The Hanged Man: Part 3: Samhain
Post #23: In which we enter the bathhouse ...
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The bath house was a low wooden structure, about three times the size of Timor’s hut. Three windows looked out under a thatched roof, shielded with wooden shutters. There was a lock on the door but Timor merely lifted the handle and walked in. They stood in a small anteroom. Pegs were driven into wooden walls over a rough bench. A pleasant, astringent scent Morfran couldn’t place lingered in the air. Against an inside wall a black iron stove crouched on an apron of stone. It radiated a faint heat, as though recently used. Timor went outside and came back with an armful of wood. He adjusted the draft and put a dry piece onto the bed of ashes. At once it began to smoke and Timor gave a satisfied grunt and shut the stove door, leaving a gap for air while the fire caught. He began to remove his clothes.
The old man was only slightly larger than Morfran, with shoulders and arms hard and thick with muscle. His body looked younger than his bearded face. Morfran thought he was not as old as his grandfather. His grey beard and one eye aged him. The hair on his body was brown mixed with grey.
Morfran too began to disrobe. Timor opened the stove door, revealing fiercely burning kindling. He filled the box with wood and shut the door, firmly this time. A neatly folded pile of linen sheets lay on the bench and Timor took two of them and walked through a narrow wooden door of thin planks into the next room.
Apart from the stone wall behind the stove, this room was also entirely lined with wood with wide shelves tiered against one wall. The stove was part of the wall and Morfran saw, on this side, a reservoir full of water and several large, flat stones. A bucket sat on one of the shelves next to a bottle with a crude wooden stopper. Timor picked it up and removed the stopper, revealing the source of the astringent smell. He took Morfran’s hand, held it palm up and poured a few drops of oil into it.
“Birch oil,” he said. “Rub it in.” He gestured towards Morfran’s hip.
It smelled fresh and invigorating, reminding Morfran of peppermint. Cautiously, he rubbed it into his hip. At once it warmed him and he massaged gratefully, feeling the ache ease. The room grew warm as the stove began to radiate heat. Timor stretched himself out on a wooden shelf. Morfran, curious, opened a door opposite the one they’d come in from the antechamber. Here was a plunge pool. He wondered if the bath house was built over a spring. The water seemed to be moving gently, as if flowing at depth. He dipped his foot into it. It felt icily cold.
In the sauna, the air was thick with heat. Timor rose, took the bucket to the stove and trickled water onto the stones. They hissed fiercely. The room filled with steam and the scent of birch oil. Morfran lay down on a shelf, breathing the hot, scented air gratefully. He’d missed wearing nothing but his own skin. He began to sweat, feeling the grime and fatigue of his long travel leaving him. His hip felt numb and peaceful. They lay quietly for some minutes, soaking in the heat.
Then Timor sat up, swinging his feet onto the floor, took up the bucket and passed into the next room. Morfran followed him. Timor stooped and filled the bucket from the plunge pool, then turned, and before Morfran knew what was happening, sluiced him from head to foot with cold water. Morfran let out a yell of surprise and anger. Timor smiled beneath his beard.
“Better to do it fast,” he said. He set the empty bucket down and bent, putting a hand on the floor at the lip of the pool, and vaulted into the water. He slid all the way under and just as quickly pulled himself out, streaming. He filled the bucket, drank, gave it to Morfran to drink, and then returned to the sauna and splashed more water onto the stones.
Once again, they lay down in the steam.
The second time Morfran took charge of his own bucket of cold water and the third he sat on the edge of the plunge pool, letting his feet and legs dangle and splashing himself with icy water. He found the combination of steamy heat and cold water both energizing and cleansing. In between visits to the plunge pool, he worked birch oil into his hip and the muscles in his low back and thigh, feeling pain release him entirely.
During each immersion in the plunge pool Timor stayed longer. His skin flushed pink as a girl’s and his clean beard curled in the steamy heat. “Next time you come in the water,” he told Morfran. “Not first time. Get used to it first.”
Morfran lost count of how many times they repeated the cycle. At last, it was time to go. He watched Timor carefully bank the stove, close and latch the shutters they’d opened for light, hang up the linen they’d used and make sure the doors were firmly shut. They dressed themselves and left the bath house, stepping into sunlight and the smell of cold, damp forest.
“Tomorrow we cut wood,” said Timor.
***
Morfran lacked Timor’s strength and skill with an axe, but he learned to help trim branches off felled trees and cut slim white trunks into logs. Timor cut wood for the bath house, so they spent one day there, making a neat stack of logs near the door. Morfran asked who else used the bath house, but Timor pretended not to hear.
They cut wood for Timor’s stove as well, and Morfran, having watched the art of stacking carefully, patiently worked for some days to lay in a big supply. Timor, in the meantime, moved deeper into the forest to cut wood to sell.
Morfran found working with wood, though hard labor, was meditative and mentally relaxing. While his hands were busy, he let his thoughts drift and take him where they would. He considered everything he’d learned about his family and himself. He thought often of Creirwy and the doomed creature Bluebeard. He thought of Ceridwen and Bald Tegid and Bala Lake and he wondered where Dar was now. His young body recovered from the fatigue and stress of travel and he felt strong and well again. The bath house was a luxurious pleasure. Timor gave him two wolf skins to pay him for his work and Morfran pieced together a coat and mittens for himself. They were clumsy, but warm.
It was winter now. Nights were long and days of snow were interspersed with cold grey days of damp chill that sank into bones. Morfran grew to love the birch forest. It possessed a kind of delicate wild beauty. It was an uncanny place. The straight, slim white trunks marched away in every direction, but the forest seemed full of eyes and ears, as though waiting and watching, alert and expectant.
One day Timor put a round slab of wood made from a cross section of a thick tree on the floor. He rummaged in his bedclothes and withdrew a skin bag. Beckoning to Morfran, the old man knelt next to the slab and tipped out the contents of the bag.
Marbles, glowing like jewels, rolled in every direction. Morfran gasped.
“Marbles!”
Timor grinned like a boy and asked, “Can you play?”
“I can,” Morfran assured him, remembering Dar with fondness.
“Can you play Bounce Eye?”
“No, but I know Ducks in a Pond.”
Timor demonstrated the game of Bounce Eye, and after that they played often. Morfran always lost, but he was fascinated by the marbles and Timor’s delight in them. It was the only time the old man approached anything like animation.
Morfran longed to know how a solitary woodcutter without a coin came by such a collection of treasure, but every time he was at the point of asking, something about Timor silenced him.
Day followed day, and then week followed week, and Morfran cut and stacked wood, cut and stitched at the wolf skins, ate and slept and visited the bath house, feeling something drawing steadily closer.
One night he dreamt of the Firebird again. It was very close. Its glow filled the dark night like a flame and flecks of golden light scattered in its path like sparks. Dark, intelligent eyes looked into his own and it opened its beak as though to speak to him, but the sound that issued from it was a ghastly eldritch shriek that raised the hair on Morfran’s neck. Morfran couldn’t make himself believe the evidence of his eyes and ears. Either he wasn’t really seeing the Firebird or he wasn’t hearing the Firebird! It seemed impossible the beautiful golden creature could make such a sound.
The wolf skin he lay on stirred and he came fully awake, heart pounding and the shriek still ringing in his ears. Had he dreamt the Firebird or was it there, somewhere in the dark forest outside? Had he dreamt the shriek or was it real? What on Webbd or out of it could make such a sound? How real the movement under him had seemed, as though the wolf skin answered the scream in the night! Timor breathed regularly and peacefully in his corner. Morfran silently threw aside his blankets and rose, pulling on his clothes and taking his coat from its peg. Quietly, he let himself out.
Cion had set and Noola was dark. The air felt like icy water. Looking up, the glitter of starlight dazzled him, magnified and reflected by white tree trunks. It was a night of silver and ice. He turned in a slow circle, looking with wonder into the night sky. He realized suddenly it was the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. There were tears in his eyes, but he didn’t know if it was the night’s beauty or the cold that brought them there. In a blur of tears, he saw golden sparks. He blinked, clearing his vision. Golden flecks of light glowed like a fine vapor between the trees. The Firebird! He broke into a clumsy, lurching run, following the sparks. A sound overhead, a sweep of air, an eddy of warmth against his cheek, and he looked up and saw an enormous bird like a golden flame with jeweled wings and a long trailing tail. It circled around him, weaving in and out of tree trunks like a dancer.
“Oh, it’s you! It’s you! Creirwy!” he cried, his voice lost among white shining trees in the vast starry night. He felt broken open. He followed the Firebird, walking among golden flecks of light, smiling and weeping with wonder.
It flew ahead of him, circling. He didn’t think about where it led him. He didn’t care. He would gladly follow it all night, and all the rest of his nights as well. But it didn’t take him far. In its glow, he recognized the bath house ahead. Warm light seeped between the cracks of the shuttered windows, but when he put his hand to the door it was locked. His hand didn’t believe, and he lifted the handle harder, put his shoulder to the door. It didn’t move. What did it mean? He looked up at the Firebird, perched on the roof, and it looked steadily back at him. Marceau’s voice came to him, “A key implies a lock…”
He groped underneath his coat and pulled the key from a hidden pocket he’d made in his clothing. He put it in the lock and it turned easily. He lifted the handle and entered.
The air was warm. Golden light glowed from the empty sockets of a skull sitting on the bench in the antechamber. It watched the door, grinning. With a whoosh of air, the Firebird flew past his shoulder into the antechamber, filling the room for a moment of flashing wonder, and then it slipped through the door to the sauna. Morfran, following it, saw it flash through the door to the plunge pool, and as he pursued it, he saw it fold its wings against its body and dive straight into the water, leaving a shower of golden sparks behind it. Without hesitation or thought, Morfran took three steps from the narrow door and threw himself into a graceful dive behind it.
The expected shock of icy water didn’t come. He dove through dark air as though cleaving through water with the Firebird in front of him. He gasped with fearful wonder. Whatever happened, wherever they were going, it was meant. It was his path. The Firebird took him where he needed to go.
He felt his speed slacken, as though the air grew heavy and thick. He fell into dim white shine and glimmer, and still the Firebird was ahead, trailing golden flecks of light. He fell gently onto damp leaves and found around him the graceful trunks of countless slim white trees. He was in the birch forest again. He got to his feet. The Firebird was gone. For a moment, he felt utterly desolate. He’d come full circle. Was it just another dream? He turned, looking for Timor’s hut, but it wasn’t there.
A grating cackle slashed the silver night. Was it laughter? Indescribably harsh and raucous, filled with dark and terrible humor, it rent the clean night air. It made Morfran want to cover his ears and hide. As it died away in the still air, he became aware again of the forest’s tension. It vibrated around him. He could hear it humming, like a great heart beating, a great, cold, silvery, icy heart in this endless night… But wait… Morfran took a step forward, throwing back his furred hood, listening. There was a heartbeat, a sound, a rhythm! Was it a…? Yes! He heard a drum!
He followed the sound. He remembered Marceau’s drumming, filling the wet grey dawn, reverberant and sonorous as the sea. This was a cleaner, crisper sound, like sticks breaking, a sharp tapping. Now he heard a sound of something stringed, too, a silvery harp-like music.
He saw a clearing in the trees ahead. He saw movement. He saw…
He saw a circle of dancers, tall and lissome, as if trees uprooted themselves to dance. The figures wore flowing white robes with hoods cast over their heads. Their feet were bare. They swayed and revolved, seeming hardly to touch the cold ground. Under a tree at the edge of the circle was the drummer. She squatted obscenely, naked knees wide, her exposed sex a dark shadow. Between her feet sat a skull and she played upon the dome of its head with two long sticks that looked like bones. Thick claws tipped her hands. A tangle of wild hair covered her head. Her pendulous breasts swayed. She threw back her head and let out that terrible cackle again, ending in the feral shriek of his dream. Morfran, concealed behind the trunk of a tree, leaned his forehead against the cold bark, shuddering. Then the gentle sound of the stringed instrument flowed through the night, soothing his horror, and he looked again into the clearing.
One of the anonymous figures fingered a stringed instrument, the sound of it weaving in and out of the sharp tap of sticks on the skull. For a moment Morfran saw Ceridwen clearly in his mind’s eye, sitting at her loom, weaving warp and weft, and it seemed to him the birch forest itself made a loom and the dancers and music wove their own inscrutable silvery warp and weft…
He heard a sound behind him and turned, putting his back against the tree. Something moved among the tree trunks some way off, something huge, as tall as the trees. As it drew closer, he heard enormous footsteps moving in time to the music.
From behind him another shriek split the night. “Come, my chickens! Come, my blackbirds, my little fish, my poppets, my daughters!”
Twirling and dancing among pale trunks, Morfran saw a pair of huge chicken legs. Perched on top of them was a hut.
He was so stunned by this bizarre sight he didn’t even feel fear. The round-topped windows on either side of the door looked exactly like eyes and they glowed with warm light, but the legs — the hut — it— ignored him altogether and danced. Morfran stayed where he was next to the tree, seeing the legs needed to stay in open spaces between the close trunks in order to dance. The chicken legs bent and stepped and the hut with its golden eyes swayed. Stars glittered down through bare branches. Morfran turned and found the circle of dancers whirling and moving together, beckoned by drum and strings.
For a moment, he felt a wild impulse to step forward into the circle and join the dancers. The icy night, the dancing hut on chicken legs, the hooded and robed dancers and the hideous, terrifying old woman playing a hypnotic rhythm on her macabre drum stirred something deeply hidden within him, called his name in some familiar but long-forgotten way. He wanted to be part of the dance, twisted and lurching as he knew himself to be.
The figure playing the stringed instrument stilled its fingers and the notes ebbed away. The figure ran on bare feet to its place in the circle.
The tapping of the drum stopped. The old crone stood and hurled the drumsticks straight up into the air, shrieking as though to wake every creature in the forest. Morfran waited in vain to hear the sticks fall. The sounds of the dancing chicken legs, which had moved around the circle from Morfran’s vantage point, quieted. The drummer pulled another skull from beneath the shadows under a tree and squatted once more, now with both skulls in front. She held up her hands, arms extended. Morfran saw the dark shapes of long nails at the tip of each finger. She licked the palm of one hand, and then the other, and reached between her legs with each hand in turn. She began to drum on the domes of the skulls with her cupped hands.
They made a surprising deep, resonant sound, catching vibrations like skins. The drummer settled into a strong, mesmerizing rhythm. The circle of dancers moved, tentatively at first and then more strongly, more passionately.
One of the figures reached up and threw back its hood, releasing pale, flowing hair. In a single sinuous movement, she loosened the white robe and flung it away. Morfran caught his breath at the sight of a white-skinned body, proud breasts, high buttocks and strong legs.
Another hood was flung back, but a clot of grey hair fell out, and as the robe was flung aside Morfran saw leathery wings flex and stretch from the dancer’s back, saw thick membrane attaching arms to trunk and barbed hooks instead of hands. He saw a concave bony chest like that of a starving old man, another clump of dark hair over the sex, and sinewy legs.
The drumming quickened. All the figures now flung back their hoods and threw aside their robes. Flowing hair, buttock, nipple, white skin caught starlight and tree light and the figures were beasts, creatures of nightmare, violent hybrids of wild animals and women.
In the center of the circle another dancer flung aside a robe, revealing a fall of hair, shoulders of marble and milk, taut breasts and below the cup of navel, the body and tail of a snake. She raised her face to the starlit sky, tongue flicking in and out, tasting. She swayed on her coiled body, undulating with the drumbeat.
In another part of the circle a dancer dropped down onto hands and knees with a thick, proud tail, pricked ears, a furred pelt. She — it? — swung around to face Morfran’s hiding place and teeth gleamed in a snarl, blazing eyes reflecting amber light. He looked into wolf eyes in wonder and as it held his gaze it stood on hind legs and he found himself gazing into the amber eyes of a naked woman with silvery dark hair.
He realized then they were all beautiful women. Or they were all fantastic beasts. They danced. The drum beat in his blood, behind his eyes, in his groin, against the soles of his feet. They danced, shifting. He saw tusks, wings, fur, feathers, talons, tails, beaks. He saw hands trailing white sparks like stars, hair, and moonlit flesh.
He stood watching the kaleidoscopic scene as though transfixed. The night seemed infinite, endless, timeless, a deep center of power. His heart pounded and he found himself gasping for air. He felt the way he had that first morning in the sea, utterly overwhelmed and shattered.
Then, without warning, the drumming ceased. The dancers stilled and Morfran saw with dazed eyes each figure was once again robed and hooded. The forest was utterly silent and still. The sky was silver, but not with starlight. Glowing tree trunks faded into pale columns. It was dawn.
“The light returns,” said the drummer quietly, and Morfran remembered again the past night was the longest night of the year. A new cycle was beginning.
The hag stood, skulls tucked under her arm. Hairs on her chin snarled with hairs in her nose in a sticky curdle. She climbed over the edge of what looked like a gigantic iron cauldron, dropping the skulls with a clatter and taking up a thick rod as tall as herself with a round knobbed end. She gave a sound or word of command and the cauldron rose through the tree tops. The sky turned silvery pink with the coming sun. The chicken-legged hut stood some way away in the trees. The old woman flew over it and tore the new morning with her terrible scream.
“Come!” she commanded, and the chicken legs turned and carried the hut out of sight, following her. The sound of her harsh cackle died away.
(This post was published with this essay.)