The Tower: Part 2: Mabon
Post #7: In which parents and children ...
(If you are a new subscriber, you might want to start at the beginning of the Webbd Wheel Series with The Hanged Man. If you would like to start at the beginning of The Tower, go here. If you prefer to read Parts 1 and 2 in their entirety, go here. For the next serial post, go here.)
RAPUNZEL
Ash, having introduced Ig and Mag to Rapunzel and thoroughly enjoyed himself watching them make friends and showing the little creatures the lighthouse, returned to Yggdrasil on a special errand, having agreed to a plan Rapunzel proposed.
She found the fire salamanders charming, and they agreed to bring her news from Dvorgdom. They were not the storytellers and raconteurs Ash was, being both distractible and unreflective, but they knew every single event that happened in Dvorgdom. Their people were ubiquitous and largely ignored by the Dvorgs.
Rapunzel’s pleasure and skill in manipulating fire and light made an instant connection with the little creatures, and she found herself both teaching and learning as the three of them played with her round blue witchlights and various other forms of fire and flame. Irresistible as puppies, they clambered, climbed, and explored the new world of the lighthouse.
Persephone was polite and comfortable with them, but clearly uninterested and incurious. She accepted the information that the salamanders would bring news of Dvorgdom to Rapunzel without further questions.
Rapunzel wondered if Heks had known of the lighthouse cellar and its access to both the sea and Dvorgdom. The tower was certainly not as isolated as it appeared. She had begun to make friends with the gulls, getting to know their habits and language and gleaning what information she could from them. They were raucous and greedy, but great travelers and gossips. She had seen both crows and ravens as well, though not to talk to, and wondered if they carried news of her presence and activities to Odin or Mirmir.
The longer she spent at the lighthouse, the more distinct the voices of the wind and stone became. Here, the wind blew nearly without ceasing, bringing news and sometimes scents of far places, murmuring ceaselessly of weather, stars and sea.
Rapunzel had never spent time near the sea. For her, a land dweller, water was something to swim in and enjoy, but amounted to only another supporting detail for the land, like a mountain, a valley or a forest. She didn’t think about trying to swim along this rocky coast. The salt water lived, its muscles green, blue and grey, veined with capillaries of foam. It battered the rocks, covered the cliffs and tower with its breath, hissed and roared, murmured and sighed.
It could also be a portal.
The portal at Rowan Gate was a threshold of mystery and power, and it had a keeper, Eurydice, one who opened the way. Rapunzel had gone through it to the Rusalka, where she learned to drum. The Rusalka used a portal too, the plunge pool in their bathhouse. Or perhaps there were many plunge pools in many bathhouses. Rapunzel had never been sure. She and Heks had come through that portal to the tower.
Now, two weeks ago, the great white bull had dragged himself out of the sea, clambered up the cliff, and he and Persephone had formed an improbable bond.
In the last few days someone else watched from the sea. Rapunzel couldn’t guess if the tower drew the watcher, herself, Persephone, or even the bull, but she knew someone watched — and waited.
She wasn’t afraid, exactly, but alert. When evening fell, she liked to climb up to the roof where the fire burned and the mirrors tilted, reflecting starlight, sunlight, moonlight, sealight, witchlight. During these hours in which she lit the light and watched night sweep across the stones and heaving sea, she could hear a swirl or the plop of a sudden dive, not of the sea, but in the sea.
She didn’t search the shore with her eyes, feeling an obscure desire to protect whoever took such pains to remain invisible and unnoticed, but she did stand in full view, letting the watcher get used to her and observe her movements and routines.
During her years in the tower, her foster mother Elizabeth, a powerful witch, had taught her about the night sky. Noola ebbed and flowed like the sea. Cion, larger and closer to Webbd than Noola, was never wholly visible. The sun cycled through the seasons. The stars arranged themselves in patterns and pictures. Rapunzel’s classroom in those days had been a luxurious room in an inaccessible tower in the forest, and she’d spent many hours at her window watching the dark heavens. Now those days and those teachings came back to her as she stood at the top of another tower and once again marveled at the firmament above.
Among Irvin’s books she found a collection of star and constellation stories, and these Rapunzel had read and repeated to Persephone with great enjoyment, refreshing her memory and affection for constellation and star lore.
Slowly, as she reacquainted herself with the night sky, she realized something had changed. It took her days to put her finger on it. At first, she only had an uneasy feeling of difference, perhaps a subtle shift in the pattern. Sharpening her focus, she found most of the patterns were familiar and expected, but something was missing. She gazed into the black depths of the night sky, examining the constellations and their relationships to each other, remembering their seasons, cycles and names. One by one, she rediscovered The Warrior, The Hound, Phoenix, Gemini, and Draco. The Warrior gave her the answer. He was sovereign in the night sky, menacing club upraised, shield before him. None threatened him but the constellation of Cerus the bull, which faced him. Cerus, with his starry red eye and sharp horns, was not in his place.
Rapunzel couldn’t guess why or how Cerus had fallen out of the heavens, or why a white bull with garnet eyes had emerged from the sea at this particular place, but she now understood Heks was right. Some kind of cosmic disturbance was taking place.
She suggested casually to Persephone the bull be called Cerus. The name obviously meant nothing to Persephone. After all, how could it? Rapunzel thought. Persephone had been raised to cherish the sunlit planet and now had become Queen of the Underworld. What did she know about the night sky, except it was there?
Rapunzel saw Cerus was accomplishing what she could not -- what perhaps no person could -- in assisting Persephone. The young woman and the bull recognized one another. Rapunzel didn’t trust the great white bull. She didn’t try to handle him and stayed away from him, but he followed Persephone like a large dog, clearly enjoying both her company and her touch. His flank had healed, he’d put on flesh and his hide shone white as milk. His only blemish was his broken marble horn.
Persephone had found thin fall pasture inland, but Cerus didn’t stay there without her. They’d obtained decent hay and he alternated between grazing and hay, depending on Persephone’s movements.
Rapunzel felt relieved to see her looking better. She put on weight and began taking care of her appearance again. She seemed less haunted and Rapunzel thought she slept better.
Rapunzel tended the light, kept her eyes, ears and awareness open, allowed the watcher to watch unhindered and unchallenged and gathered information for Heks, keeping her own council and letting the days unfold as they would. Every day she wrote in her journal, recording not only her thoughts and questions, but the weather and any visitors or news or rumors reaching her.
Dar was gone, swept away from her by inexorable cycles and tides of life and death. Heks had spoken as if he still roamed out there, somewhere, turning the wheel. Perhaps the same force had placed her here, and Persephone; cast Cerus ashore at the tower’s foot; sent Ash to renew their friendship and connect her to Dvorgdom.
She wondered what would happen next.
CLARISSA
Her father was gone. Clarissa could say the words aloud to herself, had heard the words from others, but she couldn’t make them real. They slid away like small silver fish. They lay like stones in her mouth, without meaning or flavor, things to spit out and walk away from. Sometimes she woke feeling panicked, fearing she’d lost her ability to create meaning from language. Her father had loved words, had sculpted with them, crafted with them. Losing her ability to use and understand words seemed an unforgiveable betrayal. She felt as though she spat and trampled upon his dead body.
She thought, with some guilt, she would have minded losing her mother less than her father. She’d been a child when her human mother left the sea to rejoin her people on land. Clarissa’s father had explained she missed her old home on land too much to be able to stay. Clarissa had seen how much he wanted them to accept her sudden absence without grief or resentment, and she’d tried.
She remembered a stormy day of wind and waves when her father had taken her and her brother Chris from the sea up a narrow stream that ran through a place called a cemetery, where the land people buried their dead. They’d hoisted themselves onto a slab of rock and looked through a window in a white building with a tall tower and a bell. Inside she’d seen a large room with people sitting on rows of wooden seats, shoulder to shoulder, listening to a man who stood in an elevated wooden box and spoke. Her mother had been there. Her hair, the same color as Clarissa’s but dry, wound smoothly on the back of her head. A piece of cloth covered her shoulders and a book was in her hand.
Chris, her brother, cried when he saw her and held out his hands. The wind was roaring by then, and the rain slashing down. The white building was thick-walled and no one heard the little boy’s beseeching voice or noticed as he reached out with pleading hands for his mother.
Irvin had taken them in his strong arms, slithered back into the stream and let it carry them down to the thrashing sea. Clarissa had not seen her mother again until she was seventeen.
For a time, they stayed in the bay near the little town where her mother lived. As far as Clarissa knew, her father made no additional attempts to see or speak to her mother, but she sensed he stayed in hopes she might one day return, or at least visit.
Then a stranger appeared on a horse and Radulf came into their lives. After that her father became less lonely and silent and she and Chris were distracted from their bewildered grief. Through Radulf they met Marceau, one of the sea kings, and eventually they left the bay near the little white town and moved into the deeper sea community of merfolk, where Clarissa and Chris grew up with friends and relatives and felt their mother’s loss less and less as time passed.
Clarissa didn’t forget her mother, though, and as she grew to womanhood among the merfolk, she longed to know her. She remembered her singing strange songs from the land people, sea songs, lullabies, and songs of faith and praise she called hymns. She remembered sitting on her mother’s lap and having her long hair combed, and the shimmer of sunlight falling into their grotto while Chris played with shells at her mother’s feet and their father looked on, smiling.
Why had her mother left? Her father spoke as though it was a hard choice, a choice that tore her mother in two. Was that so? Had she been unhappy with them, or had she wanted to stay and left against her will? What in that white building with the wooden rows of seats made her mother’s face so peaceful and shut away? Had she loved her father, and did she still? Did she think of her children and wonder about them?
One day Clarissa returned to the bay near the town. By then, she’d matured into her ability to take the shape of a human body when she wished. She had no firm plan about how to find her mother, if she was still there, but her curiosity and longing compelled her to try.
For two days she watched the place and observed people coming and going during the day. Several men went out in fishing boats early in the morning. As the day ended, lights shone from house windows. No one entered or left the white building with the tower and bell.
On the second evening, a dinghy left the shore and slowly moved into the bay. A lantern sat in the stern. As Clarissa watched, she heard an anchor splash and the boat stopped moving and bobbed gently on the waves. Then, she heard singing.
In an instant, she felt a young child again, sitting on her mother’s lap, the comb’s tines against her scalp, stroking slowly. She gasped. The singing stopped.
“Mother!”
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Clarissa.”
“Clarissa? Is it really you? Come closer, so I can see you!”
Clarissa swam into the lantern light.
Her mother’s face looked shocked and pale. She searched Clarissa’s face with wide eyes.
“You’ve grown up.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“I know, but somehow I’ve pictured you exactly the same as the last time I saw you.” She began to cry.
She was neatly dressed in a plain skirt and shirt, her hair coiled and pinned to the back of her head the way it had been when Clarissa last saw her. Clarissa had grabbed the dinghy’s side to come into the lantern light. Now she let go, moving her tail and arms to stay upright in the water.
“Don’t go!”
“I wasn’t. I just didn’t want to tip the boat.”
“Why did you come? Is something wrong? Is Chris all right? How is your father?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I only wanted to talk.”
“Let’s go among the rocks, then, where we can talk properly out of sight.”
Clarissa brought up the anchor and they steered the little craft among a group of large rocks on a headland some way from the town. Here, they could not be seen or heard by a chance late walker.
Her mother stayed in the boat, knees together, feet firmly planted and back straight. Clarissa pulled herself onto a flat rock.
“Here, drape this around your shoulders and cover yourself.” Her mother handed her the shawl that had draped her own shoulders.
“I’m not cold.”
“It’s not the cold, child. It’s not seemly to be bare-breasted, even in front of me.”
Clarissa felt astonished. The merfolk, naturally, were always naked. Her mother had not worn clothing in the sea.
“What do you mean?” she demanded. “You know we don’t wear clothes.”
“I know, and it always bothered me.”
On a spurt of anger, Clarissa said, “I came to find out why you left us. Was that part of the reason, because we didn’t wear clothes?”
Her mother sighed. “There were many reasons, but that was one, yes. Clarissa, my people are different from the merfolk. We’re more … civilized. God has rules, important rules, that we must follow because we’re not beasts. We’re better than beasts.”
“We’re not beasts!”
“Of course not. I didn’t mean that. But merfolk aren’t humans. They don’t acknowledge God and His laws. I missed the discipline and structure of my human life when I lived in the sea. I need it. It makes me feel safe and clear about who I am and how to behave.”
“Did you ever love Father?”
“I thought I did, but I was young and rather silly. I was rebellious. Leaving my world for the merfolk and the sea seemed romantic and exciting. Then you came along, and Chris, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to leave you, but I longed for my old life again, for church on Sunday morning and proper dry clothes and a house to live in. Your father encouraged me to visit my old home whenever I wanted, but I needed more than visits. After each visit I felt wretched. I couldn’t take you out of the sea, away from him. I made the only choice I could, in the end.”
“Father loved you. His love didn’t stop.”
“You’re too young to understand love, Clarissa.”
“I know it when I feel it, and when I see it. I remember when you left, how sad Father was, and Chris crying for you.”
“I’m sorry. I only did what I had to do.”
“Did you miss us?”
“Of course.”
“But you were happy, too?”
“I was glad to come back to a life I understood.”
I was glad to come back to a life I understood, Clarissa thought with grief, as she returned from her memories and found herself looking up at the lighthouse. Come back, Father. Come back to the life I understand and be with me again.
He couldn’t be gone. He must be there, at the tower. He must be. He had never allowed the light to go out and ships to lose their way. Inside those curved stone walls, he slept and woke, lit the stove, prepared food and ate it, carried coal up the stairs, patiently cleaned the glass and mirrors, knowing it would need to be done again the following day, and all the days after as well, because coal fire burned so dirty. He read, and sat at his desk writing and dreaming. He held the coral lump she’d given him in his hands, warming it, his eyes soft with images and words…
But she didn’t see him, only the two strange women who’d come to keep the light.
Both women were young. The one she saw the most had short, pale hair. She kept the light, but now the fire wasn’t lit with coal. She wondered what this new fire was made of, for it lit instantly and burned clean and clear and bright all night long. She couldn’t smell wood or coal. It didn’t smoke or smolder. It extinguished as quickly as it lit. The woman never carried any kind of fuel. But every night the young woman lit the fire and tilted the mirrors for the best visibility from the sea. She was as reliable as Clarissa’s father had been, as loyal to her responsibility, and Clarissa felt comforted. Some part of what had been important to her father continued, though he was gone.
The other woman was beautiful. Clarissa could tell this by the way she moved, by the rich wealth of corn-colored hair, by her body’s shape under her cloak when she stood or walked along the cliff tops. She seemed restless, walking away from the tower nearly every day, either exploring up and down the cliffs for several miles or, presumably, walking inland.
This woman was companioned by a large white animal.
It wasn’t a horse. Clarissa knew what a horse was — had even ridden one. Horses didn’t possess horns, and this did. Horns and a big, broad head and nose, powerful shoulders and flanks and a thin, small tail. It looked rather frightening to Clarissa, but it followed the woman like her brother Chris used to follow her when they were children, affectionate and trustful, wanting to be near.
Sooner or later, she would speak to the two strange women. Sooner or later, she would enter the stone tower again, but not yet. If her father wasn’t there, she wasn’t ready to know it. As long as she lingered on the shore, watching and hoping, she could still imagine it was all a mistake. He was there. He wasn’t gone. Everything was right. She needn’t take any responsibility for his papers, his books, his clothes and the sad remainders of his life. She needn’t ever think of them again, because her father would be somewhere, with his vague dreamy smile and his love for her, his hazel eyes, his stories and poetry and songs, his gentle curiosity and ability to see what others didn’t.
So she stayed, an uneasy wary presence, desolate, bobbing up and down in the surf, watching the cliffs and the tower, hoping, waiting.