Mischief Acts, page 30
that carries
only scent of earth, fungal spores,
up through the sleeping trees.
This one is quick,
light on her logical feet.
We watch
from mousehole, from berry eye,
from behind our old man’s beard,
as she scuds towards our ward, our odd-child,
Herndon.
Can a forest hesitate?
For this one is different. Murmur it.
There’s her gait, for one,
the pitch of her breath,
a strand of red hair caught on a thorn
that bleeds a certain bitter scent.
There is nothing we forget.
Rollo
Into the heart of the forest that fanciful poet’s notion
Rollo runs.
Ears pricked, eyes wide, alert to the coming
what?
Threat,
assault,
the surprise that felled
an unlucky twelve
before her.
Dawn greys above the eastern ridge. There’ll be light to see
this overgrown fantasy gone wrong.
There’s be light to see
her prey,
girl icon,
sacred Herndon,
thorn in REFO’s side. And the insanity
of it all makes her smile,
briefly.
For here she is,
a small lone woman, armed only
with expertise and a brief to succeed where REFO has
admitted defeat,
jogging through the wood of their own making, this
jungle of
failed surveillance, of
slipped corporate grip on control on reality,
she’d say. Because
she’s played the videos, she’s seen
the leafy mask, the crown of horns,
she’s heard the voice that swoops, gutters, sings songs
that belong
to another more tangled world,
weird melodies that summon
to this awkward girl
a clan of crooning wolves.
They snout and nuzzle neck and palm,
where by rights,
they should bite.
Just a girl. A young, lone woman,
face hidden her voice brazen, yes,
but surely no match for the powers of REFO, this girl
with unlikely, hairy friends.
Rollo pities her.
Rollo pities REFO, beholden
by their own protection order to forbid any harm
to the wolves they planted themselves
and let grow a swarm of tooth and claw.
Rollo has no gun.
Effra
Dawn, silvering liquid surfaces,
my transparent mirror shows me
the fairest forest, tapestry of
tendril, feather, paw print, quiet leaves.
Too quiet.
The trees’ alarm ebbed and gone,
no cunning thrum
of plot to catch a thief.
I have swum as far as my channels will take me,
I have chased, incensed by the stranger’s face
that stared into my pond,
all innocence.
Curled in a cave of willow root,
I knock and implore.
You have the might to stop her,
trip her, transfix her, fox her.
It’s too late for my serpent trick.
Do as you did before!
But the willows hush and shake their heads.
Not this one, they whisper.
There’s something about her.
Leaves in her eyes,
green in her blood.
There’s nothing we forget.
Bearman
Sip of water. Nip of something stronger.
The decanter rattles in Bearman’s clammy hand.
His work does not permit nerves. But
the wood
on his screen
rears and tips and swerves
as Rollo makes her way.
Unhindered, so far.
His daughter bold.
Not nerves.
The remit states:
bring the target out unharmed, make no mark, take
no animal life.
But he has put this task in his daughter’s hands
and not told.
They work on the need-to-know. That’s the job.
Do not disclose, there’s no story,
no oxygen to the insurgent flame,
no glory, no fame, the satisfaction only
of imposing the rules, the straight hard edge of law.
His daughter does not need to know anything that might,
after all,
be irrelevant.
No drain to cognitive resource,
no baggage,
no personal cause.
No other daughter, lost in a wood full of wolves.
The brandy swashes cold and deep.
Rollo is trained not to scare.
Even wolves, those fairy-tale creeps, hold no fear
when the training kicks in. But there’s been no way to prepare
for this target,
this Herndon, harmless outlaw.
No way to share his smallest, sharpest dread.
It’s been said
that revenge is best served cold. But revenge
in the form of a
fierce daughter,
unwitting soldier
in his own war?
It merits a stiff drink.
He could not have told.
Rollo
What time is it, Mr Wolf?
The recorded howl begins low
from the speaker at Rollo’s breastbone.
It hums through her chest
as it modulates,
becomes multitone.
And there,
there is the answer.
A wail through time
a snail-shine gleam
a silver moony beam of
shivering echo
sliding mercury
up the sensing hairs in her ears
bright threads in her blood.
Her father’s words:
win this, for me.
Rollo presses earpiece, mic, into place, commands
signal to shrink the yawn of sky space
between here and there,
haunted wood and swivel chair.
‘Dad. You ready?’
The thin, sure voice fills her head,
dousing the sparks of fear.
‘Daughter.’
‘I can hear wolves,’ she whispers. ‘But with an echo.’
His chair creaks.
His eyes close.
‘There’s a tunnel. That’s where you’ll have to go.’
He starts to reel off coordinates,
long-lost landmarks, memorised contour lines
but Rollo is listening on a frequency of
bones, of
cobweb chandeliered in dew, of
icicle drip and
starry midnight blue.
She lets peal a second artificial howl
and follows, downhill, the spiked silken trail
that will lead her, Orpheus, underground.
The Wood
Light of dawn,
day begun,
hymn of the wood
daily sung,
Herndon wakes her velvet throat,
hatching full-fledged notes:
forest music,
melody of damp earth
chalk harmony
leaf-edge ornament
and Herndon’s signature style of
wolf antiphony.
Through miles of
thicket, spinney, grove and covert
a fairy flight of morning-song
glazes the air,
ripples the pond
where Effra, goddess restored,
taints her realm with saltwater sobs,
sends up bitter bubbles that pop, sourly.
Poor Effra,
self-appointed guardian to
guileless Herndon,
making amends for the backfire
of that long-ago exile:
the rampaging hunter,
banished via backwater,
ejected from the wood, from enchantment,
from Effra’s water-bed.
And now look.
We spy,
from fox hole, from pierced oak gall,
from white puffball eye,
this new hunter,
her black-cat prowl
sinking, with each silent step,
Effra’s hopes.
She is close, now.
Through willow root, Effra begs.
Protect her,
Do as you did before!
But we sense there is more to this one.
Feel the spread of her toes, the spring
in her knees and her lifted elbows.
There is nothing we forget.
This one we know.
Rollo
Rollo, creeping through the Great North Wood,
heart and head high in the cloud of a memory:
her mother.
Who said she never should ever, darling
enter a tunnel
without knowing
how far away
the exit lay.
Rollo’s gaze flicking upwards, her lips mouthing sorry,
her cheeks receive a sprinkled blessing of rain.
As the wood begins to patter and drip,
Rollo slip-slides down the tangle slope.
Do not think, she thinks,
that you should have been struck down by now.
Do not think, either, that the fact you’re still here,
limber and clear,
means anything magical. Forest born, yes,
but trained and technical, that’s all it is.
‘There used to be a path,’ her father says.
And sure enough, she finds
the line made by traffic human lupine
and Rollo follows it
and hears,
above the slow static of rainstruck leaves,
a voice, singing.
It does a wolf impression.
The expert wail and squall carries a smile,
somehow.
Rollo stalks,
wets dry lips.
The keening transforms, a rough kind of music,
tattered, torn from a wilder scale
than any she’s heard before.
Even the videos viewed by millions have a tamer score,
Herndon, leaf-masked, horn-crowned, pouring baffling words
into tunes that hook the mind,
deep in a tender spot,
and reel it forth.
But this is it melody? makes Rollo feel
a thousand years old.
The tunnel mouth
is all ivy,
glossed and dripping,
a garlanded maw.
Rollo,
a small woman
in black Kevlar, stands
at its threshold and scans
for wolves.
In the gloom they loll, flopped
on their sides like languorous dogs.
wolfskin rugs
whose eyes follow her,
the late audience member, disrupting the solo show.
Her earpiece stutters. She whispers,
Not now.
Snouts rise and sniff.
On she goes.
Deeper,
the echo of song
purer, the melody
mocks her measured steps and then
She sees her.
Or someone is standing there,
leaf-masked, horn-crowned,
flooding the tunnel with rising sound that
tugs Rollo in
by the hairs on her skin.
Hood, says her head,
and she pulls it down. It’s a tactic.
Meet mystery with honesty, show yourself
a lone woman.
It’s just me and you.
The singing stops.
Ears prick.
‘Well, this is weird,’ the figure says. A female voice, young, smooth.
‘Who are you?’
‘Who are you?’
Their two echoes meld
and drift away.
In her ear, Rollo hears
her father’s long intake of breath, the pop
of his lips.
‘I’m Rollo Bearman,’ she says. ‘Are you Herndon?’
The woman steps closer. ‘You’re going to think this is weird too.’
Her father is trying
to speak.
Not now.
Rollo pulls out her earpiece and says,
‘Will you take off the mask?’ She’s aware
of the phalanx of eyes behind her, of the task
ahead if she gets any further, of
the sequin
that spies
from her bare forehead.
‘Okay,’ says the woman.
And she does.
She takes off the mask.
And Rollo
is looking into her own face.
Bearman
With a weak finger
Bearman slides the lights down low,
beckons dusk into his carmine room,
better to see
what his daughter beams
from within the hill. Any moment surely
the signal will die,
the connection to her,
his bold daughter,
lost,
his wood
lost from view.
It’s been REFO’s curse,
every camera, drone and bug
scrambled, blown,
except the ones through which Herndon
using method unknown
has spoken.
Does he wish that he could not see?
He is riveted, the screen
magicking him in, so he floats into the tunnel, a fly
taking a ride, past
trickling walls, past
sprawling wolves, towards—
The figure emerges, clear
as a dream and he has lost his nerve.
Speak now, he urges his tongue
or forever—
Tell her to keep the mask on.
Tell her—
But Rollo has gone closer,
their voices a puzzle of
sound he cannot solve.
Bearman feels
a thousand years old
as he sees
the mask pulled away and standing
before his bold daughter,
the double
of herself.
This other daughter
is thinner,
her red hair longer.
She wears a headdress of horns.
Time unties itself wriggles free begins to speed.
Bearman, in his swivel chair
falls up through the branches,
twigs in his hair,
eyes full of leaves.
The wood shrinks, fragments,
a scatter of dew on a threadbare rug, it is
welling up,
seeping through,
a mossy patch spreading fast as green flames
as he falls
fights back against the wind.
Follow the horns, the feet running, rewound,
to that distant hunt, the cry, the howl,
the backwards shriek of the wolf interval,
for this is no dream of a namesake.
No. It was you
who brought down the axe,
who with tatters bound
the horns to that human head.
It was you,
your mischief, your magic,
for charms are just words for desires that
burn a hole in the fabric,
let the horns poke through.
It was you.
So
Bearman opens his eyes
and listens.
In the tunnel, silence.
Each daughter in her looking glass,
half herself,
half the other,
the forest-born seed split and antlered out,
mirrored sprouts of horn grown high, heads and hearts
now turned together.
His daughters touch hands, that
unselfconscious gesture of children.
And then
they are running,
past wolves, past ivy,
out of the tunnel,
a game, a chase between the trees,
whooping joy, whooping fear,
a wild song,
a strange song,
ending and beginning.
APPENDIX
‘The Birth of Myth’ – transcript of lecture delivered to classics students at Enleigh College by D. Ferraro
How is a myth born? Do we think that, out of boredom, or a bit of showing off, a guy – or girl – in a leopard-skin toga comes up with a particularly juicy bit of after-dinner entertainment by the fire, and it sticks? I doubt it.
Do we think that, for want of a proper scientific explanation for some natural phenomenon, or transcendent experience (drugs and booze are much older than you, ladies and gentlemen), a frightened peasant posits a higher power? Blame someone else for the hangover, eh. Well, perhaps.
Or is it more like a massing, bits and pieces of life, history, ideas, unknowns, flocking together until we see a picture, a resemblance, and we recognise it?
Take this image of a starling murmuration.1 This photograph was taken in South London in 2058. What do you see? Come on, it’s not hard, is it? Yes, to our human eyes, there’s the very obvious shape of a stag’s head. The starlings won’t see it that way, but we do. We can’t help ourselves.
Today, we’re looking at the horned god, that stag’s head in all our minds; indelible, innate, whatever nonsense you think of him, he’s our example and I promise you that, once you know the murmuration is made up of individual starlings, it doesn’t fall apart, or disappear. In fact, it’s more marvellous than ever.
So: origins. There are a lot, let’s just say, and we can’t get right back, but we’ve got documents from the twelfth century that are quite sarcastic about certain leaders of the Wild Hunt.2 Because that’s what he was, in those days. King Herla is one singularly silly story about a visit to an elfin wedding that goes on for two hundred years, and includes an unfortunate goody bag for the guests.3 We don’t need the details here. They’re not important. What’s important is that, even in 1100-and-something, some people really didn’t take that story seriously.
But Herla is one starling. His flock mates are quite similar – starlings being mostly sexually monomorphic. We get Odin, leader of the Wild Hunt; Hellekin, leader of the Wild Hunt; Herne, leader of the Wild Hunt; Ellerkonge, leader of the Wild Hunt; Erl-king, Herlequin, the whole Familia Herlechini, a kind of ancient, grisly mafia. And some get taken more seriously than others.
