Sorry for the delay, dear readers!
I'm getting a little busy of late, so bear with me. :-) I had to read a bit of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to try and write that poem in something close to Middle English.
Enjoy!
XI. River Ever
Of this land fulfild of faierie
And of its magical compaignie
Is little left; and yet, bewere,
Of what remaines, of what ye fere
In solitude in the pine foreste;
Of Clearing Weste, if I be honeste;
There lieeth what in dreames ye see
It seems the Lord's great Charitee,
The waters, sauf and shallowe
Betwixt them, a secrete wallowes
A secrete greate, and fearful ...
The book was worn, falling apart with age, the pages falling from the binding like wilted leaves off a tree...the first chapter was called, The Ryver Evere.
She had always been fascinated by old books. They held the magic of the world beyond her windows, the world she believed to be beautiful as the pictures in the books, the books she read in the recluse of the library, that was a city in her world. And when, with a wearied eye, she returned to the town of her bedroom, she would indeed dream as though she had been there, down there, a place she could see only from her little concrete world, the world with beautiful towns of silk and damask, the beauty of which mocked her in the dark when she saw his dark form in the shadows of her bedroom. The world beyond, to her, was one where fire did not turn to ashes, where clouds never blocked the sun. The sun her walls blocked out.
She didn't understand why his presence in her room by dark scared her. Why his hands pressed down on her so heavily, suffocating her, when he caressed her. All she understood was that he was her father figure. She called him so. She didn't understand that he wasn't.
All she understood were the stories she lost herself in, the stories she loved and imagined to be real; the birds that could understand what she said to them and replied, albeit in their own curious, high-pitched language; the merpeople that inhabited the seas of the Earth; the fairies that whispered to her from the potted plants in the rooms of her house. Of her world. Her Earth in a universe of what she thought was beauty.
Yet, now she was not in her beloved gray city of rain and mists; now she was in another beautiful prison, beyond her town of fog and thunder, men in black top hats and cobbled roads; her new little world, world of stone walls, was in a green meadow, her father's retreat. That was what she understood. All she understood was that he was her father. Her father figure. Although it was not so.
And here she had torn apart the dust-worn wooden furniture and old bedding in search of a book to lose herself in, a story to apply to the endless green beyond the bars.
Mystries of Goodpenny Meadowe
The book was worn, falling apart with age, the pages falling from the binding like dead birds from the sky. She continued reading that first chapter.
Of peace for the teareful
Starke will for all the weake
If you, in hearte's deep desire
That scorcheth lyke the hotteste fyr
Have a wyshe for whiche you praye
On darkeste nighte and faireste daye
You may, with inke of blodde your owne
Inscribe on paper youre deare wysh
It will be granted as the fysh
Woll carrie it to underworlde...
He, her father figure, had left to hunt. Hunt birds. Birds that would fall from the sky like cursed rain. Like an Egyptian plague. Like a hail of green and grey, yellow and blue, red. Always red at the end.
He had gone far away. The housekeeper, Old Greg, with his ground-shaking snoring, would never notice. The pine forest was clear in view. She only had to find that little stream. The little stream that her heart clung onto like onto a lifeline. She was a clever girl, and yet she did not understand everything. For her, dull reality without elves and merpeople, shooting stars and the angels they were, existed only in her prison. She did not understand that the world she dreamed of was a place where the elves devoured people's dreams and merepeople lured seafarers into their lairs to be eaten. She did not understand that the man who killed the birds, who brought them cascading down in torrents of their own blood, turning rivers into red swirls of sickening water, was not her father figure.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she slashed her kitchen knife accross her palm, and felt the warm liquid cascade down her bare wrist. The pain she felt was that of the birds her father figure shot down. She was suffering for them. She closed her eyes and felt the blood pool in the crook of her arm. Oddly satisfied with her ritual, she dipped the quill pen in her blood, and wrote on a piece of paper from her notebook – yes, ripping it from there would spoil the binding. Perhaps the pages would be lost, lost, and perhaps found by another, read and felt the way she felt them. Perhaps. She did not understand these things, she did not think on them.
The blood was bright red and soaked through the pages, the stray drops blooming into centreless poppies on the page. She wrote, her heart in every word.
Dear river,
I want to be free and I want to see my true family.
Yes, she did not understand that he was not her father figure. And yet she understood that he was not the man to whom she owed her existence; that man, her father figure said, was a bad man, a despicable, evil criminal. He did not deserve to be called her father.
And yet she didn't understand that he intended to be nothing close to a father figure. She didn't understand that the concept could not be applied to him. Yes, she had always been vaguely grateful for his guardianship – his role to her, to her in her misunderstanding, as a father figure. And yet her true parents had always intrigued her callow mind, they were her hidden secret, her chance, that she turned to in her torment in the dark. She was too young to understand the chaos that reigned in her thoughts.
Her hand still throbbing, throbbing and pulsing red liquid, the rivers of the plagues of Egypt, all over her wrist, she ran out of the door. Old Greg slept, slept and snored. He would never understand that she had left. That the caged bird had flown out of a carelessly closed latch. That song no longer ricocheted off the windows. Off the glass bars as impenetrable as iron.
She tore accross the grass, feeling it brush her bare ankles, leaving a trail of red dew on the wilted leaves and untrampled grass blades. She ran for the pine forest, which stood in its dark silence, in its eternal peace and magic. She tore between the trees, forgetting her fear of the dark, forgetting, in the haste and heat of the moment, that this was her opportunity to live a day in a life of freedom she so coveted; and yet River Ever with its magical promise steered her to the West Clearing, where it was said the water flowed. She did understand that the book had been written a long time ago; and yet she had overheard him speak of the clearing in the forest, the pine forest, if one followed the middle path of the three that diverged at the start, where he had shot a fine rabbit. She had wept then, for that rabbit, as she had once wept for the bee she killed in her fear of being stung. Seeing it dead and contorted had sent tears to her eyes. And yet, she didn't think of that now.
She did not notice the beauty of the clearing, the gothic arches of the trees around it, or the enticing shimmer of the River Ever. It was a narrow river, almost like a stream, and yet it seemed deep, and long, snaking between the trees until it disappeared into darkness. She knelt at the river, at its still waters, and, having folded the paper, threw it into the shimmering water. She watched the moisture seep through the fibers of the paper; watched it sink below the surface; watched it until it was out of her sight.
Smiling to herself, she stood up and breathed in the fresh summer air, as she walked back along the middle path, away from River Ever. Perhaps she would visit again. Perhaps she would come and have a look at it the next time her father, her father figure, was hunting. Perhaps then she would simply sit by its banks and admire the play of light on its surface, feel the warmth of the sun breaking through clouds and foliage, paint pictures in her mind of the gothic trees and their vast green carpets.
She did not understand, however, that haste equalled mistake; that a lack of thoroughness could lead to disaster; a single broken card could fell an entire card house.
She was too young. As she slept that night, sweet hopes and dreams as her best lullaby, the book lay open still, open on her table. No, she did not understand that the last word of a story could change it entirely; that it is the last drop of poison that kills you; that the last lines of a poem are its true voice.
But eek, good reder, be awere
The Ryver is not God's werke faire
Alas! 'Tis Guarded by the divil
The Ryver's magic is an evil
Powerful and yet with limitacioun
If you wysh nowe for salvacioun
Prey ye in good faith for thee;
And I woll pray, to God in alle His magestee.
Having not read these lines, she did not pray; she hoped with all her heart that River Ever would grant her wish.
In fact, so sure was she that she could even say she knew her wish would be granted.
For once, she was right.
