The Court of King Jelly Roll temporary digs
In Bacchus’ name, lift up your spoons, for the season approacheth, little things. Even now, the reupholsterers are reupholstering chairs, purple and green. The physicians are smiling, the ladies are moist. King Jelly Roll is better, thanks be to God. The dead are buried, the table is set. Put on your hats and saddle your horses, for King Jelly Roll’s court is reconvened. The frosty veil is lifted, so come, the embarrassed and regretful, take off your clothes and thrash about wildly, in the manner of a boar in the throes of death. For, in faith, the winter’s boar does die for the summer’s pork. The thin gander swears an oath, and the fool is in the mixture. Shoots are shooting, boots are new, but the ceremony will be a barefoot affair. Do not sit down by the roadside facing the hedgerow when all the world is dead, and everything in it. For, in faith, that is the time to put your hand in your trousers, and the rod and the staff shall comfort you. The road is well lit, and is not very long. In the circle, four English leagues west of the wood where tall wolves groan, four English leagues north of the marsh where grass snakes consider, four English leagues east of the plain where women wish, four English leagues south of the bay where cormorants swoop at the backs of fishermen, the festival will be met. Forthwith, then, to the circle; wrap your wife in ivy. The leopard that was in the tree now stands on one leg in the centre of the circle, and, in faith, the tree stands proud on the leopard’s back. The nephews beloved of King Jelly Roll stand at the trestles of the five innermost tables, and no rope can bind them. The attendant nymphs shine like berries. From the nub of the mound, even now the first of the guests can be seen approaching. First among them is Brutus, and not least among them, Gog and Magog. King Jelly Roll has risen from his mossy sickbed. So lift up your spoons, in Bacchus’ name, for the feast.
The StagSeven days before the laughter of the horns of the Bacchae crossed the cusp of the hill and into the broad valley on the green road to the Court of King Jelly Roll, six witnessed the scene to be described. The six were; Mad Sweeney from treetops; Yuxa, winking from the undergrowth; Gilfaethwy as boar, upon whom was Freya with feathers; Hong-yu, a vixen; Badessy from the sky.
In a glade by a pool, a shallow pool of rained water stretched barely rippling like a reflection of the sun, a stag stood grooming. No other deer awake or near, the stag looked placid up to trees like antlers. In grazing brambles stark against the last of withered leaves before the breeze, he found a thirst and came as many days before to where the water gathered for its travels. With the quivering splendid soft bronze of his flanks in clear view now of the sky, it was no wonder that the starlings and the blackbirds fought their choruses through the waves. The stag approached the water, crisp blue under noon day Sun, and bent his neck and lapped it cool and clear, still holding the green scent of dew from dark before the dawn. As the chorus continued, many tones, the stag drank deep, and, as the day maintained her thrilling promise of the blossom, the water, never moving, appeared suddenly as a tapestry, became a gauze of liquid gold, but fresh. The whole world might have gasped but for the stag who, with brown eyes above dignity, continued to drink, and the air felt pregnant with the loosing muscles of a real beast taking in what water he required. That gold, never a necklace, shone then in his eyes. In seven days, with the antlered branches stretching in their buds, the first faint echoes came of the coming congregation. Wine in every pocket of the broad grins on their faces, they rounded the hill wreathed in vines with no alarm to the various animals watching. At first they stared near silent, wide-eyed into the sky between two hills, and then they flung their bare flesh into brambles, laughing, bleeding, and they called with pipes and laughter to the animals and they brought them, always dancing, to the fold and carried on with singing down the green road home. |
The FoxIn strides that cast long shadows over trees and felt like dusk for a blink’s duration, Gog and Magog trod almost whispered, lakes and valleys easy footholds. Under a stride at that very instant stood a fox tearing flesh, fresh flesh from a rabbit passing, natural.
The day, though old when the shadow flashed, was light enough that the bee could find his way to rest at the end of a day in the pollen fields, hard work. Twilight rumoured through the woods, the fox was at his picnic, quiet, his breakfast of that rabbit that was passing, and he’d been skulking, clever. The green was new, and fragile, bright for its newness, strong for its brightness. Caterpillars were making it older, busy and slow, living, and the holes they left, the craters in the leaves seen from the moon, were life. A thousand drops that afternoon from a shower dripped through the leaves and wedded their way through earth to the roots of trees. A spider swung easy from a twig, up there in the canopy, unbothered by budding leaves; the length of a grasshopper, the twig was a leisurely brown. The fox was steady in eating, here chewing at the tougher meat, there gnawing at a bone, feeding as a beast is wont to feed. From setting out from den to spotting through the trees the rabbit passing, this steady eating, chewing, tearing was the reason for his walk that evening. As was intended, the fox was eating steady, and barely a splatter of blood hit mossy ground. Sorrel moved little more than the silver birches, and the sky, that instant darkened but no more than in the fraction where the rain cloud first envelopes the sun before the light in eyes ignites, was no less vaulted than the cathedral roof when all eyes alight upon the altar. Unseen by the fox, keen-eyed though he is, a finger of Gog descended, picked up a leg-bone of the rabbit. That moment of darkness, fleeting, un-thought-of as it was, brought a shiver to the fox, a momentary shiver, and, though a bead of wetness in the fox’s eye was also fleeting, un-thought-of, it was a vein of quartz in a crag next winter. The rabbit’s bone, carried by strides down an every-coloured road to where the Court of King Jelly Roll will be met, is free of pain and will make it to the feast. |
Glossary:
Lethe (forgetfulness) – one of the rivers of Hades; an unrelated Naiad Eridanos – Virgil cites it as a river of Hades, to my knowledge without a particular meaning designated in the fashion of Lethe, or Styx (hate) – it perhaps flows around the world Nyami Nyami – a snake spirit, river god of the Tonga, and bountiful to boot Aaur – the pleasanter part of the Egyptian underworld, domain of Osiris (c.f. Elysian Fields) The Salley Gardens – Down by the Salley Gardens is a traditional Irish song, collected by Yeats in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems The Waters of Tyne – a Northumbrian song Orpheus – the fellow with a lyre; you’ll see him on Northumberland Street if you’re there at the right hour Ymir – the Ancient Giant, with whose blood Odin made the oceans; his flesh made the earth, skull the sky, etc. The Three Pure Ones – Taoist deities; the Jade Pure, the Upper Pure and the Great Pure Rostam – great champion of Persian mythology, more or less a counterpart to Herakles/Hercules |
The BoatmanWhere Lethe forgets what it is and becomes Eridanos of no fixed designation, the water leaves the foggy gloom and is home to Nyami Nyami, merry snake with his basket of bread, and the banks are green; the Southern shore is the reflection of the fields of Aaru in earthier hues, still ripe with reeds; the Northern shore is Salley Gardens, where pleasant men weep silently to strains of The Waters of Tyne, strummed for coppers by Orpheus, on the lam with his lyre. Lethe remembers sometimes to dip her feet in the river that bore her name upstream, just to be sure it’s still moving. She’s on the Salley side. A jetty juts from either bank a little further downstream, where the meanders of Eridanos first mingle with the flowing of Ymir’s blood from the North Sea. For a flagon of wine, the boatman (Jones to his friends) will take you across from shore to shore. Throw in a golden apple, or even a simple apple crumble, and you might persuade him to take you out to sea, across chopping waves on his little wicker ferry, to the bay where cormorants swoop at the backs of fishermen unawares, the shore where the first of the Eastern guests, the Three Pure Ones and Rostam the champion, have already crossed the beach and are on the road that will take them to the Court of King Jelly Roll, for the feast. A young woman came down to the jetty one morning where Jones sat smoking his pipe. They were on the south side. “Boatman,” she said, and he looked up, smiling slightly, “Will you ferry me across the river?” “Of course dear,” he said, “If you have the means to pay.” “Certainly I do,” she said, reaching towards her pouch, “Should I pay you now or later?” “Now, I should think,” said Jones, amusedly, “But what manner of vessel is that for transporting wine?” Both were looking at the pouch, “It... isn’t,” said the young woman, “It’s full of money and such things.” “Ah, yes. Hard currency. It’s wine I’ll be needing, though. That money stuff’s wasted on me, dear.” “But I haven’t any wine,” she protested, “And I do have rather a lot of money, coins of all denominations, and traveller’s cheques too!” It was no use, though, and Jones told her, kindly enough, to return again with wine, and passage would be assured. And so she headed off, somewhat frustrated. The next day, or two days later, she arrived at the jetty just as Jones’s boat returned, unladen, from the other side. She walked down and crouched to repeat her previous request. “Of course dear,” he said, “But I shall need a sip of that wine first, for it’s thirsty work being a boatman. More than you might realize. You do have the means to pay, yes?” “I did…,” she began, hesitantly, raising the remnants of a flagon, “But it was spilt on the way…” “Oh dear.” “I was hoping, perhaps, to offer you this instead,” she said, holding out a diamond ring. “Hmm,” pondered Jones, “I’m sure it’s pretty enough to look at, but I daresay it does very little for a dry mouth. It’ll have to be wine, I’m afraid.” She sighed and headed off. This particular circumstance repeated itself on a number of occasions. The young woman tried carrying several flagons at a time, she tried transporting them in a basket, even once in a wheelbarrow, but always, in one way or another, the wine contrived to spill itself on the ground before she reached the boatman. Usually it was a simple case of the skin splitting (though there is nothing simple in the splitting of four or five seemingly well-made flagons in the course of one journey), but more than once the reason for the spillage was more surprising. For instance, one day a swan flew at her and she dropped her basket, another day she was knocked off her feet by a pack of handsome hounds as a bugle called someway behind, and the day she brought the wheelbarrow it was struck by lightning and escaped her grip, trundling into a fearsome ravine. She felt very unlucky, and exceedingly hard done by. One constant, and it didn’t escape the young woman’s attention, was that the wine was always spilt nearer to her destination than to her point of departure. She assumed after a while that this was some mean, tantalising trick of fate, as sometimes she could hear the lapping of the river at the shore when the wine was spilt, so close was she to success. She never once made it to the edge of the woods, though, with a drop of wine left in her possession. She always, however, completed her journey and, with less optimism every time, tried to bargain with Jones. She offered many things; yet more money, more jewels, bread and meat, fur and feathers, even herself eventually, but the answer was always the same. It was on the day that he spurned this last offer that she reached the very end of her tether and, weeping copiously, told Jones the following; “You know my face well enough by now, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked you for passage. I’ll tell you now what I shouldn’t wonder you have long since guessed, and that is that my true love is on yonder bank, and that I mean to be reunited with him. Since he cannot know he would find me here, I daresay he’s given up hope, but a promise is a promise, and if you refuse to ferry me today, I shall swim, although that the water is wide and I shall certainly drown. I shall leave you my pouch with all of its riches, for better it remain with you, dear boatman, than that it drown with me. For while I lie clay-cold and eaten by fishes, it may yet bring me solace to think that perhaps you have made your way to town to buy wine with that money for the dry mouth that so afflicts you.” Jones said nothing at first, but gave a wry chuckle. He looked for a moment or so at this young woman, miserably awaiting his response. “My dear,” he said presently, “I hope you have a good lunch with you, as I would hate to think of you undertaking so arduous a task on an empty stomach.” With a full mind to throwing herself body and soul into the river that would be her grave, the young woman flew into a bitter despair and flung her pouch, tearing its strap, at the silt of the shore. It burst open, spilling all that was in it; coins were hurled into the reeds, others hit dry ground and rolled; gems and jewels, gold and silver lay scattered all around. Her poems fluttered in the slightest of breezes and her sketches of Spain grew blotched with the damp. Her attention was nowhere, but Jones looked keenly at this conflagration of beads and personal effects. His gaze was drawn immediately to near the very centre of the spread. Had she been looking in this instant, she would not perhaps have understood its meaning, but the crisp, clear, solar gleam of the apple could not have escaped her notice. Indeed, when she did turn in the midst of her pain, she froze, despite herself, in a scarcely witting wonder. She had picked that apple, or an apple from the usual tree, and placed it with her bread and cheese as had become habitual; it was lunch. She made no sound nor moved for long enough to find her mind empty of thought when next she knew where she was. “I believe you asked for passage?” said the boatman. She said nothing. “If your hunger can resist that particular portion of your meal,” and there was no need for him to gesture towards the apple, nor did he, “Then I shall allay your… worries, and take you aboard.” She still said nothing, but turned to look at him, eyes wide and open. “It won’t be a direct trip,” he warned, “As that payment would be too great for a simple river-crossing. But the return journey will be assured, should you wish for it. And yes, you can reach the other side, though I can’t guarantee a precise time-frame; there’ll be plentiful wine where we’ll be going, and so you shall certainly have the means to pay. It’s a feast, see?” he intoned what was almost a request. She assented wordlessly, moving towards the boat. She grasped the apple, the light of which made even the copper coins shine in constellations. Everything else she left, without a thought to picking it up. “And please,” said the boatman, “Call me Jones.” |