Bound by Blood and Wine (Samhain 2018)

Bound by Blood and Wine (Samhain 2018) - a reading (on Google Drive)

In a time when Christ and his saints slept in silence, a child rearranges pieces of a personal mythology to make sense of his battered life. The new camp lies nestled by the lake of bulrushes, a segregation center run by the Relocation Authority for the sons of wayward daughters. Their land, language and religion are not his own. He longs for the distant apple orchard, but the idylls of early captivity remain shrouded by night and fog. At thirteen, he graduated to the five-strand, eight-tower, double daily count, one room stalls when he failed the first reading of their loyalty questionnaire. Deemed too unalloyed and immaleable to die in their righteous cause, he resides in Camp Ten until his mind changes, or he ages out to the nearby labor unit a few short years away.

Beyond his barracks door lies a demesne marked "here be dragons," a feral land filled with savage, unpredictable people. But unlike his cohabitants and coconspirators, he hears stories in the susurrant voices that fill the shivering darkness and alternating sweatbox heat. Stories once whispered by the aunties in the apple orchard, implacable and indefatigable even in defeat. Or sung in their native tongues by the bronzed Adonis work-gang prisoners on their long march to the surrounding farms and fields. He fills a cloth-bound, black-market notebook with his internal monologue, his contraindicated, contraband musings staining its unbleached pages with homemade ink bound by blood and wine. Real or imagined, the voices carve fresh passageways in his already fractured mind.

The iron door creaks open and falls the shadow of Medea or her minotaur of divine retribution across the threshold of his bifold maze. They rampage through his cell in search of proscribed words, piling all the puzzle pieces in the center of the room. The notebook he secrets in a hole beneath a trapdoor in the floor. He constructs plausible worlds and timelines from the fragments, fitting one into another in any way he can. Each name, each whispered rumor, each half-told tale he notes in code with an enigmatic key soon even he no longer remembers. As they rage through his chamber, he tunnels for the trees beyond the wire, longing for the shelter of their slender green arms. Beyond the forest rise the mountains. If he can reach them, perhaps one day they will lift him to the stars. Daylight is mostly safe. Darkness requires sanctuary.

With a voice for every muse and mood of the poly-polar hydra, the devil's brood pursues him through the long, subconscious corridors. He hides like a thief in spider-laden alcoves, nooks and niches, curling up tightly like a cat in the crevices and cubbyholes etched into the crumbling mortar. As he holds his breath waiting for the fetid monsters to stumble by, he populates the worlds which will greet him when he emerges. He fills them with heroic figures, iconic people he imagines, like himself, fierce underdogs forced to make a desperate stand. When he gets caught outside a hidey-hole, he bares his sword of polished bronze just long enough to draw blood. He leans heavily on the darkness, and hit and run tactics. Strike and move. He is well outnumbered. He cannot win a standup fight.

With each Pyrrhic victory comes the reckoning at the hot gates, him with no three hundred, only a contingent of unremembered Thespians. His narration becomes unstable, confused and unreliable. Each story blends into another. True or invented, his or someone else’s, he no longer knows. His only focus now is survival, caught in an open cavern between underground mountains and a sunless sea. He forms up a shield wall across the narrow passage as the minotaur approaches with his servants of the double ax, the arche of creation scything the air before him. He offers to settle the battle in the old way, mano a mano, or literally hand to hand. He steps forward like a bull dancer, unarmed and naked to the waist. The Minotaur ducks its head and bull-rushes. With a headlong leap ending in a handstand, he grasps it by the horns. Poised between doom and dilemma, its fetid breath rises up to greet him. Instinctively, the beast snaps its head, somersaulting him over and safely out of reach. He rolls to his feet and runs again. The Minotaur snorts its outrage and turns to charge. Its hooves pound close behind.

Bruised but unbroken, he relies on time and chance to escape the labrys with no Daedalus or Ariadne to guide him from its blade. Embraced by darkness in the narrow, twisting corridors, he resumes his guerrilla game of hide-and-seek. He leans upon the companions he carries with him. Their tales are the inspiration he follows. Where their stories draw blank, he fills in the gaps, sometimes generation by generation. Names and histories emerge. Their world begins to move without his thinking, like an orrery set in motion by the hidden musings of a water clock. Their dialogue flows through his head unbidden. Hungry, desperate and alone, he listens to their whispered advice. He doubles back along a twisting goat trail to retrieve his tunic and lost sword. The sword he sharpens and cinches back to his waist. The tunic he unravels. Through ill-remembered corridors, he lays a slender thread of plotline he hopes will eventually guide him home.

To escape, first he must survive. He overlays a world map onto the warren, renaming each cavern and corridor for cities and canyons in the wilderness to craft landmarks in the shifting darkness. He repeats snippets of his half-remembered narrative like a mantra, urging himself on by his heroes’ examples. Through victories and setbacks, blind corridors and backtracks, he relentlessly moves forward, winding and unwinding the thread each way he explores, knotting a loop at each dead-end junction. Lichens and lurid mushrooms become his sustenance. Rivulets and runoff filtered by mossy walls become his wine. Resting by shallow looking glass pools of ruddy luminescence, he transcribes the episodic tales that occupy his mind, writing and rewriting until the margins of his notebook overflow with corrections, as its cover grows stained by the wounds that leech from his surroundings. Until he hears hoofbeats echoing near, strikes camp and slips away, hiding within himself to survive another night.

After a decade of string fragments slipping through his fingers, he escapes the twilight labyrinth and is blinded by the sun in splendor. The distant mountains sparkle like multifaceted gemstones; the leaves in the nearby forest shine like polished jade. The camp and its ordeals now lay behind him. He refuses to look back. All he needs to remember he carries with him. In his hand, he clutches a wine-stained book.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III