Drafting

Raw clay. Freewrite. In the sea where the demons dwell, in the darker waves beyond our sight, where shadows hide, the water grows, curling and swirling like open mouths. islands appear where the lad disappeared over the horizon, sliding off the face of the world. salt encrusted your tongue from morning to night, and the stars fell one by one through the dark. you could count them from the deck, one by one, making an explosion of wave and spray and fire that vanished as soon as it touched the water and made you wonder what there was to be afraid of. one day the sea opened up, and a hand seemed to stretch up from the depths and seize the boat in its palm. you could swear you saw the garbled bristling fingers grabbing the frame of the boat and toying with it. the mast beams of the outer deck seemed to have taken an entire forest to make, but that was nothing compared to the mast: a forest in one mighty fist of wood, banged up into the air, heaving, slamming it aside, and as wide as a house. no one would ever know where the tree had come from, but it was lucky, they said, charmed, possessed even. had come from a wood in a forest on the far side of the hills, dragged by twenty or a hundred or ten thousand horses and double the number of men, some of whom were killed under its weight, especially when the bridge gave way on Christmas Eve and the frozen stream took eight young men away. each had followed the other in the brook to save the first one, whose head had been cut asunder and was dead anyway before his friends could arrive. what made it so lucky was that the five worst storms ever had already battered, shredded, torn, flipped and evacuated smaller ships, traders boats and looms, as well as older galleons and rusting warships, but not the ocean. it would never break from the deck, and even if it did it would float better than the very ship it pushed and save them all. he held on to the banisters that were made of rotting wood but somehow swayed in rhythm with the waves. if you held them right you were perfectly safe, and so he did. his hand gripped the splintered wood with the ferocious edges where gun shot had splintered them. no one had yet bothered to repair it, though there were plenty on hand and plenty of materials to do it. there was little to fear, and so it was left. when he gazed down into the water and watched it split apart at the front of the ship, the water was greeny wavy black and foamy brown. he loved it here, seeing how the world opened up before you. nowhere had he been other than in this ship, other than on this ocean. no one knowing what was on the other side of it except Dane. legends of the land that there were about to encounter must be true: people laden with all kinds of precious jewels and golds and rubies, with eyes that pierced right through you, could tell your fortune and find you your wife from the memories and the people and the people you were going to meet. endless tales of paths that led through contented woodland, where there were nothing but flying bears and creatures that slid through the grass and wound themselves around your waist and looked up at you with the eyes of a doting girl. this was the land they were going to, where faces appeared in the middle of trees and peered to sing and whisper and murmur you into their embrace, where the leaves rustled in music and harmony that had never been heard in the world where they had come from. It was this world that they were going to, a world that they didn't even know for sure existed. Dane went back up on deck and looked for land. He found the dolphin first and grabbed dane by the belt. “Now your father can be cured and evil will be no more.” “What do I have to do?” “You have to jump from the ship and seize the animal.” Dane looked down into the foaming sea being cut apart by the ships prow, the curling waves like hands ready to seize him and keelhaul him. He heard his father cry: “Do it son. Help me.” He waited till he saw the fin of this gleaming glistening fish. “What do I do when I get hold of it?” He jumped as if pushed by the whinging voice of his beloved father. He felt the air sweep, raking him with splinters of salt ocean, and the world surge over him. He reached out, felt the animal’s side. The animal was on him and pushing down into the depths. His snout flicked and toyed with his body. Dane reached for a hold and the tip of the fin presented itself, too slimey to hold. He thought he heard it say, “give this to him, give this to him.” A surge of light leapt from the weight of its body as it twisted and slid, glided round him. He felt a violent storm go trugh his bones so he could see the bones of his leg and hand pushing vainly to the surface. But he’d got it. The surge from the animal was in him. He would give it to his father. Opening its mouth as wide as it could, the dolphin screeched. Water parted and a stream of air smashed apart the water to surround him in a cocoon of air. When he broke the surafce, now some way behind the shiup, which had turned and headed back for him. Even from where he was he oculd hear rhte derision of the crew ‘what kind fo amn are you’ use your dick to swim but thez were amayed and their derision stopped when thrz saw how qucklz he was szcthing through the water, how did the old man he know about the electric dolphin? It was he who held out his wizened hand and dane climbed up his arm falling to the deck as if a back of broken bolts. The old man knelt by him and whispered ‘you fel it. You have it. Don't you.’ Water still locked in his chest spouted now and went the torrent was over he found himself saying yes, I think I have it islike every bone has come alive and all my blood has turned to air. That’s how I’ll save him by giving him my bones and my blood. The old man seized his arm. That’s my lad, he said, you see how the ocean can cure you of doubt. Trust the drowning. That’s how you become brave and helpful. He dragged him to his feeet and hauled him down thdeck, slammed im down the stairs and stood him before his father. I drowned there too his father said but you wont be able to help me. There is something I must do first. Someone I must see and you must get me there. The wars, my son, the wars will make a man of you. The visit or the deep was not for me, not for me. And the old man coughed alump of green putum to the floor, ground it with his heel into the grain. Nothing there anyway. Load of shit. Dane seised his hand’ respect, old man, show dignity here.’ And whetehr it was true or not the old man thought he felt an eel slide up into his arm when he touched dane’s hand. He shook it free. Valleys dip and dowl in the sunshine lakes of goldwhever you look wafting undulations and female shaped thighs lying I=on the ground shell said as loudly as he could cant you see her the rolling in the earth and pering through the stalks at us, cant you see it. If e had said nothing thre would have been mor ereaction as it was men cam erunning from their sycthes and fucked the earth as hard oas they could some of them actually try8ng to get hard enough to force an entry through the clods. Day late called the man made of leather and nothing could dium his enthusiasm once he saw the effect he’d had. The women followed splitting thmselves as wide as they could some crouching sokme spreadeagled , hopping, crouching squatting defecting urinating in violentn torrentss from bladders kept full for days for just this purpose and the avoidance of any kind of fluid and for exactly thi moment when Shell would sing of the readiness of earthly thighs for this very moment the gatehring of the fruit of the earth and the replacing of it’s life with the stuff of life itself. All right, picture. Here we go. So, with the sight of half the field workers steadily ploughing the land with their own bodies, Shovel thought to himself that this village needed more than he could offer and that he would have to find what he needed. The words he had were the ploughs themselves, the blades themselves that cut the earth and allowed the fertility to begin. It was his words. It was the fact that his breath opened up a world in this way. My God, this is absolute lethal out here. Fuckin’ hell, pardon my French, these cars are zooming round me. You could not believe their speed. I mean, I could go for it. Woo! Walk on the outside again. But anyway, so back to it. But he thought to himself, my life is incomplete. I need more. Even though the word springs to life because I say the word. So, he tried. He joined in. He took his clothes completely apart, either to take part in this act of fertility, this meeting of the land, this love of the earth in all its possible senses. He wanted to roll the teal hills between his body. To hold it in two hands, to bunch the soil into his fists, to feel every part of himself blending with the soil and the air and the water and the seed. The master of this village for a hundred years knew what it meant to take on responsibility. He knew what it meant to have to learn the script, each and every line of the lyric of life, and he had to learn them so that not a single syllable was wrong. And of course, he could do it. His mind had been trained by the minds of his forefathers and his ancestors who had all been lyric masters in the past. They knew too. The words were never to be written down. His father had told him so. Uh, every night, every night that he slept, his father knelt by his bed and read him the words of the lyric, the words of the lyric of life, and every night, they would repeat the words more that he began to learn them. And he would repeat the lines with his father, repeat the words. But they would do it in a whisper. There was a voice, his father said, which you should only use when it was for real. He stood by his father. Stood by his knee, and watched his father bring life out of the earth once a year. The whole village would be in tumult, parties, food, giant white cloths laid out over trestle tables in the middle of the village square. And the wine would flow, and all kinds of foods would be brought from last year’s harvest to this one, and the sowing of the seed. And his father would stand on a chair and address the entire square and ask them to follow him into the field where he would bring life and sustenance to them for the following year, and every year after that. Every year after that. But every single year, all the village would look at Shal and think, are you up to it? They would even say to him after his father had finished, ruffle his hair and tug his ear and say to him, are you up to it? Of course, he thought he was. Part of the job that his father did at an early age was tell him the story of how the lyric came to be and of its words and its rhythms. He would also tell him how confident he was that one day Shal would take over from his father and become the words themselves. It was not enough to simply know them. The words must become part of him. Night after night after night, such was the fate of the son of the village master. Master would be there by the side of his bed, making him learn, forcing him to remember, charging him to repeat word by word, intonation by intonation, and always, never in the voice, but in the shadow, simply a low whisper in which only they could hear. His mother was downstairs, of course, packing away with her blade at the prize that her husband had brought, severing limb from limb and head from neck in almost balletic movements with her knife, and for her too, this moment of ritual was the disassembling of an animal that would keep them alive for the rest of the month, for the rest of the season, dismantling of the body of this, rupturing of its guts, the hollowing out of its intestines, curation of its blood, and at this time of year, it’s not ordinary storing of essence, but the ones made from granite that had been hollowed out, but the granite stone, the size of the head of a god. And the day master was shamed out of his post was the sadest day a ritual shaming with orn burned round his neck until a collar of ash had formed and would remain till thee nd of his days andnow, with his days so few left he sat all day un the middle of village market Square eunder a umbrella shell had made from birch and ivy so it looked like it had grown stright out of the ground. There master sat, no longer master now. Disgust was his new name and he kept his face turned outward all day hoping someone would they release him only no one wanted to even shell and his mother for they would be walked warily around. If the family had failed to perform the lyriuc well enough everyone etarted, so of course there needed to be punishment. It was a proimise to speak, to train in the voice and then use it for love. Master sanmg, trying to recpver the voice and all shall and his mother were allowed to do was glance sidways at him as rthey passed. Master could say what he liked. His needed to find new words, words that would release him from sitting in his own shit all day and shell longed for him to find them he’d pass him each day and leave a bound script with what he hoped would be the releasing words. Of course he had t mkae them up but thi he did, diligently, each day so that at 4am when the stars were still knbife sharp and the suns hadn’t risen. Free him. Free yourself came the answer. His father would scribble replies ink made from ashes from the burning. Ink got thinnner and thinner until all shell could find were crude intendations in the paper and he has to sprinkle ink on the reverse side and printed out master’s writing. It grew steadil more lyrical as if he was trying to recover his skill. The year the harvest failed was a matter of great contention. Metman had decalred it a failure becuase barley came up once not twice. Two suns, two harvests was the crike. Master had denied the sun it’s worshiop, it’s food. There was nothing to burn. Ntohing to offer the stars. Eat one. Offer the other. Only this year, second harvest flew away. Short brittle stems and earth that had turend to mud so you actualluy see spome of the seeds soft and crumbling in the water of the earth.