The thing about autumn is…
The rain
Pelting, pelting, pelting down.
The cold
Seep, seep, seeeeeeping in.
The wet
Drippity drip down your — drip — spine.
The thing about autumn is…
The colours
Shining, vibrating, glorying, garish at times.
The food
Finally ripened for consumption.
The hearth
Warm and cosy yet still bathed in light.
The thing about autumn is a varied thing.
The thing about autumn is…
Pumpkins, scary tales and leaf-mantles and crowns.
It’s apple-puppets and scarves and hats and wind’s roar.
It’s gold upon grey upon red upon green.
It’s the breath before winter and the fight before dark.
It’s the crunch of the dead and the song of the year.
It’s the buttons of mushrooms, the warmth of good tea.
It’s the last bites of ice-cream and the start of long nights.
It’s the gathering of loved ones, the sharing of food.
It’s the saving of nuts and the soft come of white.
It’s the hush of the world as it gathers to rest.
The thing about autumn is a million things.
That’s the thing.
While I’m not a big fan of autumn myself, I have a friend who adores the season and I wrote this piece for them.
Personally, I don’t deal well with cold, so the beauty of the season tends to get overshadowed by the fact that it means several difficult months. I didn’t shy away from hinting at my own dislikes of the season, but I tried to balance it out with a focus on the positive and beautiful aspects of autumn.
It wasn’t what we meant at all. Of course it wasn’t. No one heart means to harm their loved ones. No good soul would willingly do hurt to its home and no body would do harm to the spirit it houses. But we were blinded. Our roads were paved with gold and our clothes dyed pure amethyst. We shod our horses with silver and our towers rose the highest in the Low Lands, higher even than those in other countries. We’d forgotten so much…
And, when we most needed what we no longer knew, we were deserted.
Does it matter, in the end, what drowned our greed and washed away our vainglory? Stories will tell – No, are still told so long after… They say it was the wrath of God against our vanity. They say it was the wrath of the merfolk for our selfishness. Does it matter, in the end, whether it was God, the Devil, or the people of the sea? Do you think we care who intended our destruction? More the fool, if you do.
We. Lost. Everything. What else could matter? What else but that? We lost our homes. We lost our wealth. No more for us the emperor’s cloth. No more for us the hunting and the feasting, fine horses and fat swine. We lost everything. Oh, for a while yet we had our towers, crumbling into ruin. We had them until not even those were left us. Not a cat, not a pig, not a rat was left us, when all was done.
Nothing but the song of long-broken bells on days mist shrouds the lands, long ago tolling for help that never came as we ran. Bells that rang out dirges as we fled, as we tried to take with us all that was dear. Some sought to save themselves by climbing onto the roofs of our towers. Most just ran from the onslaught, or tried to. It was chaos. Winds tore our orchards from the ground. Water and trees smashed into our houses, onto our streets.
We tried to save it. Our beauty, our pride. Anything at all to keep our precious gems, our valuable horses, our fine clothes. Not even then did we think. Can you blame us? We had panicked. We were scared. And so we left them. We left them all to drown. If you could get away, you did. If you lost your wealth, you did. Better that than death, we thought in those few days of panic.
So many of us died then, during that first disaster. So many, many more thereafter… We died of famine. Of cold. Of loss. We were so proud and so used to wealth, and too many of us could not stoop to begging. So many… The sea had slaughtered us. Butchered us. Decimated us. It sent our ghosts to roam the world. That nightmare killed us all and left us graveless until we were nothing more than dust and bones and moans in the wind. The memory of us nothing more than a warning against sin. If it is even that, now. It has been so long.
Eventually, the land was reclaimed. We fought the sea, again and again, until we had wrested back what it had taken. Until, once more, we had the land that had been ours so long ago. We had it. But not our most-beloved Saeftinghe, town of the golden roads, city of the crystal towers. That was lost forever, our precious Saeftinghe, even after we had reclaimed the land on which it once had stood, and we did not build anew.
When the world was calm again, some of those who had survived the catastrophe returned. They came to dig up the priceless pavement, to get back the wealth that they had lost. They were never seen again. Yet, also, there were those of us who wept, who began to understand what we had so long forgotten. Mothers who had lost their children. Children who had lost their siblings. Lovers who had lost their heart’s delight… We had lost our families. Our lives forever changed and sundered from what had been, could have been. Should have been. We were sons who would never follow our father’s trade, daughters who would never wed… All life, and love, and laughter lost to the waves after that storm.
Does it surprise you, then, that so many of us perished of grief in the aftermath? Even had there been food, we would not have eaten it. Our bodies held no hunger that this earth could ever still. We were alone and desolate. Others showed us — taught us — about kindness and love, about giving to those who needed what we had in abundance, but it was never enough. Never. For we had lost all that we had held dear and all that we should have held dear, and we did not realise until it was already too late. So very much too late…
Such is our doom now, to wander these lands forever. To think forever on all the love we’ve lost, to watch the ebb and flow of remembrance as our people learn and forget what would once have been Saeftinghe’s salvation time and again.
So hear me now, you who seek to find our treasures in the mud. You will not find them. Not our silver, not our gold, not our jewels. The sea has taken it all. Taken it all far, far away from us. She might grant your wish, but she will curse you with a thousand griefs if she does. She will take you as she took so many of us. Turn back whilst she is yet sated on our tears, contented with our cries. Turn back to your loved ones and hold them dear as we did not. Turn back lest the sea once again take innocence and laughter from this our world.
Turn back and take our tale with you. It is all you will find here, the only thing left for anyone to take. The only thing left for us to give. Take it. Take it and go. Share it with all who will listen.
You may recognise the motif in Saeftinghe from more well-known legends, such as Lyonesse or Atlantis. Saeftinghe is a legend from the Low Lands, however.
It’s another piece that I’ve based on real historical events. Saeftinghe was a real town in the Netherlands. Much of the town’s surrounding land was lost during the All Saint’s flood of 1570, but the town itself didn’t disappear beneath the waters until 1584 when Dutch rebel soldiers destroyed the last dike in an attempt to stop the Spanish from conquering the country.
Nowadays some of the land has been reclaimed and is an important nature reserve in the Netherlands.
While I’ve obviously fudged some of the historical facts for the sake of the story, it’s well in keeping with the way the legend itself has altered them.
Closing eyes, concentrating
On that dratted stack of hay.
Floating needles hidden still
Within that dratted stack of hay.
Cannot see, must be focused
Needle, needle, silver fine.
Needle, needle, self do free.
Needle, needle, sing to me.
Closing hand, holding sew-tool
Triumphant, see here how cold
&nb
sp; Needle lies in colder hand.
Needle, needle, lost in hay.
Needle, Needle is loosely based on the structure of an englyn proest dalgron, a Welsh poetic form that focuses on half-rhymes.
I had a lot of fun with this one and I hope it brightens up your mood as much as it always does mine.
To Rhian, who has the best title ideas
Sitting on a sheltered ridge, Bella sighed. The wind spun snowflakes around them and they huddled in the cold. It wasn’t hard, being a demon. At least, it shouldn’t be hard to be the archetypal demon that beat people down psychologically and encouraged them to do wrong, cruel or mean things and the like. That should be easy, even for someone like Bella. There were hundreds, thousands, millions of other demons to help them with that most of the time. But Bella could never quite manage to get the words out with the rest of their chorus and they still struggled to convince children to steal a cookie from the jar or teenagers to cheat on their tests.
That last failure was what had driven Bella into the mountains, to a ridge so cold no one would be looking for them there. Because Bella didn’t know what to do. Bella was a demon, a lilac-skinned, no-horned, bat-winged, stubby-tailed, biscuit-loving demon. As far as Bella knew, they had always been a demon and demons had always been evil and nasty. It just… wasn’t Bella.
They sighed again and shifted backwards to lean out of the wind a little more. Biting through their skin, the cold was almost comforting in its distraction. That worried them fleetingly, but Bella had too many worries already. After all, ‘I do not want to make people do cruel things’ wasn’t something a demon could confide in anyone. Not for the first time, they wished humans wouldn’t freak out if they showed up to talk to them. Bella was only a weak demon, and couldn’t transform or glamour themself into someone that could pass for a human. Bella had fled as far away as they could think to go, far colder than any demon liked. They’d hoped they would acclimatise, but the cold just would not go away; in fact, the wind was picking up. Perhaps the top of a high mountain range wasn’t such a good hiding spot after all. But to return home and face everyone…
“What’s up?” The voice startled Bella almost enough to keel headfirst off the ridge, but a pale green hand was there to steady them all the same. They smiled weakly at their sort-of-rescuer: Sannmallja. Great, Bella thought. That was all they needed now: the meanest, cruellest demon in their chorus seeing them try to come to terms with yet another failure to their name. Sooner or later someone was sure to notice how incompetent they was and then what would happen? Stories and rumours weren’t exactly the best sources of information, but the kernel of truth within them was bad enough. Bella didn’t even know which parts of the stories were true, which only made the fear worse.
“You okay?” Sannmallja asked and Bella startled anew. Blinking up, it took Bella’s mind a moment longer to realise they had drifted off into thought when they should have been alert. They got up hastily, dusting the snow off their denim pants and vest, but there was nowhere else for them to go. Bella kicked some snow off the ledge. That made them look tough instead of anxious, didn’t it?
Sannmallja looked them over, a frown on her pretty features. The other demon didn’t look very cruel right at that moment, but Bella couldn’t take the chance of trust. “I’m fine,” they answered stiffly and wrapped their arms around their shoulders for a bit of added warmth.
“Liar.”
“What?”
Bella knew they should get ready for a fight — a very short one; Sannmallja would undoubtedly wrangle them off the ridge — but they didn’t have the energy or the desire. Besides, if Sannmallja shoved them off the mountain, it could solve all their problems. Were there choruses for demons like there were for humans? Bella wondered. If they weren’t shivering already, they’d have shook themself when they realised that Sannmallja was still talking. Damned distracting thoughts…
“i–i watching you,” was all Bella caught as Sannmallja settled cross-legged on the ridge and grabbed a handful of snow off the ground, squeezing it into a tight ball. “In the chorus. Your mouth moves, but you never make a sound.” Bella swallowed. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”
“Wh-why were you watching me?” Bella asked. It was a stupid question, they knew that, because everyone was supposed to watch everyone, but the only other response they had was asking why Sannmallja wasn’t reporting them like any other demon would be doing. Bella nudged some more snow off the ledge and tried to figure out how to make themself smaller and less of a target. They huddled in on themself more and more the longer Sannmallja kept her silence.
Then, “I like you.” Sannmallja turned her head and looked up. She held out a hand in which a snowflake was rapidly turning to ice. “You’re not like the others.” Her voice was wavering and the arm was trembling. Bella simply stared, not knowing what to say. Sannmallja peeled the ice flake off her hand carefully, but she didn’t move away. She didn’t stop reaching out and offering her hand and Bella felt… They didn’t know what they was feeling, but they was a demon, however small, and reading emotions was part of what they did: Sannmallja was afraid, and she wasn’t trying to hide it behind anything.
Staring at the quivering demon before them, Bella was silent. Sannmallja kept her left hand outstretched, but the other was curled tightly around the edge of the outcropping, a tiny patch of spring-coloured warmth in the cold snow. Bella weighted their options, nibbling at their upper lip, their own fingers digging painfully into their skin. They could choose ambiguity and let Sannmallja interpret it how she chose. Carefully, they said, “I… I think I might be?” They wanted to curse the waver in their voice, but it helped some that it had been present in Sannmallja’s voice too.
“So am I.” Sannmallja’s statement was simple, plain, flat. Bella’s heart skipped a few beats, but rather than continue on to say that Sannmallja was some undercover agent, the other demon said, “I became the best in our chorus to hide that I was different. But you…” She trailed off, the tremble still in her voice and limbs. Sannmallja pulled her wings closer, eyes darting all over Bella’s body and the surrounding area and suddenly it took all of Bella’s strength not to laugh. Sannmallja thought they was an agent. Them! They barely registered Sannmallja’s comment on their own behaviour at first, but then they caught it.
“I try,” Bella answered and Sannmallja only laughed at them, mirthless yet visibly relaxing.
“You try like a puppy,” she teased.
Still, there is a limit to even the insults a demon is willing to listen to. “I am not like a puppy!” Bella cried.
Sannmallja smirked as she got up. “Then why do you have such big puppy eyes whenever you’re wheedling your way out of your duties?”
Bella almost stamped their foot. “I do not,” they hissed, “have big puppy eyes.” They crossed their arms. Bella was shivering and Sannmallja was laughing. The sound was filled with something that they couldn’t quite place as well as joy. It was a great, big, born-in-your-belly kind of laugh that eventually sent them back down onto the ridge beside Sannmallja because it was too infectious a sound not to start laughing too.
After a while, both Sannmallja and Bella were out of laughter. Bella’s stomach hurt and they felt a smidgen less cold than before. They hadn’t noticed how close to Sannmallja they’d been sitting and they scooted away a little.
Sannmallja said, “All right. Then you aren’t like a puppy at all.” She patted the ground between them and Bella’s hope that she hadn’t noticed them move melted away. They stayed where they was, with a little under half an arm’s length between them. “I always thought I was the only one.” Sannmallja’s voice was soft, gentle, and utterly unlike the tone Bella normally heard her use. It startled them and they began to build a little snowman in the space between the two of them.
“But the stories…”
Bella couldn’t even finish before Sannmallja interrupted, with every bit as much fire and diamond as she normally used in the chorus. “They’r
e demons, Bellamonne. They lie. It’s what we do.” She stopped, breathing hard and looked at Bella’s face. Bella stared at what was left of the snowman they’d only just started to make. Slowly, Sannmallja looked down at her hand and at the remains of the snow. It looked like a sad, squashed little hedgehog now. “Sorry…” she said and she did seem genuinely sorry. “I never believed the stories, but I didn’t want to stand out. None of my friends believe the stories, but they don’t want to take any chances.” Sannmallja stretched and Bella wondered how the other demon could possibly be so calm and comfortable discussing what amounted to treason. “I’d like to introduce you to them, if I can trust you.”
“I… I don’t know.” Bella focused on making their snowman a new body. Something that didn’t look like tragic road kill.
“We’re all like you, Bellamonne.”
Bella’s hands hunted around for bits of rock to use as coat buttons and their eyes stayed fixed on the snowman figure. “What if I can’t trust you?”
“That’s a risk we all take.” Sannmallja was silent for so long that Bella tried to glance up at her surreptitiously to see what the other demon was doing. Sannmallja had her head cocked a little to the right and her hands were absently kneading the snow. She’d be leaving on an assignment soon then. Bella stayed silent, watching the pale green fingers move against the snow.
Eventually, Sannmallja got up, dusting snow from her legs. “Call me if you decide you trust me, Bellamonne. I have to go.” She smiled again and Bella didn’t quite understand why it made their stomach flutter anxiously. Sannmallja jumped off the ledge, spreading her wings to catch a thermal. Bella watched her until the snow and the mountains had swallowed her silhouette. They sighed again and looked at the uncompleted snowman. They knew they could be found again, but it was such a sorrowful thing to leave a snowman unfinished… Bella had even less desire to encounter anyone than before, but the snowman looked so sad and lonely that they stayed to finish the head. And then they stayed to make another to keep it company. And then they made a little hedgehog family too because their heart couldn’t bear the memory of the first one Sannmallja had created by accident.
Feather by Feather and Other Stories Page 23
