Old Bones

I exist and I don’t exist.

I suppose it has been that way for years. Time. Seasons. Years. It all twists and turns in knots in this place, never troubling to perform in the order nature dictates, taking whatever amount of time it wants to do whatever it please.

Should I try to remember? That world. Out there.

There was a time. Let me tell you. A man, all young and cock-sure, who thought he knew everything. Believing himself to be fearless. Out he set, marching off into the world all brash with his confidence. What does the world have to teach me? Bring it on. Let me learn from it. Let it learn from me.

That boy. That fool.

I remember a house. I remember a long, narrow, cobbled street. And all the houses that ran along it were the same. I remember the street being alive with children, so very many of them, scurrying and scattering, while the mothers worked inside the little houses, doing laundry and mending, piling it up into carts at the end of each day and returning it to the warehouse in exchange for a little pouch of copper coins.

I remember a room where we sat on haybales, and slept under sheepskins in a box of straw. The copper pots hanging from hooks, herbs on shelves, a chest against the back wall where all our clothing and valuables – such as they were – were kept.

#

This house is nothing like that. Slabs of stone, end on end. Stuffed up and insulated with moss and bracken. A fire is a danger. You light it with care. You cook from it, you let it heat the hollow you call a home, and then you douse it and sleep beside the embers. But you never take your eyes off the flame. Not for so much as a moment. The fire knows, you see; the fire knows, and it comes for you.

Everything comes for you.

You learn that. Here. The insects are venomous and flesh-eating; the birds descend from the sky, beaks-leading, falling like a rain of daggers. The earth will swallow you up, bogs move beneath the surface, sniffing and seeking and hungry. They’ll have you if you let them. They feel the vibrations of your footsteps, even your breathing. Only very-stillness, held breath, a forced calm, keeps a man alive.

The animals are at least as vicious.

The trees most of all.

#

I remember the ocean. I remember the salt smell, and the way the salt spray would lash at my skin. Tender, at first, when I first signed up, torn to bleeding at times by a rough salt wind. But my skin hardened. My stomach hardened against the motion of the water beneath the deck. There was danger – we’d been chased by pirates, men fallen overboard, a boy fallen onto the deck from the rigging and his leg broken in three or more places. His eyes were blue, that boy, looking up at me. Not just pain, but knowledge – are you going to have to cut my leg off? Will the captain give me to the sea if I can’t work anymore?

Such things are real. At sea it isn’t murder. Or so the men would tell me.

We took on slaves in one port. Soldiers in another.

The slaves were dirty and skinny, they had a look about them as if the life had been hollowed out from inside. I was afraid that they would fight us, that we would have beat them – the women and children as well – that we would have smash their heads against the masts, bloody them into submission. We were told we might. But we didn’t. They only looked at us with big, resentful, wet eyes. I’ve no idea who beat the fight out of them or how, though at the time my imagination would taunt me with suggestions.

The soldiers were as young and brash as we were. Grinning. Joking. They were on their way to die – they liked to make that known. Their manhood would be forged in battle, in facing and giving death. Some of the older ones had fought before. They laughed with the lads, but they kept themselves a little apart – they’d faced what we hadn’t, found the will to end other men’s lives. Put their own out there to be chanced. There was a shift. A change.

As if none of us had stared death in the face in the midst of a storm. We who had lost men too. The sight of sea-monsters; the eyes of mermaids; the song of sirens. The grizzled old sailors would have none of their posturing.

A girl in a green dress taught me something of being a man. She had dark hair and darker eyes, a snub little nose and a snowstorm of freckles. The captain brought whores aboard for the carnal needs of the men. We were all free to partake. And so we did. With relish, while the older men laughed at our fumbling eagerness.

She was my first. And once I’d been in her arms, I sought only her for the rest of the voyage. Not in love, but I played with it, the thought, the fantasy – I had never been in love, I wanted to be in love.

A taller, darker, serene, red-lipped girl belonged to the captain alone – any man who laid a finger on her would belong to the sea.

#

Girls are fewer and further between, now.

I know better than to take up with the dryads, though sometimes they tempt and whisper. A man loses more than his seed. His mind as well. His strength. She weaves them all into the roots of her tree, binding the man. No hope of escape then.

No. There is no hope of escape now. When the forest claimed me, it did so for life. And he – does he know? Can he remember me? He walked away, seeming not to hear my screams: come back, come back, come back, you have left a part of you behind. He didn’t hear, or didn’t want to hear, or couldn’t. Confused, afraid. I don’t know if he lived or died, if they found a way out. I have never seen him here, in the forest, I have never found him in the villages.

#

Well, I am unsuited to village life.

I am unsuited now the company of men, even more so to the company of woman. And I’ve seen how people can turn on each other, how quickly differences can tear apart communities. There is savagery beneath the surface. All the time. Hunger stalks and threatens them, and they’ll assuage its appetite any way they can. Groves of the dead testify. I know there have been times when the cooking pots are filled with sickly babies or the weak, the old, the unpopular.

Was it like that back in the old place?

I try to remember. Slaves. Soldiers. Ragged children running dirty streets. Blind beggars and emaciated girls who opened their cloaks to show a naked, tattered body. These memories are scattered and uncertain. They mix with visions of dancing and singing, of roasted apples and music, of the man who lifted a knee-high boy above his shoulders and spun him so hard he was dizzy and sick, but he didn’t care because he’d truly felt as if he’d been flying.

It’s such a mess of feelings and actions. I don’t know how to fit in.

And I am different. Marked. Claimed. The forest has eaten into my skin. It’s budded there in my bones.

How many years?

Time is different here. Perhaps I am hundreds of years old already. Maybe only months have gone by. I forget. I lose track. And I have long since stopped marking the sunrises. There are 72 tally marks, but I don’t trust their honesty.

And I have killed. The blood on my hands would not recommend me to civilized company – I was not always civilized, though I became so and lost it again, or at least, so I think was the way of things. There is a grave. I have spent time carving the stone, carving images and patterns on it, trying to make it beautiful, to reflect the beauty of a lost life. I did that. When I sit beside the stone and run my fingers over the patterns, I remember that I have done it. Any haunting that’s due is due to me, is my burden. I wouldn’t carry that over to anyone else.

I have a home of sorts. I have a house. I have a garden that needs to be tended with care – a wrong move and it will happily poison me. I have livestock; though the position of farmer and beast is precarious – in a moment we could become reversed, me tied, grazing, awaiting death. They would seize me, chain me, eat me, if I gave them the chance. That one looks at me now as if to ask me how soundly I sleep, how carefully have I checked the ropes? He’ll come for me the first chance he gets.

But the sunset is beautiful. I sit on the hillside and watch it melting into the trees, while the forest turns stark silhouette. As the sky becomes pink and purple I’ll crawl away into my house and close the stones over the entrance in order to survive the night. I live – in a manner of speaking, alive and not, forgotten, unmourned – alone with just my garden and my savage, ambitious herd, with my mottled skin, with my guilt.

I exist – in a way.       

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work