This is where I live in Plum Cove, Gloucester, MA. We are on a small hill overlooking the cove. A small softball field and the two lane road that runs around Cape Ann lie between us and the beach. It's quiet here: the beach is usually full of moms and small children in the summer. Bill and I often snorkel round the rocks watching the flatties, urchins and tiny lobsters that live there.
This post is an excerpt from a fantasy novel I have been working on sporadically. It is the story of a late Bronze age healer from the south west coast of England, whose devastating childhood experiences change her in ways that make her very different from the average woman, for better and for worse. Enjoy!
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There were no more candles left in the sixth week after midwinter so we dipped rushes in pork tallow and tried to sleep through the long hours of darkness. The daytime was spent searching for firewood, which was becoming scarce within an hour’s walk of the village. We had killed all the animals except the breeding stock and had gorged ourselves at the midwinter feast on pigs roasted in front of the great bonfires and emptied the barrels of beer made from the saved malt barley. We had taken the honey of late summer and poured it into oat porridge for those with no teeth. After the eating, all that could made love in the dark corners of the hall while dogs sniffed around the remains of the meal and children slept, round-bellied, in heaps by the embers of the fire.
That time is always good, but by now the cold and damp begin to eat into your bones and the clouds and mist never lift to show blue sky. It is as if the bargain we made with the great one at the midwinter feast would never be honored and we would live in a dim hell for ever, stumbling through the muck, unable to get dry and warm even close to the hearth. It is worse for me because I am old and my chilblains pain me, and the smoke indoors makes me cough even though the fire keeps me alive. I drink mullein, valerian and horehound boiled with bloodroot and honey to ease the pain in my chest, and lie back in the sheepskins that my son has brought me. I find I can doze and dream for days at a time now I am old, and while I’m dreaming I see many of the days from my past, and sometimes from other times that have not been yet, or of this day in lands far away where my son is, and other places where I am a stranger.
Young women bring me broth and bread softened in milk in the morning and evening. Sometimes it is my daughter-in-law or one of my son’s servants, sometimes my sister, the one that died. Sometimes, which warms my heart, it is my mother, gone now for twenty years, looking as brisk and bonny as she did when I was a girl. Sometimes I see my father sitting opposite me on the hearth, his hair bristling like bronze wire, his chin on his hands, looking into the embers with the look of planning, as he often did in the winter before he led the young men on the spring voyages. He said he saw the journey among the flames in the fire, the loading of the boats with grain and dried meat and small casks of water and fish lines and hooks, the sharpening and repair of the weapons, the selection of the men who would go (none with bad blood between them, all with firm hands and strong hearts), the time of going, when the winds changed to the southwest, and the way was free of ice to the lands over the sea. He could see all this in the fire, so when the time came, he could tell the folk what would happen and when, and they knew to follow him, because his understanding was sound.
He could not foresee the day when his brother walked behind him on the hunt and killed him with a spear thrust in the back, nor how the killer was brought back and judged, and hanged in the clearing in the oaks, nor how they cut his limbs away and buried each in a different corner of the county, or how they left his trunk for the crows and wolves and threw his head into the sea. I saw all this, for months before it happened, in dreams from which I woke crying out. I began by hating my uncle more than ever, but after a while, I realized that it was he who would suffer the most, and who had suffered all his life, and I had pity on him and prayed for his soul’s peace, even as they were dismembering his body. I hated him because of what he had done to me and to my mother. Go back with me forty years to the time when I was born and I will tell you the story I have told no other, for you and I will never meet in the market place or pray together by the old stones on the moor. You will keep my secrets safe, and I have kept them too long already.
