, whether raiding nets or not. So, your grandmother and the selchie parted.
When your grandmother found a moment to steal away from her busy life, she always made her way to the places she knew seals frequented, especially the place where she and her lover had lain together. She was respectably married and loved her good fisherman, but she never forgot what she’d shared with the selchie. That passion was a thing apart from her married, everyday life. Then, one day, they found each other again. She told him she’d born him a child, a son. Your father was a youth then, and she a married woman of several years. I suppose the selchie, too, had aged and changed. Your grandmother said little about that meeting and I respected her silence, but I hoped it was a good reunion.”
Marceau smiled sadly into the fire and Morfran, watching his face, hoped too that his grandmother and grandfather had once again found a brief hour of passion together.
“Now,” Marceau resumed, “In the meantime, of course, your father, who was called Guy, learned to fish and care for sheep and sow and reap and all the skills his adopted father could teach him, including using the harpoon. That last skill required strength, speed and accuracy and your father possessed all three. As the years passed, he began to go to sea with the fisherman and gradually took on more and more work on the land as well. He was popular, learned how to dance, competed good-naturedly with the other lads, flirted with girls and entered manhood.
The family was relatively well off with two healthy men working hard and Guy’s skill with the harpoon augmented their income with skins and fish too large to be caught with line or net. The only lack was that there were no other children. Your grandmother never conceived again, though she and her fisherman lived in respect and affection and their relationship was no barrier. She told me after the selchie no other could stir her passion or her body so deeply as to conceive new life and she felt content, but she wished she could have given her fisherman his own sons. It wasn’t to be.
Now, her family and indeed all the village knew your grandmother felt an unusual love for seals. As I’ve said, they saw something of the traitor in this preference. Her son and her husband refrained from openly boasting of their seal harvest and didn’t butcher and skin seals at home, but rather in the harbor where she wouldn’t be distressed. She’d repeatedly begged her husband to never kill a seal that wasn’t raiding nets and he’d repeatedly reassured her he wouldn’t. She trusted him, having no reason not to, and told herself her lover would be safe, as the selchie, as I’ve said before, don’t raid nets and lines.
But two men together in a boat in company of male neighbors and friends are not the same two men who sit by the kitchen fire with wife and mother. Any group of men engaged in dangerous and difficult work becomes a brotherhood and no woman, no matter how beloved, can belong to that brotherhood or indeed understand it. How much stronger is a brotherhood woven of generations of family and tradition and tragedy and loss? Every family in that place had lost a son, or a brother, or a father or a husband to the sea. Some families sacrificed a man in every generation, and some more than that. For them the sea was life and death, lover and killer, beautiful and terrible. Fish was food in their mouths and the mouths of their children. Seals stole fish and destroyed the means of catching them. Therefore, seals were enemies and to be killed on sight. It wasn’t cruelty, but a hard pragmatism learned with bitter experience.
And so it was one day, an ordinary day in spring before sowing time when birds sang of golden weeks to come, your grandmother sat outside spinning in a patch of sun. Up the hill came her husband and son. She never forgot how he looked that afternoon, your father, fine and strong and laughing, proud of his youth and his skill, dark hair shining in the sun. He came to her and tossed into her lap a chain of golden links.
“A gift for you!” he said, full of pride.
She picked up the chain in trembling hands. She remembered long after the way the gold glowed, so fine and beautiful, and the contrast of her hands, a burn on her thumb, calluses from water pails, scars from harvesting tough grain. Peat stained every crack and fissure in her skin. Her nails were broken and ridged. For the first time, she told me, she felt aged. Her youth was gone and her beauty with it and she hadn’t known until that moment.”
“It wasn’t true, of course. When I met her, she was an old woman and I fell in love with her myself. I think she was more beautiful in her last years than she’d been as a young woman. But I think she never thought of herself as beautiful again after the day her son, all unknowing, killed his father and her lover, the selchie king. Your father was nineteen years old.”
Morfran hid his face in his hands. His grandmother. His grandfather. His father. He was filled with pity.
“Now you begin to see,” said Marceau gently.
“There’s not much left to tell. Your grandmother tried to show delight and pride in her son’s skill, but the blow was too great. Some part of herself was slaughtered along with the selchie. She didn’t blame her son. He couldn’t know. She couldn’t blame them even for breaking their promise to not kill a seal unless it raided a net. She understood. Yet she couldn’t hide her terrible grief. And she dared not explain. She and the fisherman had been married in peace and contentment for years. To bring up that old disgrace again, to remind him of what happened before their life together was more than she could bear. And what of Guy? He’d no idea in the world the fisherman was not his father. To find out after all it wasn’t so, and that his true father was a creature out of myth and legend, a creature out of the sea he strove against for life and livelihood, and to find he himself had murdered the one who gave him that life? She couldn’t do it. She dared not do it.
It changed everything, of course. She aged terribly, and lost her joy. Guy turned sullen and silent, as young men do when they’re hurt. He turned away from the stone house and spent time in the harbor with the other young men and women, drinking too much, staying out too late, taking more risks at sea. The fisherman felt he’d lost them both, wife and son, and didn’t know why. Two or three years later he died. A storm blew up while he was out fishing. He’d failed to read the signs in sea and sky, though he’d always done so before. He’d gone too far out and was fairly caught. He made it home by some miracle, but he was exhausted and wet through. He went to bed and never left it again.
Guy, your father, possessed a friend who had family here on the southern coast. The two young men decided to leave the island and come here, to a new country and a new coast, and find lives for themselves. Your grandmother came with him to make sure he was settled with a roof over his head and the means to earn a living. They loved each other, Guy and your grandmother, but your grandfather’s murder stood between them like a wall.
Your grandmother had never left her island before. She loved to walk along the shore, especially at dawn and dusk. I used to see her. She made a lonely figure. She was tall and graceful, even in old age. The gold of her hair faded, but she liked to let the wind blow through it. We usually stay away from land people, but something about her compelled me, perhaps the same thing that once compelled your grandfather. At any rate, one day as she passed I made myself known to her. We became friends and she told me her story.
Guy liked the place and settled down well enough, making new friends. He was handsome and skilled and once he learned the fish and sea in this part of the world he got along well. She wasn’t worried about him but she wanted to make peace with him before she returned home. I think she feared she might not see him again, and she couldn’t bear their estrangement. She blamed herself, of course, for keeping the secret all those years, but it’s hard to see another choice she might have made.
At any rate, I counseled her to tell him. Her husband was dead and couldn’t be hurt. Guy was far away from the community where it happened and a man grown, no longer a boy. I told her every man has a right to know where he comes from and it seemed to me better to grieve over the truth than over something he didn’t understand. None of it was his fault and in time I felt certain he’d see that.
So, she told him. I think she hoped they could find their way back to their old relationship but that didn’t happen. Still, she felt relieved she’d told him the truth of it. She feared she’d lost him, but hoped when he had a chance to think it over and spend some time in the world shaping his own life as a man, perhaps loving a woman, he’d come back to her with his old affection and respect. But at the time he felt bitterly betrayed and she thought it best to go home and let him work his feelings out with the help of time.
She left, then, to go back to the island and a life alone. I never saw her again. She must be long dead now. I don’t suppose she ever saw Guy again, or knew she had a grandson.”
The sea sighed against the shore while Morfran thought about his grandmother. Somehow, in his curiosity about his true parents, he’d never considered their parents, and the parents beyond them.
“Grandson, do you realize I hunger to know about you the way you hunger for your parents?” asked Marceau. “The first chapter is told of what I can tell of your family. Will you tell me more about yourself before you sleep?”
Morfran hadn’t considered this aspect of the matter, but he stretched out next to the fire with a rolled blanket under his shoulders and head, shut his eyes, and returned in his mind to Bala Lake. Without plot or plan, he described scents and sounds and sights of home, letting memories drift across his mind as they would. He found himself telling the tale of the Cauldron of Inspiration and Knowledge and Gwion and the events of that fateful day on which he was to at last taste the first three drops of the brew. He described the long winter of Ceridwen’s pregnancy and the family’s grief. He told of her decision to give the baby to the sea and the peace that came with it, and he remembered the smell of blood, the laboring woman’s groans, the incredible miracle of watching new life emerge from the womb and of the babe in his hands, the thick twist of umbilical cord still anchoring it to the darkness from which it had emerged. Then he told of how they’d made the coracle and Ceridwen’s plan for the child. He recounted her solitary journey almost in the same words she’d used to tell her story to Bald Tegid and Morfran when she returned.
Now he’d come to Creirwy’s part of the story, but he was deeply relaxed and sleepy, warm and comfortable by the fire and comforted by revisiting his home and family in memory. He felt ready for sleep. He pushed himself up on his elbow and realized, to his surprise, Marceau was weeping.
Marceau smiled. He put up a hand and wiped his cheeks. “Your foster mother has great courage,” he said simply. “It touches me and it touches on the next part of my story about your mother and father. But that’s for tomorrow. I think tonight we’ve talked enough. It’s good to give new discoveries time to settle. This morning you possessed no grandfather and I’d only just realized I’d found a grandson!”
Morfran realized in amazement the truth of this. It felt as though several days had passed since he had watched the figure launch itself into the grey sky above the cliff and dive into the sea.
“Will you take me into the sea tomorrow?” he asked impulsively.
Marceau laughed. “Tomorrow I think the sun will shine. I’ll take you into the sea. You must make friends with it in your real shape and then, though we haven’t spoken of your gift of shape shifting yet, I think perhaps you’ll find it not so difficult to wear the shape of your people.”
Morfran’s mouth fell open. For the first time, he understood the full implications of his relationship to the man beside him. “You…” he stammered, “I…”
“Yes, Grandson,” said his grandfather, chuckling. “You’re of the sea people and the selchie people. The sea is your home as much as Bala Lake. It’s time you were introduced to it. Sleep now. I’ll come back to you in the morning and we’ll talk more.”
The old man rose to his feet and bent, taking Morfran’s face between his palms. He kissed him on the forehead. “Sleep well, Grandson. Look for me in the morning.”
He turned and stepped out of the firelight. Moments later Morfran heard a splash. Then he heard only the breathing sea and burning fire. He rolled himself in his blankets and slept.
(This post was published with this essay.)