The Hanged Man: Part 7: Beltane
Post #65: In which people and meaning lost are found again ...
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RAPUNZEL
One day, Rapunzel noticed Maria had taken apart some of her work, reducing the piece on the loom by nearly half. It had looked flawless to her own eye, but she supposed Maria had her reasons and refrained from comment. The next day Rapunzel found a new color in the pattern, a dark bruised purple paired with a lighter, more playful violet shade.
Alexander’s eye was open. It still made her shudder, carrying it and touching it privately so often in its dark pocket, if it was open.
After her meeting with Maria and her mother, she felt more inclined to believe the open eye was a message to her, a sign to watch for something or someone. She’d followed its guidance surreptitiously since she and Maria left the lake town. She was glad it seemed to want to the follow the river with Maria.
Now it had remained open ever since they’d left the lake town. Not once did she find it closed. It never slept. Its unwavering alertness made her uneasy. Once she arrived in the lake town the eye slept off and on, as though relaxed, making her feel she was in the right place and all was well. Why was it so vigilant in this place?
When she looked at Maria’s weaving and the thin, wandering threads of mingled deep purple and violet, she felt the same unease. There was something unsettling about it. It was like an itch in her mind. The colors didn’t seem to go with the rest of the pattern, and yet were integral, she could see that. They must be there. The textured, nappy white background wasn’t white, exactly, but a creamy, organic color, unmistakably that of the White Stag. The flowing borders of brown and green and a touch of blue were river, bog, frog song. The clear pink was the crown of blossoms the White Stag had worn that first evening and Juliana herself, like an animated flower in the evening mist in her rose-colored skirt and pink shirt. Thin gleaming gold and silver hairs could hardly be seen and at the same time were impossible to overlook. And that wandering, weaving, inexorable purple thread. Was it menacing or playful? Rapunzel didn’t know. But it made her uncomfortable.
BRUNO
Bruno watched from his perch in the tree. His anger with the intruders simmered a little hotter every day. The woman with the dark knot of hair was not so much in evidence as the young one with her ugly cap of yellow. A woman’s hair should be long and curl and cling, shining silver and gold in the sun, like Juliana’s. He hated the short-haired woman. He hated her competence in the garden. He resented her frequent laughter and her physical affection with Juliana. She wasn’t fit to touch his woman. It wasn’t her place to spend the summer days with his woman.
With all his being he wished them gone, these interlopers. They ruined his pleasure in the hours watching and waiting for a glimpse of Juliana. They bathed and did laundry, worked in the garden, lounged in the sun, cleaned out the henhouse. He saw them dressed and undressed, at play and at work, and remained unmoved. He would rather see Juliana come out of the house and draw water from the well for three minutes than watch the woman with the ugly short hair bathe naked in the river for half an hour.
He told himself he’d wait until they departed, find other things to do and watch no more, but he couldn’t stop himself from stealing through the trees every day. He told himself he’d just check to see if she was alone again and spent miserable hours watching anyway when he found she wasn’t.
It was ruined. Nothing ever came right for him.
MARIA
Rapunzel and Juliana planned at breakfast to spend the day working on the chicken coop. The roof leaked and the fence was inadequate against foxes. Rapunzel borrowed a ragged pair of overalls and Juliana tied up her hair in a brightly flowered dishtowel stained with berry juice. They assembled hammer, nails and chicken wire and left Maria to finish her work.
She sat for a time with the finished cloth draped across her lap, feeling peaceful, satisfied and pleasantly remote. After a little she left the loom and went outside to hand Rapunzel nails, silent but glad to be with the other women as they worked. She picked up a shovel and began the dirty job of cleaning the floor under the perches, shoveling straw, manure and feathers into a wheelbarrow. Gradually, she joined in the conversation.
Rapunzel announced she was hungry and called a halt. They sat in the sun and ate cold meat, bread, and fresh greens.
“I’m finished,” Maria said quietly.
“I want to see,” said Rapunzel at once.
“Tonight.”
Filthy but pleased with themselves and the newly reinforced chicken coop, they stripped off their clothes and let the river wash away sweat and dust. Juliana nursed a sore thumb from a miss with the hammer.
When they were clean, they sat in the grass and dried naked in the sun, leaving their clothes where they’d dropped them.
“We’ll do laundry tomorrow,” said Juliana lazily. “They can lie here for the night. As if in agreement, the cat appeared, kneaded briefly in the heap of clothes, and lay down.
Clean, clothed and refreshed, they gathered around the loom. Maria’s weaving lay draped over it.
Without a word, Juliana picked it up and took it out into the evening light.
Maria knew it was one of the best things she’d ever done. It was also unlike anything she’d ever done. She waited to see what they’d say.
Rapunzel and Juliana bent over it, tracing patterns with their fingers, feeling the texture. Juliana picked the weaving up by two corners and swung it behind her and over her shoulders. With one hand, she freed her hair from under it and let it fall in its usual glorious tangle.
She laid her hand against Maria’s cheek. “This is the most beautiful piece of weaving I’ve ever seen. I’ll treasure it the rest of my life. Thank you.”
She stood proudly with lifted chin, and the blend of colors and patterns wrapped around her as though she was a queen. Maria never forgot the sight of her, clothed like a bride in the pattern of her own life.
That evening, after they’d eaten and put the kitchen to bed, Rapunzel showed them the eye.
She set it on the table. It rolled and came to rest, the eye looking at Juliana. Maria was both fascinated and horrified.
“Rapunzel! You’ve carried this all along?”
“Yes. I reach into my pocket and touch it many times a day. Most evenings, when I’m alone, I take it out and look at it. It has power. I’m not sure how to use it yet, but I’ll learn.”
Rapunzel looked at Juliana, who sat as though paralyzed by the gaze of the blue eye. “I’m trying to understand why the eye is open here. I’m afraid for you. I think maybe it’s a warning of some kind. When I look at the purple thread in Maria’s weaving, I feel the same way I do when I think of this open eye. Something about it seems wrong. No, not wrong. It seems so right, that color and thin thread in the pattern. Right but scary, something frightening around you.”
“I don’t know what that purple thread is,” said Maria slowly. “I had a clear picture in my mind of the pattern and I was well into the weaving before I realized something was missing. I don’t like the thread either, to tell you the truth, but it needed to be there. I had to take what I’d done off the loom and begin again with this in it. The color doesn’t go with anything else but at the same time this part of the pattern goes with everything else. I can’t explain.” She reached out and traced the wandering purple in the weaving lying over Juliana’s shoulders like a shawl.
Juliana sighed. “Rapunzel, move that marble, or eye, or whatever it is so it’s not looking at me, will you? I don’t want to touch it and I can’t think with it staring at me.”
Rapunzel poked at the eye and it rolled slightly so it directed its gaze into the table top.
“Thanks.” Juliana settled the weaving around her shoulders and leaned back in her chair, relieved.
“You know what I think of when I look at this purple thread?” she asked Maria.
“No. What?”
“I hear the sound of a flute,” said Juliana with an apologetic smile. “It’s not the green fluting of the frogs here,” she pointed to the blended bands of green and brown with their hint of blue. “It’s a…mmm…more playful sound, a joyful sound, but it moves. It wanders, like the pattern. It’s like a bird call you might hear from a distance, moving closer and then farther away. Mysterious and attractive.”
“Yes,” said Rapunzel. “I know what you mean! That’s the lighter color, I think. I feel that, too. That part doesn’t bother me. But there’s something underneath, something darker and more menacing — isn’t there?”
“So, is it one thing with two faces or two things that somehow go together?” asked Maria.
“You tell us,” said Rapunzel.
“I can’t. Do you think this is what the eye sees?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s your life,” said Maria to Juliana. “What do you think about it all? Why are we guessing?” She felt cross.
Juliana ran her fingers over the shawl’s folds. Maria and Rapunzel watched her silently, aware of unspoken words hanging in the air.
“There is something!” said Rapunzel. “Tell us.”
Juliana looked up with a hint of defiance. “But there’s always something, isn’t there?” she asked. “That’s life.” There’s always a thread somewhere in everybody’s life that doesn’t work quite right, or is painful or even actively threatening. I’m not special.”
“You are to us,” said Maria.
Juliana’s face twisted and Maria realized with amazement she was trying not to cry.
“Juliana?”
“Oh, all right. It’s a bit of a story, though.”
“Tell,” ordered Rapunzel.
“Well, you know I came here after I stopped waiting.”
The other two nodded.
“I ran into the White Stag and then I found this place and it felt like home.”
They nodded again.
“There’s a village nearby. It’s a pretty place but the people are…simple. Very God-fearing.”
Maria winced.
“Everyone goes to church. There’re a lot of rules. So, I come along and I don’t go to church. I’m a woman alone, no man, no children. Nobody knows where I’ve come from or anything about me. I don’t dress the way they think I should and my hair is like an insult.” She smiled mischievously. “I must confess I enjoy that part!”
Rapunzel giggled.
“I find this place and it suits me. There are a few others living here outside the town, all outcasts, people who don’t fit in. I can’t do anything like this kind of work,” she smoothed the weaving again, “but I love to weave linen and I’ve supported myself with that. I take my work into the market and sell or trade for what I need.”
“These aren’t bad people, just limited. After I settled here, I started a kind of private game of giving my work away anonymously. I would hear about a wedding at the market and drop off a set of linen sheets for the marriage bed. If I heard of an impending birth, I made a gown or two, and provided some sheets and pieces for the birth and the baby. When someone died, I left a shroud. I like to lay those over the lavender and rosemary bushes so the scent folds into them. Nobody knows it’s me. The villagers think they’re some kind of a gifts from God because they’re so devout.”
“Oh, Juliana!” said Rapunzel.
“I know,” said Juliana. “It started as a small contribution I could make. I didn’t think they’d accept the gifts if they knew they came from me.”
Maria remembered her village, the heads of the old people together, whispering, condemning, judging…
“I bet they don’t even know your name,” she said shrewdly.
Juliana looked down into her lap.
“They call me ‘the woman with the silvery gold hair.’”
“What about the others in the forest?” asked Rapunzel. “Have you made friends among them?”
“No. Some are hunters and they wander from place to place, never truly settling down. Some are quite poor and have too many children to support. They live in poverty and ignorance. The charcoal burner and his wife and son live here. The charcoal burner’s son is rather a problem.”
Now, thought Maria, we’re getting to it.
“A problem how?” she asked.
“The charcoal burner’s a brute. He’s a big, rough man. I hardly ever see his wife and when I do, she’s always bruised and cut. They have a son, a young man. I think he probably had a hard time growing up. He never looks battered, but he’s the same size as his father now. He slouches around in the forest and has a disconcerting habit of appearing suddenly in my path. He’s…friendly.”
Maria made a sound of distress.
Juliana looked up quickly. “It’s all right,” she assured. “I’ve made myself clear. I’m years older than he is. I think more than anything he’s attracted because I’m clean and colorful and happy. He’s never seen a woman like me. He probably wants a mother figure more than anything. He’s not very bright. He never learned anything growing up.” She glanced at the eye on the table. “I always carry my knife.”
They’d seen the knife. It was razor sharp and she wore it under her clothes and used it frequently in garden and forest.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” said Rapunzel. “Is this the purple thread?” She turned to Maria.
Maria looked at Juliana.
“It might be,” Juliana said reluctantly. “But don’t forget, it’s only a thread. The White Stag is a much bigger part of the weaving, and the river and bog, and the blooming trees. This is only a small part wandering through. I said before, everyone has something like that in their lives.”
“Are you safe here, Juli?” asked Maria.
“It’s my home. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
“But you’re so alone!”
“I have what I need,” said Juliana stubbornly. “The White Stag is nearby.”
With that they must be content, Maria realized. Rapunzel picked up the eye, rolling it thoughtfully in her palm.
***
Once the weaving was finished, Maria began to feel an urgency to continue her search. She wanted to see the sea. It was time to leave.
Yet she didn’t want to leave Juliana.
She talked with Rapunzel, who intended to stay longer. Juliana herself said she’d be pleased for them both to stay indefinitely, but understood Maria’s need to move on.
Once her mind was made up, a few days of preparation passed quickly and Maria found herself standing in the sun embracing Rapunzel, and then Juliana, and then Rapunzel again, with her pack on her back and the long summer day in front of her.
***
Maria crested a low hill and found the sea. The air looked milky with humidity, the sky pale and blending into muted green and gold land, and there on the horizon the sea lay like a gently palpitating blanket of pearly mist. She left the winding river course and struck out in a straight line toward it.
It was farther away than it looked. As the sun climbed, the color of the day intensified and the mist burned off. The coastline was rocky; bluffs and cliffs took shape as she neared them. The sun felt warmly comforting and then hot. Maria’s clothes hung damp and her skin grew sticky.
On she went, determined to see waves meet land. She didn’t think of finding her sons. She was conscious of no plan and no hope. She only wanted to get there.
For a long time, she stood looking out over the water. She’d put aside her bundle and stood with bare soles. Waves creamed up over rocks and between her toes, feeling sticky and somehow heavy against her feet. It was quiet except for the ocean’s sough, like the breathing of a great beast. Nothing else moved, not even a bird. She felt like the only living human being in the world. An irregular line of drying plant matter — seaweed, she thought, marveling — and debris lay on the shingle above where waves lapped. Under her feet lay smooth stones, bits of shell, now and then a piece of wet wood, and scoured pieces of broken stuff she thought must be glass. Was this sea glass? The colors were muted and cool, grey and tan and pale water colors with a tinge of pink. Stone and shell and wood. Milky colors. Cool neutral colors for a large rug in a room flooded with sun. It would be fun to use different weights of wool to provide subtle texture under a bare foot.
She wandered, seeing patterns, lulled by the waves, her mind empty of everything but each moment’s sensation. The sea sighed to her left and the rocky bluff rose into a cliff on her right. Hidden in a fold of the cliff she found an opening like a wide shadow. A cave.
She approached it over dry, smooth sand that coated her bare wet feet, stepping out of sunlight into cooler air. There was a strong smell of sea and underneath it another smell, something familiar. It was only a tang, gone before she could identify it. She walked forward, wondering if the sea reached this far and washed in and out of the cave. The crack widened. Rocky walls moved farther apart and she wondered how she could see — why she could see in a cave. Was there an opening overhead? Walking forward, she looked from side to side and up, but realized the light wasn’t daylight but a dim flickering light that released shadows more than it illuminated.
She turned a corner and found a fire burning and a huge squatting black iron kettle. The figure of a woman with a mass of matted hair down her back turned to look at her, turned smoothly, glided with a muscular coiling movement that wasn’t human at all, and Maria saw pendulous breasts, a sharp outthrust chin reaching up to meet a bony nose, and below raddled, puckered, sagging skin on the upper body the thick smooth form of a snake ending in a blunt tapering tail like a flaccid thumb.
It — she? — brandished a slender pale stick with shreds of dark material clinging to it. “The One Who Weeps, as I live and breathe! And as you live and breathe, too!” She cackled. “I’ve been waiting for you. Every day I take a little drink, a special little drink of your tears. They stain the sea, yes they do, stain the sea and coat the tongue and I dip them out, one by precious one, and roll them in my mouth!”
The thing leered and moved forward with sinuous motion. Maria stood still, her own mouth puckered and dry with horror as though she herself had been drinking salt water. Her eyes fixed on what the creature held. Every muscle in her body cowered and clenched. She groped with her mind — what was it? What word named it, that slender object with an obscenely rounded end and dark shreds hanging from it? Her heart pounded and squirmed in her chest, in her throat, like a panicked thing, and still she couldn’t name what her eyes saw, but she must, she must recognize it and name it and understand…
The creature casually brought it up to her mouth and gnawed at it, sucked at it, ran a scabrous tongue over the curving end, and Maria thought, Bone! It’s a bone! That’s it — a half-gnawed bone! In the same instant, she understood the fleeting odor at the mouth of the cave. It was blood, of course. Blood and rotting flesh. A distant scream began to rise from every cell of her skin, from the delicate fronds of each nerve, from the powerful smooth muscle coiled and hanging like fruit in her belly, from the sponge of her lungs, while a logical, cool detached voice in her head said, ‘Chicken? Beef? Pork? Fish?’ Then the scream swept aside that voice, obliterated it in a wave of metallic horror and she knew, she knew…
Greedily, the thing watched her face, feeding on her confusion, her fear, and the rupture of her last defenses. It threw back its head and shrieked with laughter and that laugh severed Maria from consciousness. She pitched forward gratefully into nothingness.
When she became aware again, she heard, “Now, what did I do with my pretties? What did I do? Where are you hiding, my daubs and dobies? Come to Baba, my beauties! Come to my hand, naughty ones!”
Maria opened her eyes and saw the flickering light and shadow of firelight. Her cheek lay against sand. She closed her eyes again, retreating into dullness, numbness, darkness. She wouldn’t wake up. She wouldn’t. She would lie here until she died and refuse to think anymore, see anymore, feel anymore.
“There you are! There you are, my pretty taws!” The voice crooned and Maria heard a gentle clinking sound, like pebbles being stirred. She wondered if this thing would kill her and hoped so. Perhaps it would kill her and eat… but her mind shied away. Mustn’t think of eating. Mustn’t think of anything.
“Ha! There you are, my ducks! You and you…yes, yesss, you two as well! The rest of you go back to your bed and sleep and wait…. waaiitt. Your time is yet to come.” Again, Maria heard the clinking and then a soft thump like a small weight being tossed onto the sand.
“Sit up, girl. It’s too late for quitsies now. Too late. What’s seen can’t be unseen. What’s known can’t be unknown, no, no. Pandora’s jar is opened. Bluebeard’s chamber is unlocked. And you needn’t think I’ll help you escape. The Lamia eats children, Weeping One, the children of women. I’ve eaten my fill — for now. You’re not a child and you stink. You stink of burnt offering. What use are weeping and wailing and searching and seeking? An easy life, that! A cowardly life!”
Maria sat up numbly. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. There was nothing left to lose now, no place left to hide. Pretense and defense alike had been swept away by the sight of the Lamia chewing on one of her son’s bones. Grief and penitence and self-loathing had cushioned her for a time from what she’d done, but the Lamia was right. Her long search, her restless wandering and endless weeping were a sterile martyrdom healing nothing and making up for nothing. She felt too weary even to hate herself. It was over and she felt hollowed out, emptied.
The Lamia glided close, held out her closed hand. Her nails looked like iron claws. Maria extended her palm and felt four small, round objects dropped into it. She closed her hand around them, rose clumsily to her feet and left the cave without another word.
(This post was published with Edition #65 of Weaving Webs and Turning Over Stones.)