Stagtine, 4. A Field Harvest

Section I, Chapter 1

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Lionel, son of Lynet, is a bull in the Wildland. One day it came to pass that his death, speaking in a torrent of wind and hooves, awakened deep memory and changed life forever.

His blood welled across the misty dawn like a velvet carpet laid for his arrival. Our hearts, together, thumped deeply, Earth pounded as life pulsed rhythmically, outward and thick, like awakened spirits rapping against their cage of bones. A river of magma played under the pale, metal sky and grey clouds covered everyone.

The land in front of us fell in long, shallow slopes, forgotten hills of cedar and olive, barren and knotted and twisted together, toward the river valley below. His life flowed slowly and scudded across the hillside. It released summer’s once green grasses from their frozen torpor, unhurriedly. The frost steamed as the warm blood freed blade by blade from the ice, the grey winter’s hold, and the world seemed to gather under mist and steam. Magma is a world builder and a new world was building. Slowly.

It was a spectacle for the coming of life’s luminaries, our celestial celebrities, to carry him away, gently, into the second world, just below the clouds, the spirit land. Mercy without justice is intoler- able. So also, is justice without mercy. And I wondered if the gods know what it feels like to be human, to be here, to be man, to witness death, to give it, and to live alongside it all. Do they know? I often wonder.

From the east extended a west of a whole and colored wardrobe with its wooded hills heaped up by some ancient war or maybe the growing sickness that followed. Not humans—for we have only the little powers of little men—rose these hills but monsters, gurgling up under Earth’s crust, like dragons. Descending down, their rapping wings, their enflamed breath, their ebullient blood together formed these crags: the eternally blue ridge, the forgotten dragon’s back. Eroding down, down, down.

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