A refugee from apocalyptic war comes to a desolated country, where the only escape from the sport of its occupiers — who will hunt him with dogs — is a mountain pass, the haunt of thieves… They kill and plunder in their own right. Gafeidda debates his chances with the Shepherd, but cannot bring himself to trust the Shepherd.
Book One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Book Two
The Wayfarer
The Bride
Her Stay
War-Making
They Won’t Return
Charity
King of Chaos
I.
Haunt of Thieves
Part One
You see, Gafeidda, how the road climbs to the bend
How perilous and narrow
The way is, that the passer must hug the mountain’s face
At the crest, how the sun at its mid-day height
Becomes a torch splintered by horns of grey rock
The dark rock
(His strength is a piercing flame; our god is distant, and hears not our lamentation)
The Old-Spirited One, we call the cropping
A tree by lightning smote
The haunt of thieves
When night falls, Gafeidda, you will know
The glow of embers, even now—
You see the brazier’s smoke
If you remain, you will not return
Hunted Gafeidda, you will long to burn
Cross there, quarry of thieves
Or linger, and be torn by dogs
Gafeidda hears the wind
This change from deadened frost to biting cold
That has gained potency from the noon hour
Onwards
It cries, this wind, like a child
The Shepherd says aloud
(The meaning will unfold, gradually;
and all you’ve staked your life on will be
brought to mediocrity)
Now drawing frozen hands to lower once again
His hat brim, muffle this pinpricking rain
Away, Gafeidda thinks the dogs, far below, cry too
Caged and let starve for days
Only days enough to make them hunger
They will be loosed
Before the sun has set
Part Two
A stranger to Gafeidda,
Bitter-hearted refugee who mistrusts this tale
And tells the Shepherd, “They are thieves, to be sure.
Friends of yours. You the dog and they the vultures;
theirs no sanctified nest, no god’s dwelling-place
defiled.
Nor will you let me
Know your name
(your belief is told in practice; and your act is hid from sight)
Shepherd, I live by gleaning. I have no coin, no noble name
To bargain with, my labor alone; and what I fear
Is to be made prisoner
For they say the jailer likes his charges quiet,
And that he gives them nothing other men might
want
They say he offers crumbs for bait and once informed
Marks his man and plays him for his sport”
“Pride,” the Shepherd says, “is coin.
This is so. There are those who will break you for it;
count as gain the taking of it. Run! And where the path grows steep
And when the hound’s maw snatches at your feet
When you fall, and flail at a blackened shape
And find it not a root
For indeed, they’ve charred a sign on every stone
Severed hands of venturers and scattered bones
You hear them now, Gafeidda, the chattering crows
Nothing frightens them
They can be rousted only when the glowing coals
Come in a rain from the pinnacle
And your living hands and eyes
Will seem to the carrion bird akin
To those of dead men she has feasted on
Pride…Gafeidda, you will not die
To me, your thought is plain
Moments pass, not one can you afford to waste
And still you waver and would rather hear
All I have to tell
I tell no more than you have heard below
You may cross at any time
You may return to the forest
And hope to go unseen
Yet though I say to you, ‘This way is death,
And that way also’
You feel, concealed within this choice, a thread…a light
A way to life
Part Three
Only now the river Bedhokan
She whose flowing waters
Gain in strength and claim
(For there is no answer to her whim; in their season
the iron clouds will rain)
A goddess’s Authority to shape the land
She cannot in her course be checked by laws
Of warring men
Only now passing watchtowers on the shore
Does the freight of flood-scoured wreckage
From the battlefield and forsaken town
Spill without heed
To the lost memory of the seafloor
Gafeidda would say no more
He understands and would have told the Shepherd so
That all synods of wisest men
Conclude with an old brutality
Ask the generals, if you will, or ask the farmers
Will they then at last give way
When the seedling’s roots have drawn the blood
From the slaughter’s soil
When lightning-flindered, forty seasons hence
These aging limbs must fall
And the kindling’s metal ore
Steeped in its moss and glassy resin
Burgeons to a conflagration
Will they now ungrip their fingers
And be reconciled?
…they will answer no
“No, I will not be at peace, not
while my enemy breathes”
And who, Gafeidda thinks, is the enemy?
The Bedhokan plunges here, the water’s curtain
Tears helter-skelter ’til each droplet
Atomizes sheeting the fallen rock
This impasse stalls Gafeidda at the height
That overlooks the sheltered way
And twice a torchbearer’s flame burns red
At the cavern’s mouth beneath the cataract
Long rains have undermined
Columned firs that anchored once the path
Now corpses in their resting place
The still-green crown still poised
Above the eddy
Held by its lacing of twiglets
That cannot bear a man’s weight
Part Four
Ravens hear the trembling gong’s alarm
Harbinger of rolling earth
Far away as yet but coming near
(Birds of the air may take to flight
Men and cities cannot do)
Souls they carry heavenward, on each feather tip
The lost descends to touch in parting
A temple of her beloved
Her fingers brush and cling to
His brow as a cobweb might
Lightning flares behind closed eyes
A momentary flowing together in exile
Of ghost
And death-in-life
She speaks before the whirlwind takes her
In spirit-language of old awakened sights
Demons they have imprisoned in a maze of circled lines
Etched by knife
Gafeidda can only trace the path again
Here is the short lieutenant with his grin
He holds a bottled soul in an outstretched hand
“Even the way in which our goddess carves the land
Proves us conquerors…we are invulnerable and Destined
and you
Like a fly hatched in an empty barn
Beat at the window while the sun glares—
The way is barred
You waste your time and the Shepherd knows”
These men are watchers and have seen
The sated flood below them roar
Where limbs of the floating dead
Entangled form a foaming raft
Of maggots shadowed by a trailing swarm
And this horror thrills the lieutenant
He feels that she favors his side, has chosen
A lofty place for them above the squalor
Their magic thus the stronger
The Shepherd where the path
Descends no lower
Shrouded there waits by the pillared stone
Toothed and tapered like a broken axe-head
And his face is white like bone
This rock he calls Aantahah—Ancient Father
His hand is raised and his eyes see nothing
Part Five
The sun lights Aantahah’s teeth like molten gold and falls
Fang-red through burning crevices of rock
Gafeidda’s boot-soles tread clay, tortured in ice-forms
The Shepherd sings prayer at the hour of offering
Aantahah mei’capeddre vorsairct
Mei’capeddre vorsac
(Ancient Father accept my sacrifice to you
Accept my sacrifice)
Now nothing can be gained but at the cost of suffering
And the Shepherd who like a comrade beckoned
Has turned his back
He kneels and prays to a stone face
And worse—“Your god,” Gafeidda says
Will topple with his blinded eyes, laid low
By the weight of crow-dung. Birds of omen use
him as their cess-pit. So lordly is your god…”
He steps from the path across fissured earth
And yet in doubt
Of finding strength to climb once more
He finds it
Burning anger rakes his arms like tinder catching fire
He strikes the Shepherd four times
“So great his potency―your god―that a dead man’s eye
Sluiced through the gut of a carrion-fowl
Paints him in malediction…and he bears it”
The hand falls
The chanting cadence had been broken only
By the landing of each blow
And now the Shepherd speaks
As though his work were done
“I will go with you.”
Where the night call hailing sundown
From the thieves’ den starts the crows
Buffeting from the summit with a shriek of wings
That marries to the shout of the lieutenant’s men
And twists like a thread of yarn into the mad baying
Of the dog pack
All come flying in a spiraling refugee mob
Like bats
Part Six
The Betoe’l-fowl awakens weak-eyed
On moonless nights she leaves her nest
And skulking to her mates, she fans her
Stinking feathers, peers with a predatory glint
(By dark inches
like standing stones bewitched,
beneath the starlight they three creep)
She hears a busy, wrathful peep, a tick, tick, tick
The Betoe’l-fowl draws nigh a tempest
More sibilant than the nighttime breezes
Yet the faint utterance of a rat
Or brown-backed cricket’s chirring
Is an impassioned battle scream
within this melée stirring life
Among the dead
Nibbled clean-boned by the rippling tide
She, who rules among scavengers; her muscled neck
her tail unfurling warning, her dagger bill
Impaling
And when she calls, her fellows in turn give voice
The shattering of glass suspended on a fluting note descending
Fabled as the parting wail of the slain
From mound to mound they vault the crest above
Met by the pack-leader slinging like a whip
Howl on howl
The piping exhalation of a burning thing, unearthly
Gathering on the hound’s
Moan, whistled in a man’s throat
The signal-cry again falls from the thieves’ haunt
One ember like an idol’s eye wobbles red
One follows, and they scintillate, crazed with rage
This forgotten god, he stares askew
Until the molten setting sun subsumes his light
So it seems
Gafeidda knows only one unanswered thing
The rest means nothing now
The Shepherd close behind keeps to his word
The thieves are also countrymen
The lieutenant with his foreign dogs
Third among unknowns, is not
But they are all murderers…and yet
…perhaps the Shepherd—he is a strange man.
Gafeidda asks, “Why, Shepherd, can I not
take my knife, cut the buttons from my coat?
Throw them on the path, all I have of worth
…would they not let me pass?”
Part Seven
“Fling to the devil what you will
Your brass is a thief’s for the taking
But deal as your faith demands
Do you suppose they offer peace―
Go, gather in the coals they’ve thrown
And make trade with them coin for coin”
Now so close, and baldly seen
The craft by which the snare is tightened
Dredged from the angled ditch and strewn
Over the slope before the rise
Gafeidda landing on loose stone
Would stagger through the tapered hollow
Where sheer rock flanks the Old-Spirited One…wife
In the Shepherd’s tale, to Aantahah below
To cross at speed is hopeless then, yet here Gafeidda
Means to run
But his eyes close
The voice of her comes ringing like a chain
Not the old woman’s
Not the even-handed goddess
Who loves the ones that pay her homage
The children who recall their parentage
Lay tokens at her feet
This song comes spinning like the marble of glass
Winking at evil, worn at the collarbone
“I will go with you”
She was not life―he lives, and knows the disquiet
Of her being near
And dying fear
Whisperings entangled in the weave of memory
She had been all that promised life
He finds at last the choice has not been made
Her song rests and he seems to wake
Above his head the music swells
Its final note becomes a clank of metal and a sliding swash
All else is dark now, but the rush
Ignites a flaring fire
Struck from behind
Gafeidda tumbles free
He has passed the trial
He leaps and runs, in no-man’s land
He runs but will not breathe
II.
The Wayfarer
Where miles-long grow embattled limbs
Above the sea, salt-hardened, east-laden
Shading pathways wound through sand and scoured stone
Every stone an anvil shape, each tangled crown
Untossed by wind
The wayfarer, led in hunger by a ghost
Stares aloft to see a figure clad in spider webs
Rigid with the stories of the dead
He that approaches tears his garments
Threads of charred flesh as he feels them
Whip-ends of deliverance
Peace
That, he tells this mute, this sage
Draws hands now gloved in silk
Away. Beggar’s hands that leave
The seer undisturbed
“Yours is a lie as well”
The splintering of an ocean’s iron weight
Fills this grove with a searing mist
He sinks in the lee of a seated form
A gust, and from the branches
A filament filters down
The Bride
All that promised love
The slaughtering of her house perfection
Of its kind
His knowing her this way, exclusion, even language
Only famine, or delirium…newly colored
Then promise was this sheer ravine
That forbade crossing
But by inches
It must be
Toe by toe
One moved or died
Still in shocked faces
Icicles, leaves glacéed in water
Sad lips smiling letters
Making by suggestion words
All these, in powdering vines or
Scuds his boots made in the loam and slime
All intimate, all theirs between them
He and the bride he hadn’t known
Her Stay
Water weighs the yoked woman
Stooped among refugees crowded here
Not threatened by grenades hurled from the sentry box
They let this trafficker within the gates pass
She may return
Water she bears reached by a path of heel marks
Baked in the mud and useless in the rains
Such times the prisoners have their thirst
Slaked, if they are willing to cup their hands
Save their coins
When that begging class that rings the walls
Has shouted up a handful
Extracted one for ten
The gatekeeper takes two
The prisoners curry favor for the last
She is not certain how she came into this body
Certain she cannot suffer worse for waiting
If her love is not sent to this abode
The gods see in her shape some other deed
Fulfilled. Can he be dead?
She has never felt it
She unships her buckets and finds at an angle to the sun
This face reflect itself ugly…or not so, but dirty and plain
Not still the age that she had been
Not yet wholly resurrected
She feels the guts and nerveless skin
In dispassion, retain a mortal decay
Perhaps her stay is then ordained a short one
War-Making
The blue soldier’s tunic
Dangles a last brass button as though the gamble
Of trade advances nothing
where an unhoused man can look
able to shift a pallet of brick, he commands the only currency
And pallid sick, blue in the face with sunken chest
Breeds invitation to a potshot
He will take this one-note tune as prophecy
When it falls and rings the water in her pail
But the mate who crutches at his side
Licking from fingertips the essence of tobacco
Smoking all day, and sore discontent when the last butt
Has burned away, the fellow smells of smoke
It may be only this
No power of authority his eye holds
But holds Gafeidda’s weary one in thrall
Certain this show of misery reborn
His savior, having earned a mug’s reward
Another death incarnated for to curse
The war-making insufficiencies of the race
Follows with her burden, drawing close
They Won’t Return
Tide fans up the estuary a warm salt froth
That rinses rot, that hinge of flesh
Holding a clamshell shut
The gulls discard them careless cracked
To bake and stink with dragging seaweed
And wooden ribs will lose their battle
The fisher in his stilt-house barters
For half a hull to piece together
A walking path that rings and rudely cheapens
Cliff falls of carven masonry small demons
Sunk to their necks in sand
The victors here permit the poor to move in rags
Often they won’t return
The stalls where the road comes down
Sell goods for coin, in lieu of keeping tabs
Their keepers point to posters, totals tally-marked
As ranks are filled
Two work side by side to ease a third across
She, the water woman, at this task undaunted
Whether or not the limping man unwashed
Or lousy, both, her head is in his armpit
Her arm is round his waist
Her strength is wholly vested
The other cannot bring himself to grip
Has got the matted garment’s folds
And shuns the flesh
Tilts away, moves to the front, moves to the back
Purses lips and draws his brows
“My daughter, my true daughter,” the old man says
Charity
The camp takes all the rising ground
On the delta’s city side
Driftwood split, stakes driven in and roped
paper and cloth of every color, every kind
partition quarters curtain sleepers
Hard-faced pounding builders making use of time
New shelters in construction catching wind like kites
Fortress blocks dragged up on braids of kelp
serve for hammers then at length
for thresholds
hearths and cooking fires are burning
so passing the avenue between
this market street
bargaining with a short-reined sanity
Arsonous anger waiting almost longing
for hunger’s wildcat claw to loose its grip
The ease of a lunatic on fire running house to house
meanwhile Gafeidda weaving in and out
has gained a mob
tracking him, knowing in the way of the jealous and deprived
he stretches his legs, he aims to gain the other end
to leave this wantful elder
and the woman, his prop, behind
Charity, virtue at the beggar’s entry strays without
Lingering there a place ahead of courage
Hollow-eyed refugees untroubling to a gatekept bliss
But troubling to the one who holds a fish
It comes to them to lift the old man on their shoulders
King of Chaos
The recruitment sheds are manned
Each by a bobbing puppet on a stick
Tittering in death’s head greasepaint
Shanty coffins banged at Gothic angles, these
Painted black, a bloated joke
A train scores the hill, a parade float
Straddled by some nameless King of Chaos
Loitered on, by back-leaning mockers, as the short lieutenant
As the wanderer recalls him
Why this lunatic was seething with it, professing faith
A twang of tautened muscles chirping, virulent in hate
Spectacle that it is, like a wedding’s trenchermen
Drawn in uniforms of velveted excuse-making
Mumbling, eating to obscenity, grinning falling drunk
Every soldier in this army kitted out for killing
Certain to be killed, but the camp is emptying
He wonders now, do I turn…ought I look
Does she follow there
And is the cripple my kinsman reborn
Her father also that priest of Aantahah
The Shepherd’s potent pillar of stone
Will he marry us, though she is old and foul in her way
And will this nuptial be the culmination
A sea of bodies, dragging over earthworks
Using the arms and legs that power them
Value in this sacrificial, this most literal spending of life
The tower men dusting their hands of a mess
Gafeidda will join his bride at last
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