The sea is a person in of itself, a woman with seaweed for hair and shiny chips of green glass for eyes, volatile and beautiful, both merciful and malicious. She strikes against the cliffs at Dover, eats away at the beaches, beats away enemy ships. For so long, she has kept them safe, from occupation, from the will of others. She is a creature to be respected, and this is what she has returned to them—the safety, momentary as it is, from those that would go against them.
But if she is to be a person, then she shall be a person, and people fall, crumble under weight. She is a protector, but not one as great as to keep away the Romans and their fleets indefinitely. But she tries, and for that, the girl finds herself thankful.
The sea is a mother with its babe, cradling close the island and its people. If ever this girl had a mother, it would have been the ocean around her. But she, unlike the surrounding waves, is not a person but a thing, born of ideas like home and place and here. Her existence lives in the tentative place between thought and word.
The Romans call her Britannia and it is a word. Not a first word, but a word nonetheless. And one so deprived of words cannot help but cling to the ones they are given. She rolls it on her tongue, learns the shape of it in her mouth, the satisfying click of teeth when it's left her.
Her people learn words too, banks of them, and she discovers the wonder of voices. The way she says her words is not the same as others. The variations are addictive in their own way, the trill versus the roll of an r sound. She hates the Romans, but hoards their words nonetheless. They have words for people and places, structures, professions. They have word for the sea. (Mare and later it will mean a horse and she will find manes and hooves in the sea foam.)
And one day the Romans are gone and the Anglo-Saxons have taken their place.
They have a language too, harsh and biting, without the same cadence as Latin had. She finds it appropriate—these words are quick and to the point, perfect for harming. They're said in a different way, like spitting at someone you hate even at the politest of conversations. She finds that it fits well, better than Latin. Her people drag in these words, consolidate them. They are uncomfortable and cold and she finds that she adores them nonetheless. They come with letters, curly and sharp, traced into the sand and washed away. (She is eating them, the sea. They are like sustenance, these names.)
Sǣ is the word to mean the sea now. She has a name, this mythic woman, and the girl thinks it wrong. To be named is to be tied. Once she could recall the longing for a name, a yearning hope that she would exist beyond genius loci. (Because there is a word for this now, as well.) To tie her beloved protector to a word is blasphemous, like binding the water in chains and locks. It is her word. It is her sea. A possessive—mine.
Scip is the word she has now to own the sǣ. The woman in the water has destroyed them for her, smashed them into splintered bits of wood to keep the Romans away. She is terrified at first, of owning this woman, because she is a cradle and a home and a temptress at once, and simultaneously a trap, depths of green and blue waiting to drag you under, the muddy water of the Thames has shown her the dangers. She can own you as well, keep you in her underwater empire, tear out your insides on the rocks and hold you peacefully in a chilled embrace.
One day the girl—once a child, and perhaps still—chooses a name for herself. No longer Albion or Britannia but a name for a body, a human body rather than an island. She borrowed it from her brother, as she is prone to doing with words, but never names.
Gwenhwyvar is a word that means swelling white wave and she takes it when she sees it, tries it on to see if it fits, like the Anglo-Saxon words did. She knows words now. Has a vocabulary. She is allowed to be picky now, with the ones she wants. And especially so with the ones she applies to herself.
But she likes it. It fits like something warm and soft, a blanket on a cold evening. She wants to think that the woman in the water likes it to. Enjoys imagining that the woman would approve, perhaps. Like a child seeking affection from her mother, the island is still cradled in the cold bosom of the seas.
She comes to understand that some nations are landlocked, and she imagines that they have the warmth of the land alongside them, the companionship of others. But I am happier this way, she thinks. Because now there are words to describe warmth and sun and people, and sea glass and the colour green.
And she has everyone she needs or could need, a woman watching as she begins to own the oceans (they are seas no longer, this new word lacking affection simply refers to the water) with chips of glass for eyes, whispering to once-Albion, a slow disappearance as words change and she is bound by names.
break
Later (far, far later) there are politics. Monarchies and blood feuds, civil wars and houses pitted against each other like dogs in a fight. They're sour, rotten things, decayed fruit and fingers lingering in grimy gutters. It's disgusting in a vague sort of way, a bone-deep revulsion that drives one to self hatred or pity.
But Gwenhwyvar has neither self hatred nor pity. She can no longer be bothered with such, it seems. She has lost perspective in losing herself to language. (It has a name now and it absorbs her like watery sand.)
Like the Romans before them, she hates the Normans. They are the barbarians, not her and not her people, who have done nothing. The Conqueror is a monstrous beast with an army of pillagers, little more than rats scavenging in filth; thrashing their tails and gnashing their teeth.
The tentative ruling class was ruined underfoot, torn from their homes and families. The Normans are a plague and a scourge and an enemy, someone to hate with all of the justification they can muster. In quiet moments (few and far between) she likes to imagine ripping out their tongues for their slander and tearing the words from their throats.
Hastings hurts like a sore bruise for weeks, a dark stain over half her rib cage that aches like an open wound and feels infected. There is the urge to cut it open and drain the blood, squeeze out the dark and usher in daylight—but even that is gone.
They want to commemorate their victory, relish in it like hogs in mud. Disgusting hoards of them cheering, and she wants to let loose her stomach or her wound, wipe spit and dirt on their faces, and grind them into the damp battlefields. She is angry in a way she has never been before. She has no word for this and doubts there ever will be one, not for this type of rage. It's not something to be spoken of. They give her cloth and needles and coloured bits of thread because she is woman-shaped, and tell her to recreate their victories as dictated.
She wants to push her needles in their eyes and almost does, so she is given a watcher and this is how she meets France.
She makes their tapestry because she is forced to do so, but she steals their words in quiet retribution. They roll strangely, with equally strange sounds. And they are different when they come out of her mouth, so accustomed to the clipped ones of her English.
So she puts them together, alongside. Mixes them together with the Latin and Danish, matches them to letters and wishes quietly that she had a beach to write them on.
The sea has abandoned her. She can no longer hear the whisper of waves and the white noise of crashing against the chalky white cliffs. She is a child no longer though, and cannot rely on the cool, welcoming water to protect her and her people. She is tragically, painfully solid. She is here enough to hurt for herself and for her people. She is here enough to hate.
And this is why the woman abandoned her, she thinks. A child grown, full of bitter hatred and curses. A vile adolescent who wants to rain blood on the Normans and whispers quiet, ineffective hexes under her breath even as she struggles with thread and rips to pieces the tips of her fingers. Nothing so kind even in hatred could want her here. She thinks that the only reason she has not yet been swallowed is that the invaders are here, even if they are less clean even than she.
She is quiet until one day they are all gone.
It's now, in the vacuous silence, that she is inspired to recall and old word: dústswearm. It is the word for the bits of dust that float around, dancing in the sunlight. One day she is asleep and the next she awakes to find that the dust is not the only thing there anymore.
The fae are kind at first, in the way one would expect. Gentle creatures who want only to touch her hair and keep her company in the forests, from the Normans. She lets them, knowing they are malicious but not merciful. She practices her words to them, teaches that this is how she will talk. That this is her language and the language that her people will one day use. Shows them her vocabulary proudly. This is mine, she says. I made it.
And the fae admire it like a shiny precious stone, pick up words of their own to try out and then one day they are speaking. To the fae who have never left the haven of greenery, she explains the sea, as a mother and a friend and a protector.
She explains another word as well, one that she has kept close to her heart to keep it warm without letting it out into the light. Perfidious is a word for a traitor, a liar, the one who hides in the alley with the blade. It's a cold little word, and she hates to think of how it would fare out in the world, away from the island, away from the warm little place near her heart.