The Tower: Part 1: The Tower; Part 2: Mabon
Post #1: In which the fruits of solitude ...
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PART I THE TOWER
The Card: The Tower
Balance of creation and destruction; communication
The lighthouse stands on cliffs above the sea. The hidden ones built it, those among their people who shunned the world aboveground weaving the tower’s roots from stone, and those who had made friends with the Green World raising the round walls around steps spiraling into the sky.
The sea and stony cliffs were ancient lovers, and the builders found seams like mineral lightning, fissures frosted with dendrites, small crystal vugs and fossils locked within the stone. They flaked, split, chiseled and carved, adorning the tower inside and out.
As the hidden ones removed stone from the cliffs, the sea crept into new places, stroking and fingering. The rock gave way, shuddering, accepting the invasion, consenting to the shaping, and the sea hollowed out a round gate of passage linking the tower to other places.
They built the lighthouse in the center of a web of sky, sea and stone; at the top a platform embraced the warning light guiding sailors and other wanderers in the darkness. The sea’s voice vibrated eternally in the stone. Webbd’s stars and moons crept across the night sky above the tower. Seabirds like a handful of flung salt wheeled in the constant wind breathing around it in the milk and honey light of Yr, the life-giving sun.
A keeper came to the tower from the sea, a collector of dreams and fancies with a heart full of singing words. He was a sea creature who loved the land and its people; he wove stories and tales and faithfully kept the light showing others the way.
For a time, he lived in the tower, suspended between the elements, and visitors came from the sea and land to speak and to listen. The tower and its keeper provided balance and harmony and clarity. Water, stone, air and fire wove together into Webbd’s fabric by the tower’s light. Stars and quarried stones murmured to one another during long nights sonorous with sea and wind.
Then the keeper was gone.
Empty, the tower waited.
PART 2 MABON
(MAY-bone or MAH-bawn) Autumn equinox, the balance point between summer solstice and winter solstice. The second of three harvest points in the cycle, a time to complete tasks, measure success, give thanks and prepare for winter.
The Card: The Hermit
Inner truth and wisdom; stillness; withdrawal and rest.
CHAPTER 1
PERSEPHONE
In the end, Persephone took nothing but a few clothes and her dumbek.
She’d planned to pack more. After all, she’d have lots of time, time to herself to do whatever she wanted. She could read, or learn something new like…like…oh, anything! Tie knots, for example. She could learn to tie every knot there was, become an expert tier of knots, famous, rich, independent, respected! She could make a whole new life, create a new Persephone no one had ever met.
She liked the idea of Hades discovering gaps in their living space where she’d removed a picture, an ornament, a rug or a favorite piece of pottery. She relished the hurt each discovery would give him, the wince, the way the lines in his face would deepen as he felt the pain of her loss again.
But he’d never suffer as she’d suffered. He’d never feel what loss really was. What did loss of life mean to him? He existed because of death. He was death. He was steeped in it, made of it, and she’d been a fool to think life could come from death. Life was life and death was death and one canceled out the other. In the end, death was stronger. What Hades was mastered and controlled everything she was. His presence made the Green World’s light and life cold and dead. If she’d stayed with her mother, stayed to dance the joyous dance of harvest, wrapped herself in a blanket of abundant grain and fruit, stayed under the life-giving sun, her womb wouldn’t now be a shriveled wasteland.
But she’d made her choice. She’d given up the Green World for love, for some naive idealism that found the Underworld a necessary and lovely part of a whole. Now her harvest from that idealism was death. Hope, joy, laughter, physical rapture, new life, all came to death.
So, she decided to leave before death took the last thing she possessed -- her own life. She would flee, go back to the Green World where she belonged, but not home to Demeter. She didn’t want her mother. She wanted no words, no comfort, no helpful concern or concerned help. She wanted to be alone, where no one could find her. She felt sick to her bones of stories and passion, hope and fear and the false promises of love and family. She wanted nothing from anyone, only to be left alone.
Part of her still lay on her bed, the bloody sheet beneath her and thighs sticky and stinking as the child slipped out of life and into the Underworld. Part of her still lay seized by the cramping pain, the numb despair, the powerlessness of loss. Yet she’d risen, washed, eaten, drunk, and gone about her work, refusing to look at the memory of Baubo carefully wrapping the stained sheet around a lump of bloody tissue.
One of the first stories she’d heard after getting back on her feet came from a soul who’d been a lighthouse keeper. He’d been swept off his lonely rock by a storm-driven wave, smashed his head against an unyielding stone cliff and left the lighthouse fire to burn out and the mirror untended. He’d cared about his work, taking quiet satisfaction in guiding mariners and saving lives.
Before he finished his story and she’d asked, “What would you like to do now?” she’d known she would go to that remote lighthouse in a high rocky place where the sea pounded and the weather struck. It was the refuge she wanted. There she’d be safe. There no one would find her.
She didn’t want the dumbek, couldn’t imagine a use for it and resented the effort of taking it, but somehow it was impossible to leave it behind. Suddenly overcome by apathy, she turned her back on the fine, fierce imaginings of Hades’ suffering and left everything in place. Unless he opened her wardrobe, he’d never notice she’d left. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She took one last look around her at the place where she’d known such hope and happiness, and fled.
RAPUNZEL
Harvest ebbed into winter while Rapunzel learned to speak with the drums. Winter in the birch forest with the Rusalka was timeless. It might have been one winter in what she thought of as the real world, or it might have been a winter encompassing a year or more. The forest was sentient, a huge being made of uncounted trees and the life among them. A bathhouse plunge pool acted as a portal between the birch forest and other places, including Rowan Tree, the small community which had taken Rapunzel into its arms. Rapunzel had gone through the bathhouse portal several times with the Rusalka, forming the impression of layers of birch forests, each exactly the same (or was it the same forest?), the portal like a staircase between them. The same bathhouse, or did each layer have its own? She didn’t know. She accepted magic’s inscrutable nature. Sometimes Baba Yaga was present with her chicken-legged house, but she too might be in one layer or each of them.
When winter numbed the forest the Rusalka left the tree canopy and returned to the water as merwomen. Rapunzel couldn’t shapeshift the way the Rusalka did. Her friend, Morfran, was a shapeshifter and half merfolk, as well as mate to Sofiya, one of the Rusalka. Vasilisa, another friend, was also part merfolk, though the only shapes she could take were human and merwoman.
Rapunzel could wear the aspect of ugliness at will, thanks to Baba Yaga, but she remained in a woman’s shape. When the Rusalka were elsewhere Rapunzel stayed in the little log cabin in the woods where Morfran had taken her the first night she’d arrived.
The cabin suited her. It was rough but solidly built. Rapunzel quickly mastered splitting wood and Morfran supplied her with firewood and taught her to manage the stove. He and the Rusalka hunted and Rapunzel had learned something about finding her own food from Lugh back at Rowan Tree before she left. It seemed a long time ago now, another lifetime in a faraway place.
The cabin was equipped with a rough mattress of bracken and leaves and a pile of strong-smelling skins, primarily wolf. She ate at a wooden table, with a couple of stools, a plate, a bowl, a spoon, a cup. In spite of the rude surroundings, the place reminded her of the stone tower of her adolescence. Here she was free and there she’d been a prisoner, but the solitude of the place echoed that of the tower.
She was not displeased by this. She liked her own company. She was fascinated by the Rusalka, respected them, learned what she could from them and gladly joined her power with theirs in dance and music, but she luxuriated in her time alone as well. Morfran felt like a kind brother, friendly, helpful, vaguely protective, but emotionally remote.
In the tower of her maidenhood, Rapunzel had been surrounded with diversions and activities. Here in the winter birch forest, she need do nothing except keep the fire going and stay warm, or visit the bathhouse for a steam and a soak. Rapunzel practiced her drumming every day, losing herself in contemplative rhythm, her thoughts wandering freely. Many hours a day were empty of doing.
In the winter birch wood Rapunzel came fully into being. This process was aided by the forest itself. In the purity of solitude and nothing in particular to do, Rapunzel found her intuition sharpened to an almost painful degree. She became aware that every step she took was absorbed and recorded by the forest. She could feel its intelligence, its interest, its purposeful life. A tree, a winter rabbit, a bird, a skunk -- each formed part of an enormous complex system, a live being.
It was odd, she thought, this shifting perception of boundaries. She’d learned from her mother Elizabeth the interconnectedness of all things, but it was a rote kind of learning. She could express interconnection in language and intellectually knew it to be true, but the complex experience of it hadn’t become palpable until now. Elizabeth herself had lost sight of interconnectedness when she separated Rapunzel from the world. If Elizabeth hadn’t been so afraid of loneliness would she have seen the ultimate futility of locking Rapunzel away?
Here in the woods a skunk was clearly not a tree. A chickadee was not a bare tangle of bramble. Yet Rapunzel could feel some deeper level and layer of connection, a more complete understanding than the visual discernment between one being and another. The forest was made of hundreds of different forms of life, but at the same time it was one being. She felt sure of it, though she couldn’t explain it. Were boundaries real, then? They must be, on some level, mustn’t they?
She thought often about Dar. She felt glad no one could ever know how often he came into her thoughts, especially Dar himself.
Rapunzel had left Rowan Tree with Morfran, the Rusalka and the old woman, Heks, on an early fall day. Heks had come through the Rowan Tree portal after her, but Rapunzel hadn’t seen her again. The portal must have taken her somewhere else. At that time, Lugh; his twin brother Dar; and Mary, Lugh’s very pregnant mate, had been making ready to leave Rowan Tree in Dar’s wagon. Dar had been vague about their destination, telling Rapunzel he took Lugh to a meeting and Mary to a safe place to give birth. Then he’d return to Rowan Tree and help the little community through their first winter. “And wait for you,” had not been said aloud, but she’d heard it nonetheless.
She’d left Rowan Tree to learn how to drum from the Rusalka, having developed a fierce desire for the skill during an evening of women’s dance led by the Rusalka themselves, old Baubo, and Ginger, a newcomer to Rowan Tree.
Her desire for the drums had been real. The act of drumming revealed parts of herself she’d never known and enhanced her power and energy in extraordinary ways. However, it was also true she’d felt relieved to have an excuse to leave Dar.
He disturbed her. He saw too much and he made her feel what she didn’t want to feel. The more she enjoyed his pointed wit, his sly but accurate observations, his outrageous teasing and his nimble brain, the more she resented him. He fascinated her. He infuriated her. She disliked him more than she’d ever disliked anyone and his kiss had the power to disturb her peace for days. Yet something about him compelled her. Reluctantly, resenting her own reluctance (why did she care enough to be reluctant in the first place?) she’d suggested they leave Rowan Tree together, take the road wherever it led through the harvest landscape, free and unfettered. Let people think she was his woman. Why did she care?
Curtly, he’d refused, informing her coolly they would both stay at Rowan Tree for the winter and leave together in the spring. Irritated, resentful, rebellious and flattered in swift succession, Rapunzel ended the conversation without committing to this plan, but she privately looked forward to it, not without trepidation.
She told herself and him the invitation was careless, a lark, an uncomplicated week or two as easy companions. Nothing more. But she knew what would happen if they left together. She denied it, even to herself, but she knew. She didn’t want that to happen. Not really. But what would it be like if it did happen?
In the midst of this indecision and confusion the dance had occurred and Rapunzel gladly allowed herself to be seduced by the drums and dancing. On the point of staying at Rowan Tree, waiting for Dar’s return after dropping off Lugh and Mary and exploring what might come after, she drew back, asked the Rusalka to teach her and decided to leave Rowan Tree for a time.
Dar had shrugged carelessly, wished her well and said casually he still planned to return and spend the winter, then set out in spring with anything the community had produced to sell or trade and a list of necessities to buy.
She knew he waited for her.
What did he want from her?
What did she want?
She wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t about fear, but about boundaries. She didn’t want entanglement, at least not in a way she couldn’t control. She knew without doubt she couldn’t control Dar. Another man, perhaps, but not him. Boundaries again. Boundaries weren’t about fear, but about…independence. Healthy independence, nothing to do with fear. She wasn’t afraid to go back to Rowan Tree and see Dar. She simply wasn’t ready yet. She needed to learn about her own power, her own life.
One night Rapunzel rose up through the plunge pool from the winter birch forest where she and the Rusalka danced on a floor of silver ice and frost. The Rusalka rose with her, tail, fin, bare breast, flowing hair like leafy branches. Suddenly the dim water filled with starry points of light, as though the swimmers were suspended in a cloud of cold fireflies. The lights flickered and wavered, some shining bright and others dim. Rapunzel looked around her in wonder, as she rose to the surface of another pool in another place, or maybe not. Maybe, after all, they sank into the same plunge pool and rose again, over and over, into the same winter wood.
When Rapunzel had pulled herself out of the pool with the others, she saw someone had joined them, an old woman, lean, spare, completely unremarkable. She looked like every old woman, yet Rapunzel recognized her thin hair, her lined face. The old woman’s eyes gleamed, as though capturing the reflected starry light from the water. As Rapunzel watched, the lights dimmed and faded and the plunge pool looked depthless and dark again. The old woman opened her hand and cold light glowed from a handful of round gems or stones she held. The light struck the old woman’s face from below, casting strange shadows that reminded Rapunzel of firelight or torchlight.
“Heks?”
“Yes. It’s me. I want to talk to you.”
“Me?” Rapunzel felt surprised. She’d hardly spoken with Heks, though they’d traveled together with the others to Rowan Tree, led by Dar. Heks, being a midwife, had cared for Mary on that journey. Rapunzel and Cassandra, the half-mad seer she’d rescued from a mob, had met Dar, Lugh and Mary in a village and joined the group.
Heks said little to anyone. She was pleasant, matter of fact, and had a trick of rarely being noticed. Rapunzel remembered Heks had implied some prior relationship with Baba Yaga. Rapunzel had entrusted her ex-lover Alexander’s blue-eyed marble to Heks before leaving Rowan Tree, not out of friendship but out of a feeling that Heks was the rightful keeper.
Now, the Rusalka took no notice of Heks or Rapunzel. Some stayed to relax in the plunge pool and others lay in the sauna. Rapunzel knew they’d spend the rest of the night there.
“I’ll take you to my place,” she said to Heks, and led the old woman through the sauna and anteroom, out the door and along the path through the trees to the log hut.
Inside, Rapunzel gestured wordlessly to a wooden stool and put the battered teakettle on the stove. She pinched up some precious tea leaves and let them steep in her single cup, setting it before Heks and sitting on the other stool.
Heks poked at the floating leaves with a finger, watching them soften and uncurl in the hot water. She pursed her lips slightly and lines sprang out around her mouth.
“Where did you go?” asked Rapunzel, irresistibly curious.
Heks looked up, her mouth relaxing into a smile. “No idea. I was alone. I climbed a mountain and played marbles with a great bear with a sickle moon on his chest.”
Rapunzel’s jaw dropped.
Heks actually laughed. Rapunzel realized she’d never heard her laugh before. The lines produced by her laughter made her look like a different woman.
“Baba Yaga was there for a time, too.” Heks reached into a pocket and spilled a handful of marbles onto the scarred table top. They rolled, finding cracks and gouges, clinking together. They glittered and shimmered, red as the blood of strawberries and grapes, white and silver like polished ice crystals, black with tiny pinpricks of light, like a night sky. Among them Rapunzel saw four brown eyes, an amber wolf’s eye and Alexander’s blue eye, all open and gazing serenely at whatever appeared in their view when they came to rest on the table. Alexander’s eye, pointed just above Rapunzel’s head, winked at her.
Rapunzel made a strangled sound of surprise and snorted with laughter at the same time. In all the time she’d carried Alexander’s eye it had never once winked at her.
“I had news,” said Heks, paying no attention to the marbles or Rapunzel’s reaction, “and it was time to leave the Sickle Bear and come and find you.”
“But why?” asked Rapunzel, bewildered.
“Dar is dead.”
“He is not!” said Rapunzel at once. “He’s back at Rowan Tree by now, waiting for me.”
Heks’ eyes glimmered strangely in the marbles’ dim, like silver glass.
“You must mean Lugh is dead,” said Rapunzel, more calmly. “He wasn’t looking well when I left. He looked used up, somehow. He put too much of himself into harvest. Poor Mary. Is she all right? Have the babies been born?”
“The Dar you knew is dead, and Lugh as well. Mary’s twins are born and the new cycle begun.”
“No.” Rapunzel fixed her gaze on Alexander’s eye, which looked unblinkingly over her head. Heks’ steady regard felt unnerving. Feeling defensive, Rapunzel put on her ugly woman face, which usually distracted those around her. Heks didn’t react at all.
“Who told you this?” Rapunzel demanded.
“The stars,” said Heks, stirring the marbles with her old woman’s finger. “The cosmos is a web of matterenergytime and galaxies without end are strung on its threads. It’s sentient. It knows itself.”
“It can’t be true,” muttered Rapunzel, but with less certainty. “There must be a mistake.”
“The new cycle has begun,” Heks repeated, “but there’s a disturbance in the Yrtym threads and the sky is uneasy.”
“Urtim?”
“Yrtym,” repeated Heks. “Threads of matterenergytime.”
Rapunzel felt dazed. Could it be true that Dar was dead? And Lugh? And she’d been idling, taking her time, playing with the idea of facing Dar one day, when she felt ready, and all the time he was dead. Dead. She’d never see him again. She’d never find out what might have been possible. She’d missed her chance. And Heks sat regarding her out of those chilling eyes. Why didn’t she remember how unsettling Heks could be? Rapunzel remembered her as a rather uninteresting old woman. But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Hadn’t she told Maria, Rowan Tree’s leader, with perfect truth, that she sensed deep places in Heks? And she’d given Heks Alexander’s eye, a precious, personal, magical object. An unusual gift to give an ordinary old woman. Yet she’d known it was the right thing to do.
It's time to go back, Rapunzel thought to herself suddenly. I’m finished here. But now where to go? Dar was gone. She didn’t want to go back to Rowan Tree without him. Her mother, Elizabeth? Live with her in a little house in the town by the lake? No, not there.
“What should I do now?” she asked, her usual confidence and independence shattered.
“You’re needed. There’s an empty stone tower on the sea, a lighthouse. Its keeper has recently died and a ship has already foundered in a storm because the fire wasn’t lit and the mirror untended. The waters off that coast are dangerous. Someone with power must go care for the lighthouse and gather information, watch and listen for what stone, sky, wind and sea can tell. Threads of Yrtym connect life, from a single cell to the cosmos. Any disturbance will be felt throughout all levels.”
“You’re kidding,” said Rapunzel blankly. “You want me to go to a stone tower?”
“That’s right,” said Heks imperturbably. “Who’s better suited? But this one has a door, and a key.” She laid a small golden key on the table. Its shoulders were encrusted with red gems.
In fact, the idea of an isolated stone tower, and Rapunzel assumed it was isolated, standing on an unfriendly coastline, attracted her. It was something useful to do while coming to terms with Dar’s…
You bastard, she though furiously at him, you made me care and then you left! You might have told me! Had he known he’d never see her again? Had he known it was good-bye --forever? Surely not!
“All right,” Rapunzel said abruptly. “I’ll do it.” She took the key and stood up. “When can we leave?”