The Tower: Part 3: Samhain
Post #15: In which meetings ...
(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 part 3 in its entirety, go here. For the next serial post, go here.)
Rowan Gate was a humble spring bubbling up out of the ground, enclosed on three sides by old stone walls Rose Red and Rowan had rebuilt and repaired when they arrived at Rowan Tree. As dusk fell, Sonia, the community’s candlemaker, passed out candles to everyone, and Rowan Tree gathered to say goodbye to the Rusalka, lit candles in hand.
Eurydice and Rose Red had once again addressed them in the dining hall, explaining about Mother trees and the Rusalka’s intention to leave early, in case the portal should break down entirely.
Eurydice privately confessed to Rose Red her fear that she would not be able to open Rowan Gate far enough for the Rusalka to pass through, and Rose Red, resolving to take her own advice, said, “Tell them. Maybe together we can open it if you have trouble.”
Rose Red listened to Eurydice with admiration as she confessed her fears to the people of Rowan Tree and noted their willingness to help any way they could. Sonia volunteered candles and everyone volunteered their presence, not only to bid the Rusalka farewell, perhaps permanently, but also to support Eurydice, who tried to convey the feeling of pushing the gate open with her mind and heart rather than her body.
They formed a candle-lit aisle in the autumn gloaming, men, women and two solemn children, and the Rusalka walked between them, pausing to touch, exchange a word or two, and even embrace. The Rusalka crowded into the shelter of the spring’s three stone walls with Eurydice, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Rose Red on one side and Kunik on the other.
Eurydice drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, and her tension and effort flowed into Rose Red.
“Together now,” said Rose Red, low-voiced. “One … two … three.”
Rowan Gate filled with the tension of pushing, and Rose Red remembered the oak leaves like supplicating brown hands. The Rusalka, one by one, stepped into the spring and disappeared. The feeling of effort dissipated. Eurydice opened her eyes and relaxed, and the little group of people exhaled.
“It was so hard,” said Eurydice. “I don’t know if I can open it again, even with everyone’s help.” Tears fell down her face and Kunik put an arm around her.
“What will happen now?” one of the women asked. Darkness had fallen, and Rose Red couldn’t see faces as the candles flickered.
“I don’t know,” said Rose Red.
Maria, the community’s leader by unspoken agreement, said, “Now we will continue to harvest and prepare for winter. We’ll care for our animals and each other and wait for more information. We’re sure to hear from someone. In the meantime, we must look to our own needs as well as we can.”
The group murmured agreement and loosened as people turned toward their homes. Rose Red heard candles being blown out and the smell of burning wicks hung in the air momentarily before being dissipated by a night breeze.
“Thank you,” called Eurydice. “I needed you.”
Several people raised their hands in acknowledgement as they moved through the Rowan trees guarding Rowan Gate.
SEREN
The shock of slamming into the cold water nearly stunned him into unconsciousness. He’d been laughing, bantering with the captain of the ship, when one of the crewmen tipped him over the rail as neatly and effortlessly as though disposing of a bucket of slops. He’d noticed before the strength of sailors, though naturally none could match his wit or his tongue. Muscles they had, but in sensibility they were as rough and stupid as cows.
The laughter hadn’t quite left his lips, and a mouth and nose full of icy stinging seawater brought full consciousness roaring back, along with a wave of fear, and then fury. Surely this was a dangerous sort of practical joke!
Gasping, he searched the heaving waves around him for the ship, expecting to see a row of jeering, laughing faces above the rail and a boat being lowered for his rescue, or at least a rope coiled and ready to throw.
But the ship moved away from him, not toward him.
They were leaving.
“Hey!” he shouted after the ship. “Hey!”
His outrage and injured pride earned him a slap in the face by a wave and another mouthful of water. He realized he was quite likely to die, and the ignominiousness of the situation made him clench his teeth in fury.
The greatest poet who had ever lived could not die, alone, uncomforted and unsung, in the middle of the ocean. The Gods would not allow it.
On this thought, he felt something stir beneath him, and jerked and shouted in surprised fear, kicking out.
Something moved against his thigh and then his side, and a smooth grey shape surfaced beside him, a blunt head with a neat blowhole on top, a wide fixed smile and a friendly and rather intelligent dark eye.
It was a dolphin.
Thus began a lengthy ordeal. Seren was not clear exactly how long the dolphin steered and supported him. It felt like days and days. The water was freezing cold, and he felt proud of his ability to withstand hypothermia. Perhaps his superior creativity came with subtly superior physical skills. Sailors possessed brute strength, but his abilities were more refined and sophisticated.
For a long time, he saw nothing but waves in every direction, and the dolphin’s sleek, wet curves, but then he noticed a faint smudge of dark land. Days later (it seemed like days, though he hadn’t noticed intervening nights. Perhaps he’d blacked out periodically?) he could see a rocky shore under a slanting cliff on which a lighthouse perched.
Heartened, he forced his cold-numbed and (surely by now) emaciated body into weak paddling and kicking to help his rescuer, who pushed him determinedly toward land.
What a poem he would make of this! What a story! An epic struggle! A night adventure (night was always more dramatic than day), full of stars and foam, salt waves and a dolphin of silver and pearl! He became so engrossed in describing the exhausted hero, pale and half drowned after being callously cast overboard by pirates, crawling on all fours onto rocks that bruised and cut his beautiful, long-fingered hands, that he didn’t immediately grasp the feel of solid land beneath his feet.
Truthfully, his numb legs would hardly hold him and he felt as weak as a newly-hatched chick. He clutched the dolphin for support, though clearly the creature could take him no further without risking its life in the shallow water. Seren, however, eyed the sharp-edged rocks and pounding surf with chagrin. He had no wish to actually be seen crawling out of the surf like an exhausted wet animal.
As he stood, trembling and panting, he heard a shout and someone hurried down a narrow path on the cliff face. A girl with long hair, streaked gold and brown, tumbling down her back. It looked as though it needed a good combing.
She trod the path nimbly and left its gradual zig-zag descent to jump straight down the steep rocks. Seren noticed her bare feet.
“Are you all right?” she called. She stepped right into the surf, walking among the sharp wet rocks as though on soft, grassy ground. “Shall I come help you?”
“Certainly not!” he called back, wincing as he heard his voice, raw with salt and thirst. Steadying himself, he squared his shoulders, left the dolphin’s support and took a few steps forward. The sea ebbed, clutching him, trying to draw him back into its bosom, and he heard a loud splash behind him.
“Delphinus!” the girl cried, evidently delighted.
As the next wave pushed him from behind, Seren took advantage of it and moved forward. Pausing during the water’s ebb, moving with its flow, he gradually made his way to where the girl stood, knee deep.
She was strong. She linked her arm with his and guided him out of the surf. He staggered, suddenly feeling deathly tired, and his stomach rolled uneasily. She lowered him onto a handy slab of rock.
She turned, looking out to sea, and the dolphin arched out of the waves in a graceful silver blue arc. She waved. “Thank you, Delphinus!” she called. “I’ve got him now!” The dolphin leaped again, as though in answer, and swam toward the horizon.
The girl turned back. “We must get you up to the lighthouse. You’re white as foam and cold as sea ice. What’s your name?”
“Seren,” he said.
She paused as though struck, looking intently into his face. She appeared only slightly younger than he, and her eyes looked strange, light-colored like abalone shell. He coughed and winced. His chest felt waterlogged.
At once, her speculative look became concerned. “I’m Clarissa,” she said briefly, and put a strong hand under his elbow, raising him to his feet.
Laboriously, they clambered up the cliff path, Seren staying on his feet by an act of willful pride. By the time they reached the lighthouse, he was gasping and would have fallen without Clarissa’s support.
He had a confused impression of female voices as they lowered him into a chair. Clarissa disappeared. A woman filled a bathtub and he noticed her thick braid of honey-colored hair, swaying against her back as she worked the pump handle next to the sink. Another woman with the shortest hair he’d ever seen on a female knelt before him and deftly began removing what clothes he still wore. She stripped the stockings off his white, dead looking feet. He felt humiliated by the discovery he couldn’t even find the strength to lift his hands and unbutton his jacket.
The short-haired woman lowered him into a steaming tub of water standing in the kitchen. The warm water felt unexpectedly painful and he cried out before he could stop himself, and then felt ashamed by his weakness.
“It will get better,” she assured him. “Be still and relax.”
Bundled herbs floated in the water, their scent soothing the inside of his raw nose.
“I’m thirsty,” he said, and the woman with the braid handed him a glass of water.
“Sip it slowly if you want to keep it down,” she advised.
He sipped, and as the sweet water cooled and eased his salt-puckered mouth and throat, he struggled against tears of relief.
The sharp pains in his arms and legs gradually eased into tingling as he began thawing. He submerged his head, rinsing saltwater from his hair and face. His eyes stung and burned, watering.
Seren leaned his head back and relaxed. Every now and then the woman with the braid tipped more hot water into the tub. She boiled a kettle and made tea for him, adding a slug of something from a bottle. When he tasted it, he recognized mead, sweet and thick with honey and ginger.
At last, drugged with warmth, several cups of mead-laced tea and exhaustion, he allowed the short-haired woman to steer him onto a stone staircase winding up the lighthouse wall, through a large bedroom and into a smaller one above it. He fell onto a bed and slept.
***
“You called the dolphin who helped me by name.”
Clarissa looked up into Seren’s face from where she sat on the floor near his feet. He was ensconced in a chair before the stove. Persephone sat in her favorite armchair, but Rapunzel stretched out on the floor on her back in her accustomed place, a pillow beneath her head.
Seren had slept straight through the rest of the day he washed ashore and the following night. He woke feeling warm, rested, famished, and ready to create a story of his adventure that would be told and retold for all time. His lyre, along with his other possessions, remained on board the ship, but he consoled himself with beginning to craft words. He could add music later.
After eating a prodigious breakfast, cooked by Persephone and served by Clarissa, they settled before the stove to talk.
“Delphinus,” she said, smiling up at him, her eyes warming to blue, green and a hint of violet. “He’s a special friend of Poseidon’s.”
Seren raised an eyebrow, amused by the girl’s presumption to speak about King Poseidon as though he was a family member.
“Where did you hear that?” he asked.
She pulled her knees up and clasped them, her eyes on his face. “It’s well known,” she said, “among my people. I’m a—”
“Delphinus is a constellation,” interrupted Rapunzel, without opening her eyes.
“Yes,” said Clarissa, looking at her in surprise.
“Is there a story about him?”
“Many stories. Shall I tell one?” She looked shyly back at Seren. “You’re the storyteller. Some say you’re the greatest storyteller who ever lived. I couldn’t tell it like you could.”
Seren felt gratified by her praise. It pleased him that they knew who he was, although it was hardly surprising. Everyone had heard of him.
“I’d be pleased to hear it,” he said graciously. If they were to exchange stories, it was kinder to allow her to go first, before she heard his skill and became too discouraged to try.
“All right,” said Clarissa. She left her place at Seren’s feet, picked up a fat pillow and sat against a wall, the pillow behind her, from which vantage point she could see everyone’s faces. For some reason she found she told better when she could see her audience’s reactions.
“Once upon a time, before the moons and sea found one another and the silver tide ebbed and flowed with their passion, Delphinus arced through a foam of stars in an endless black sea, lit only by nebulae and starglitter.
His body curved, a bowstring of joyful potential, but he remained fixed, arrested, forever still, only his coruscating eyes moving here and there as he watched the cosmos.
For unmeasurable eons Delphinus hung, suspended in the cold, lonely black sea of space, abiding, his thoughts and hopes focused on Her.
She was not fixed. She was not black and diamond glitter, but vibrant green, shades of grey and brown that rested his eye, and most of all blue, a blue shimmering from indigo to amethyst, and from turquoise to jade as she revolved before his gaze. At times she concealed herself with gauzy grey, at other times flirtatiously swirling streaks of milky white over her body.
She enchanted him. He was captivated as she rolled voluptuously before him, always subtly changing but always there, enduring, suspended, like him, within the web of space.
He called her Hyash, and he longed for her as the sea longs for the land, as the tide longs for the moons.
As Delphinus gazed, captivated, at Hyash, a large rock hurtled past his long nose, not quite touching him, and he moved! His head moved and he thrashed, ungainly, heart pounding with excitement, uttering high-pitched sounds of effort. He rolled, flexed his powerful tail, at last realized the promise of the arc he’d held so long and plunged straight toward Hyash. The rock that had severed him from his place in the black sky sped ahead like a beacon, and as Hyash filled Delphinus’s vision the rock glowed and then burned with a lambent light too brilliant to look at. As he shifted his gaze, Delphinus realized he fell amidst a shower of stars, and they too burned more and more brilliantly as they dove together in a rapturous swarm.
A strange perfume filled his nose, fecund, salty, moist and filled with life. Delphinus swelled and blazed with passion, moving his powerful tail in an effort to dive faster, to enter Hyash’s beckoning blue-streaked being, to disappear into the waters of her body and never leave them again, to taste, to feel, to fill his senses with her.
Blinded by light, he felt intoxicated with sound and movement, scent and color. Still he dove, silvery grey and gleaming, eyes ablaze with determination, and Hyash parted her watery thighs and welcomed him, warm and liquid, as he penetrated and then rose to the surface to leap and dive again and again, mad with ecstasy.”
Seren felt stunned, not only by the story’s rhythm and poetry, but also its sensuality. It was unexpected from this strange girl with her disordered streaked hair of blonde and brown and silvery eyes. How had this tale, clearly a creation story, escaped his notice?
“My people say Delphinus and Hyash between them made all the sea’s life,” said Clarissa. “The stars that fell with him turned into starfish.”
“And stars still mark his place in the night sky?” asked Rapunzel. “A sort of placeholder, like Castor and Pollux?”
“Yes,” said Clarissa.
“And is it the same creature, the Delphinus in the story and the one you know?” asked Rapunzel. “If so, he must be old beyond telling.”
“I think so,” said Clarissa. “Many thousands of dolphins swim the sea, all kinds, even pink dolphins in some places who shapeshift into men who come on land and seduce women, but this one dolphin is the one we call Delphinus.”
Seren, bewildered, annoyed by references to people and creatures he knew nothing about, cut in.
“Who are your people?” he demanded of Clarissa.
“The merfolk,” she said simply, looking surprised by his vehemence.
“The merfolk!” he exclaimed.
“Lucky for you Delphinus was there,” Rapunzel said to him, sitting up and crossing her legs comfortably. “How did you happen to fall in the water, anyway?”
“Oh, yes! Now you tell!” said Clarissa.