by Linda Talbot
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The Ghost Gift
The wail wandered like the soul of a sailor stolen by a siren.
"How appropriate," thought Bjorn, considering Symi, the island near Rhodes where he walked in painful reassessment of the recent past.
Here seafarers knew the implications of the mermaid's song, as they broached the waves in the skaphes, once the fastest ship in the world. This was the island where, at the Panormitis Monastery, with its miraculous connotations, model ships and gifts from afar, Taxiarchis Michael, the island's patron saint and protector of sailors, held a soul in his hand.
In the mirror Bjorn looked impartially at his shifting soul. He saw a tall, blond yet small-spirited man, ill equipped for emotional crisis, mentally marooned in the high room of the house in Chorio; its neo-Classical elegance fully restored, like a consciously constructed defiance of the waterless land.
Ingrid had asked him to leave. To allow them both a breather. She had insisted on the abortion, suspecting a genetic disorder. The conception had been accidental.
The hollow within him deepened. Part of him had died. The wail wandered once more on the breathless night; rising, subsiding, then as chilling as a roused cat or abandoned child.
Sleepless, Bjorn climbed from his soupha - the raised wooden sleeping platform - and crossed to the window. He saw the moonlit town, climbing the steep-sided harbour; the houses, in principle, too urban and considered for this land, yet even in restoration, homogenous.
He went downstairs and stepped into the white of the moon. He climbed from the town into the arid hills. He looked at the full moon and, fleetingly, believed he saw Aigle; a luminous figment of mythology, in his path.
Symi was named after her. She had been a lover of Apollo and given birth to the Three Graces. She flickered, turned her implacable white face to the sea and was gone.
The wail wandered again; behind Bjorn, but moving to where Aigle had stood and where now glimmered a pool of cool light.
Aigle had exposed Asklepios, her son but he had survived, suckled by a goat, guarded by a sheep dog and found by a herdsman. Later Asklepios was renowned for raising the dead.
Bjorn took a side track, hoping to evade the wail that wavered now and died. Suddenly he heard heavy footsteps. He swung round to confront only white-lit vegetation. Then small hands clasped his chest, squeezing and digging, until, fighting for breath, he fell. A great weight oppressed him. He thrust at it, pummelling the air and rose unsteadily.
He ran, silvered, through the night dust, and, like Glaukos, an early inhabitant of Symi, who had eaten an immortal flower, reached a promontory and leapt into the sea. Glaukos became a sea god but Bjorn lay, worried by the waves with no will to swim. He moved enough not to drown, riding the tide, exhausted, until he washed up on a gleaming stretch of sand.
Ingrid sailed the woven waters of the lake. Her face; the rigid features of a stranger, moved with her. She held herself with regal restraint; a pale haired inheritor of the Nordic mist. She would continue to teach; haunted in class, by the essence of the growing child.
Now the mist moved, weaving with abstract impetus across the grey face of water, infant forms with bowed heads, small hands feeling for a way, the wispy limbs furling, then wayward and pulled irrevocably apart.
Gaining weight on the wet air, a sense of accusation oppressed her, until she steered the boat impulsively in evasive circles.
The feel of fragile fingers worked like spiders, exploring her wind-worn skin. Wildly she brushed at them, while longing to grasp their implication. They persisted, their urgency increasing as though weaving a web of intractable gossamer over her face. She no longer saw the water; the fine web lines wavered before her eyes. The boat slammed into the damp bank.
She made fast and stumbled out. The web broke with the sound of a child deprived which was lifted by the querulous wind and borne over the darkening lake.
Ingrid made her way through dull vegetation to the shack of the old woman who lived by the lake. She had never married and in the dark hut, with few amenities, distilled herbs and, some claimed, hot air, to appease and alarm. Still the old, fearful and incurable, consulted her.
Ingrid saw faint smoke, lifting to be lost in the grey air and knocked on the door. She heard a low acknowledgment. And as the woman cautiously lifted the latch and peered out, a potent mix of wood smoke, herbs and ingrained dirt, wafted from within.
She gestured Ingrid inside. The room closed around the young woman as she bent broad shoulders and a head of blond hair dishevelled by the fairy fingers.
As she sat on a low chair by a dim table strewn with herbs, the old woman said, "So you have killed your child."
Ingrid started. How did she know? "It was barely a child," she objected, unable to meet the woman's eyes that gazed greyly beyond life.
"But you are suffering," she insisted.
"Yes."
The old woman peered unpleasantly into Ingrid's face. "I see the utbard; lost, resentful, moving from mother to father, from this land to one where old ghosts who have suffered and survived, have returned. They are wise and will resolve this."
Ingrid knew of the utbard - the ghost of an unwanted child - that returned, invisible, yet whose spirit swelled or shrank to a curl of smoke in its sad search and claimed victims, even on its mother's death. It could only be rendered harmless if confronted by water or iron.
Aware of this, Ingrid pointed out, "I was on the water when it came."
"Ah yes. But to be subdued it must be completely submerged. The father will help." The old woman said no more.
"Thank you." Ingrid rose to go.
"All will be well," said the old woman finally, as Ingrid bent again to pass through the door.
Bjorn opened his eyes to a sheer wall of rock reaching to unbroken blue. He struggled to stand in the searing sun.
A hand grasped his elbow. He turned to see a dark young man with recognition in his eyes. "You are Bjorn?"
"Yes."
"I'm Asklepios. I understand."
"Understand what?"
"I was abandoned at birth. Now I can restore life."
Bjorn looked askance. He considered Symi's monkish implications and assumed the man to have succumbed to a belief in miracles. He pulled away. But could not leave. An aura beyond the brilliance of the sun surrounded the stranger.
Bjorn froze. The aborted child. The plaintive wails had gone. But the oppression remained. Bjorn was compelled to look into the man's eyes, where shadows stirred that might be water or the slow movement of memory. He wore the casual clothes of contemporary man, yet seemed unrelated to the present. He was composed; his flesh unearthly as he shimmered in the sun.
He released Bjorn, who, alarmed, passed his hand through the man's arm. It was visible, limp now at his side, yet it did not exist. Doubting his own existence and fearing he had drowned and entered some dimension of sunlit death, Bjorn walked quickly through the sand. But effortlessly the stranger was beside him, smiling with a presence that smelled now, of decay. His youth was suddenly incongruous, like a confidence trick; a cruel manifestation in the domain of death.
"Your woman will have a child," he promised, as Bjorn, breathless, began to climb the steep path. He could see the rock's rugged top but it grew no nearer.
The man climbed silently behind. Bjorn could not hear him breathing and his feet did not dislodge a single stone. Suddenly the sun dimmed. The sea surged; a white-backed beast released. A cold wind whirled with a malevolence that brought Bjorn to a halt.
Another presence enveloped them; awesome, unforgiving, assaulting Bjorn and the stranger with a sense of imminent annihilation.
" Zeus." The man dropped to his knees. Now Bjorn knew he was deranged. Yet it grew darker. The sea clawed the cliff. A low wind snatched the vegetation.
Ominous cloud gathered and blackened until it had no limit, no compassion. And from within, resounded thunder with the force of a primordial voice; a being beyond the machinations of man
. A blue blaze of lightening lit rock and raging sea. Bjorn and the stranger shuddered, racked by the charge. They were consumed. No trace was left by the subsiding sea and the sky flecked now with blue.
Ingrid felt a fleeting shock. Her hand tightened on the tiller, then fell limply as she perceived some distant and disastrous event.
She drew into shore and shakily disembarked. Horrified, she halted, hearing the whimper of a child. She brushed her face, imagining the tiny hands of the utbard. But the influence this time was warm; drawing her to a dense bush of bracken.
Within, sprawled in a rough shawl, lay a baby. It stopped crying and, as Ingrid approached, opened wide blue eyes as though in recognition.
She took the child, knowing before the fruitless search for the mother, before the exhaustive inquiries to establish her eligibility to adopt, that the boy child, like a gift from the gods, would be hers.
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The Tyranny
This is a tale prompted by the adventures of Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone. The Titans, Zeus’s enemies, lured Zagreus away. He went through several transformations to evade them but was eventually captured and devoured by the Titans. Athene rescued Zagreus’s heart and enclosed it in a gypsum figure into which she breathed life, so Zagreus was immortal.
