Graynelore. Stephen Moore

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       Chapter One

       Graynelore

      Children remember in childish ways. So, through a child’s eyes, I will look again upon Graynelore. I can see a frozen wasteland. Deep winter’s ice lying broken and sharp upon a horse-trodden path. The riders are long departed. My breath is a broken kiss upon the air. The land before me is a magical silence.

      I can pass a child’s hand across the ruts and crevasses of a cold, wet stone wall. It is the wall of a house, and built so thickly this Rogrig can stand at his full height and yet hide safely within the depth of its wind-eyes.

      I can find a child’s delight in the crackle and spark of burning logs, the heat of an open fire.

      I can lift a child’s finger to my tongue and taste the iron of an abandoned broken war sword. I can feel the dead weight of it again, as I struggle to drag it across a stone floor for the lack of body strength to lift it.

      I can sting my nose with the smell of the piss and the shit of fell beasts – animals sheltered indoors against the rumour of coming raiders – and yet still know the comfort of it.

      I can raise the beat of my heart and laugh at a tangle of drunken men, falling through an open doorway, playing at the Old Game. And I can wince at the foul cry a young woman gives them in chastisement.

      ‘Ah! Be-having-you! Do you have to come kicking that fucking head about in here? You’re spilling blood across my freshly strewn floors!’

      I can ache to my soul for the death of my father; only slaughtered, it seems, for his surname. I can hear words, murmured together in a single breath: murder, blood feud, Elfwych, and understand them, with a child’s innocence, only as the unbearable pain of my father’s absence…and a mother’s tears.

      I can huddle with a grieving family, grimly gathered at our fireside, making the cursed talk of revenge.

      Sick with fear, I can taste stomach bile at my throat on seeing the sudden stillness of my first human killing. He was a Bogart by grayne; though a Bogart out of an Elfwych. Upon a holyday, I once played childish sport with the lad. Yet I dropped a great stone upon his head – broke it apart – as he lay face down upon the ground. His body was already sliced open, that the work of another’s sword, but it was I who killed him. To possess all that is life, then, in a breath, in less than a breath, to take it all away…

      Before the raider’s trail, I can sit piss-scared upon my own dead father’s hobby-horse. And I can heed the old wives’ warnings that came ringing to my ears.

      ‘Mind how you go there, child! Keep off the bloody bog-moss. It swallows grown men whole! It sucks down full-laden fell-horses, carts and all! It will leave us no sign to remember you by…’

      And, of a bright summer’s day, without a care, I can run again through the long dry grasses with Old Emma’s Notyet, chasing after the cat’s tail. Mind, that is no man’s business but my own, and I will thank you for it and keep it to myself.

      Do you follow me, my friend?

      Old Emma, my elder-cousin, was a long time dead. Notyet, her daughter, was my playfellow. She was a weedling child, plain-faced, stoical, yet not displeasing. In age, there was less than a season between us. We came together because we lived together. We sat out upon the same summer fields and watched, lazily, over the same stock. We ran, a-feared, from the same raiders, raised the hue and cry. We ate from the same table, burned our faces at the same fireside. Bloodied our noses against the same hard ground and broke ice from the same stone water trough. And we each caught the other looking, without a blush, when we washed ourselves, naked, in the same stream.

      Notyet would often hide herself away in some secret woodland dell, where she would play awkward tunes upon the crude wooden whistles she made. I would listen, and follow after her simple music. I liked to find her there, in hiding. Was she my heart’s meat? Was she? Ha! Upon Graynelore! If it were true, I would not have admitted it. She was my kissing kin, but…(And but is enough to condemn me, and us.)

      Little more than babbies, we made a babbie together. She did not carry the infant well. It was dropped too early, born a feeble weedling; and un-cherished, it was soon dead. Birth is such a bloody struggle. Life is such a difficult trail to follow, while death – the sudden stop – so very easy.

      My friend, I have given you these awkward childhood memories; these fleeting glimpses of Graynelore, not because of their individual worth, but because together they might give you a sense of the world into which I was born. For the most part, they might appear to be nothing better than the gathered pieces from a broken clay pot! A handful of shattered fragments, a few, no doubt, so cruelly sharp they can hurt still, but, at best, incomplete.

      Indeed, there are pieces missing. There is another memory I must share with you. I must take us to another day, and to a meeting with a Beggar Bard.