Boethia
Nanowrimo - 2012
11/1
It was the storm that decided her, in the end. The cottage was no lovely place in the best of times, but in the springtime, the perennials made sweet scents and reminded her of her mother's love of beauty and homely face. In the fall, the crispness of the air and the scent of seasoned wood burning reminded her of her father, who had lovingly laid aside cords of wood - dwarfing the cottage - and made a big ceremony of the lighting of it. The summer - with the graciousness and time to sit by the road and consider the beauty of the world and argue with her brothers... well that was not so bad either, even if her whole body ached with the long labor made possible by late light.
But when October ended with a massive storm that uprooted her great-grandfather's oak and stripped the roof of its already decaying thatch and spoiled the grain she had set aside with soaking rains. Well, she looked at the devastation in the light of the morning (only half-glad that she had survived it mostly unscathed) and decided that the work of putting it to rights was not worth the having of it. She spent one last cold night cowering in the corner of the house that still had a bit of shelter. In the morning, she gathered up anything useful and portable. She said fond farewells in the now-green grass to her mother, father, brothers. They - as always - did not reply. She stood a very long time right where she used to stand while she washed the clothes: in happier times and in sadder times. She looked at the scene, so like (and yet, after the storm, unlike) the scene she had witnessed every day of her life. She imprinted it all on her heart: the good of it and the bad of it. The tedium, the joy. The heart-wrenching, seeming-unsurvivable sorrows and the jokes and the songs of her memory.
And she walked away.
No one had come to check on her - after the storm - from the village. She didn't really expect them to. The part of her that had been brought up right, that had once played with the other children and knew each villager by name, thought that maybe she should go to the village to announce "I survived the storm. I'm leaving now." But to what gain? Would they wish her well? Would they try to talk her out of it? Would there be pity there? Would there be people demanding that she just work harder - maybe for them? Perhaps the village had not survived. Perhaps she would feel obliged to dig out survivors and labor tirelessly nursing to the injured.
There was no way in which going to the village, telling them, made her life any easier. And she was tired, oh so tired, of how many things made her life harder. Let them assume that she died. Ran away mad. Crept into the bushes with the last of her strength. Was abducted by highwaymen. Turned into a frog and escaped into a pond. Whatever they wanted to believe - let them believe it, whenever they got around to bringing their clothes to be washed. She was small loss to them, and they were no loss to her.
Boethia went over the litany of sorrows in her mind as she walked. Feet mechanical. Eyes half-blind to the well-known path before her. She barely noted the various damages to places that had been so important to her. The outer fields. The second wall. The old hut. Trees were down, plants uprooted in places she'd known all her life, and she could not bring herself to care. She just stepped over the branches, crabbed hands holding an unwieldy, blanket-wrapped lifetime, and walked.
Even her internal monologue (which carefully avoided to topics such as "Where she was going" and "What was she going to do for the rest of her life") was getting boring by the time Boethia left the area she knew well. It was getting late in the short autumn after noon, when her senses sharpened as she began to see less familiar things. It is much easier to pull up memories of a place when there are only six or seven, instead of a memory every day for a lifetime.
Here - her mother had brought her to this point in the road, and they'd turned into the forests here to go gather herbs in the height of spring every year. Her mother had been careful to make sure they did not tread the ground in such a way that anyone could guess where they turned off. In fact, this looked like a particularly unwelcoming place to leave the packed earth, with a high bank to one side and a bog to the other. Boethia relished the sensation of being in no hurry (of having no place to go, even), and stood at that spot. She thought of the dark forest bower and crinkling stream she and her mother had passed. Her future, she thought, might wait.But she might never pass this way again. Might never see that bower and stream again.
Treasuring her mother's memory, she carefully stepped off the road in such a way that even the best trackers might never find her prints and walked into the forest. The herbs that had brought them every year would not be there now, she knew. She was surprised at how unfamiliar the route seemed in the autumn twilight. Heavy branches hung askew with browning leaves where she was used to blossoming buds. She began to question her judgement in coming back here. Something bad might happen.
The thought made her laugh. What else was there to happen? She would live, she would die. She would be loved, she would be killed. The future held all hopes and all risks in unknown proportions now.
11/2
Boethia's thoughts turned from the complete freedom of fatalism to trying to to pick her way through the storm-strewn non-path she had followed with her mother in the flowering of her childhood. Fading, idealized memory (combined with the missed carelessness of having someone else in charge) did not mix well with downed trees, changed seasons and evening light.At last she found the spot she remembered. A solo fir tree, perfect on all sides with only a narrow opening showing that a grown woman could stand upright at the base of the tree - thickly covering branches hiding her from site. It was like a tent made of living boughs. She had played here, relishing a play that was all her own with no brothers, while her mother picked the herbs nearby. The stream - the cause for the opening in the high, thick firs, rushed merrily past and opened the sky to reveal a majestic, if comparatively small, mountain beyond.
Satisfied, she drank her fill of water, started a small fire and stacked wood for a roaring fire that night. She sat, legs dangling above the stream and cool breezes filtering up, and watched the mountain turn yellow, pink and dark purple. The stars came out behind the mountain, silhouetting it it against the clear mountain field of stars. It seemed to her that a yellower, closer light lingered on the top of the mountain, but she wrote it off as a flight of fancy. The stars were ever so much brighter where there were no clouds or torches. She turned her back and threw a few more branches onto the fire, luxuriating in the heat thrown towards her. She fell asleep with the flicker of firelight in front of her.
The night was clement for almost November. Even under the questionable protection of fir boughs, she was hardly any colder than she had been in the cottage when the four walls still stood. She woke later in the morning than usual, and ten minutes later she was done with her morning ablutions. She packed up her things and stood up. Where now? Her inertia would have carried up the road if she hadn't stepped off it, but stepped off it she had.
The mountain in front of her looked mysterious and lovely. She wondered what she might see if she stood at the top of it. It looked so very old and almost sacred in the yellow light. Perhaps standing so high, she would be able to see her future - to see where she wanted to go. If nothing else, at least she would have stood on top of a mountain once in her life. She drank again from the stream and started her trek up the mountain.
It took her as much time to get to the steepening sides of the mountain as she thought it would take to get to the top. She began to think of this as folly, but stepping back down the mountain meant conceding the hard won steps she'd already taken. She looked at the water of the river - not so far away - and decided to keep going.
Boethia was almost hot, certainly out of breath, as she stopped to catch her wind after an arduous climb. Then, suddenly, she realized she was hearing crying. That she had been hearing crying for some time now, but she had not heeded it over the sound of her heart and breath. It sounded like, well, it sounded like a baby. But all sorts of lore came flooding back to her, of creatures in dark corners of desperate woods that lured travelers into certain doom by crying like a baby, or a woman. But this really did not sound like a flesh-rending monster of the night. It sounded like a baby who had cried for a very long time and was tiring out. And it sounded like it as coming from the top of the mountain - just over the next ledge. With the wind winding its way up the mountain, she might be very close to that wee crier before she heard them. She pushed on with redoubled effort.
Of course, seeming close is misleading when you are climbing up a hillside, so it took her quite a while to get to where she thought she heard the crying. She told herself to focus on where she put hands and feet: she would never discover the source of this mystery if she took a wrong step and plummeted to a broken leg or worse, alone on a mountain. She pulled herself over the edge of the final (she hoped) rock wall, and saw it.
There was indeed a baby (no fearsome monster). It was lying wrapped - or had been wrapped - in the middle of a boulder there at the top of the mountain. It was crying weakly. A track (she paused from taking in the scene to curse that there might have been such an easier way up the mountain than her arduous one) wound down from the back side of the mountain.
She went over to it - cautiously. Looking around to see if anyone was there. No one was. Just the baby, lying in soiled wrappings, so very hungry, so very tired, so very cold, so very thirsty. Boethia picked the child up, making shooshing noises. Just like her mother had done. Somehow, she found herself joining the baby crying - there at the top of the mountain the two of them, without their mothers, wept.
She snapped out of it, of course. Her nose was runny. And this child didn't need sympathy, it needed water, food and warmth. She pulled out the skin she had been using to carry water. There were only a few mouthfuls left, but the babe would welcome them, she was sure. She was glad the water was warmed by the sun. Water would not keep it long, but surely it must drink something, or perish soon. She pulled it close to her, and dribbled the water carefully into it's swollen mouth. It sputtered and cried more angrily, but the water went down.
Once the water was spent, she undressed the child. Was it a boy or a girl? Boy - that much was clear. It seemed healthy enough. It was perhaps three months old? No longer a newborn, but still a baby. She guessed he had been born in the height of summer. Were there any birthmarks, rings, notes of rank? Was there embroidery on the swaddling cloths - that would soon have been winding clothes? In the stories, children left exposed were always royal, and always rescued (like she was rescuing this little one). They always had telling birthmarks, or royal artifacts so that - when grown - they could return to their borning parents and (usually) kill their cruel father and bring joy to their mother's heart. Boethia reflected ruefully that it rarely worked out well for the foster parent who had done the hard job of raising the child.
11/1
It was the storm that decided her, in the end. The cottage was no lovely place in the best of times, but in the springtime, the perennials made sweet scents and reminded her of her mother's love of beauty and homely face. In the fall, the crispness of the air and the scent of seasoned wood burning reminded her of her father, who had lovingly laid aside cords of wood - dwarfing the cottage - and made a big ceremony of the lighting of it. The summer - with the graciousness and time to sit by the road and consider the beauty of the world and argue with her brothers... well that was not so bad either, even if her whole body ached with the long labor made possible by late light.
But when October ended with a massive storm that uprooted her great-grandfather's oak and stripped the roof of its already decaying thatch and spoiled the grain she had set aside with soaking rains. Well, she looked at the devastation in the light of the morning (only half-glad that she had survived it mostly unscathed) and decided that the work of putting it to rights was not worth the having of it. She spent one last cold night cowering in the corner of the house that still had a bit of shelter. In the morning, she gathered up anything useful and portable. She said fond farewells in the now-green grass to her mother, father, brothers. They - as always - did not reply. She stood a very long time right where she used to stand while she washed the clothes: in happier times and in sadder times. She looked at the scene, so like (and yet, after the storm, unlike) the scene she had witnessed every day of her life. She imprinted it all on her heart: the good of it and the bad of it. The tedium, the joy. The heart-wrenching, seeming-unsurvivable sorrows and the jokes and the songs of her memory.
And she walked away.
No one had come to check on her - after the storm - from the village. She didn't really expect them to. The part of her that had been brought up right, that had once played with the other children and knew each villager by name, thought that maybe she should go to the village to announce "I survived the storm. I'm leaving now." But to what gain? Would they wish her well? Would they try to talk her out of it? Would there be pity there? Would there be people demanding that she just work harder - maybe for them? Perhaps the village had not survived. Perhaps she would feel obliged to dig out survivors and labor tirelessly nursing to the injured.
There was no way in which going to the village, telling them, made her life any easier. And she was tired, oh so tired, of how many things made her life harder. Let them assume that she died. Ran away mad. Crept into the bushes with the last of her strength. Was abducted by highwaymen. Turned into a frog and escaped into a pond. Whatever they wanted to believe - let them believe it, whenever they got around to bringing their clothes to be washed. She was small loss to them, and they were no loss to her.
Boethia went over the litany of sorrows in her mind as she walked. Feet mechanical. Eyes half-blind to the well-known path before her. She barely noted the various damages to places that had been so important to her. The outer fields. The second wall. The old hut. Trees were down, plants uprooted in places she'd known all her life, and she could not bring herself to care. She just stepped over the branches, crabbed hands holding an unwieldy, blanket-wrapped lifetime, and walked.
Even her internal monologue (which carefully avoided to topics such as "Where she was going" and "What was she going to do for the rest of her life") was getting boring by the time Boethia left the area she knew well. It was getting late in the short autumn after noon, when her senses sharpened as she began to see less familiar things. It is much easier to pull up memories of a place when there are only six or seven, instead of a memory every day for a lifetime.
Here - her mother had brought her to this point in the road, and they'd turned into the forests here to go gather herbs in the height of spring every year. Her mother had been careful to make sure they did not tread the ground in such a way that anyone could guess where they turned off. In fact, this looked like a particularly unwelcoming place to leave the packed earth, with a high bank to one side and a bog to the other. Boethia relished the sensation of being in no hurry (of having no place to go, even), and stood at that spot. She thought of the dark forest bower and crinkling stream she and her mother had passed. Her future, she thought, might wait.But she might never pass this way again. Might never see that bower and stream again.
Treasuring her mother's memory, she carefully stepped off the road in such a way that even the best trackers might never find her prints and walked into the forest. The herbs that had brought them every year would not be there now, she knew. She was surprised at how unfamiliar the route seemed in the autumn twilight. Heavy branches hung askew with browning leaves where she was used to blossoming buds. She began to question her judgement in coming back here. Something bad might happen.
The thought made her laugh. What else was there to happen? She would live, she would die. She would be loved, she would be killed. The future held all hopes and all risks in unknown proportions now.
11/2
Boethia's thoughts turned from the complete freedom of fatalism to trying to to pick her way through the storm-strewn non-path she had followed with her mother in the flowering of her childhood. Fading, idealized memory (combined with the missed carelessness of having someone else in charge) did not mix well with downed trees, changed seasons and evening light.At last she found the spot she remembered. A solo fir tree, perfect on all sides with only a narrow opening showing that a grown woman could stand upright at the base of the tree - thickly covering branches hiding her from site. It was like a tent made of living boughs. She had played here, relishing a play that was all her own with no brothers, while her mother picked the herbs nearby. The stream - the cause for the opening in the high, thick firs, rushed merrily past and opened the sky to reveal a majestic, if comparatively small, mountain beyond.
Satisfied, she drank her fill of water, started a small fire and stacked wood for a roaring fire that night. She sat, legs dangling above the stream and cool breezes filtering up, and watched the mountain turn yellow, pink and dark purple. The stars came out behind the mountain, silhouetting it it against the clear mountain field of stars. It seemed to her that a yellower, closer light lingered on the top of the mountain, but she wrote it off as a flight of fancy. The stars were ever so much brighter where there were no clouds or torches. She turned her back and threw a few more branches onto the fire, luxuriating in the heat thrown towards her. She fell asleep with the flicker of firelight in front of her.
The night was clement for almost November. Even under the questionable protection of fir boughs, she was hardly any colder than she had been in the cottage when the four walls still stood. She woke later in the morning than usual, and ten minutes later she was done with her morning ablutions. She packed up her things and stood up. Where now? Her inertia would have carried up the road if she hadn't stepped off it, but stepped off it she had.
The mountain in front of her looked mysterious and lovely. She wondered what she might see if she stood at the top of it. It looked so very old and almost sacred in the yellow light. Perhaps standing so high, she would be able to see her future - to see where she wanted to go. If nothing else, at least she would have stood on top of a mountain once in her life. She drank again from the stream and started her trek up the mountain.
It took her as much time to get to the steepening sides of the mountain as she thought it would take to get to the top. She began to think of this as folly, but stepping back down the mountain meant conceding the hard won steps she'd already taken. She looked at the water of the river - not so far away - and decided to keep going.
Boethia was almost hot, certainly out of breath, as she stopped to catch her wind after an arduous climb. Then, suddenly, she realized she was hearing crying. That she had been hearing crying for some time now, but she had not heeded it over the sound of her heart and breath. It sounded like, well, it sounded like a baby. But all sorts of lore came flooding back to her, of creatures in dark corners of desperate woods that lured travelers into certain doom by crying like a baby, or a woman. But this really did not sound like a flesh-rending monster of the night. It sounded like a baby who had cried for a very long time and was tiring out. And it sounded like it as coming from the top of the mountain - just over the next ledge. With the wind winding its way up the mountain, she might be very close to that wee crier before she heard them. She pushed on with redoubled effort.
Of course, seeming close is misleading when you are climbing up a hillside, so it took her quite a while to get to where she thought she heard the crying. She told herself to focus on where she put hands and feet: she would never discover the source of this mystery if she took a wrong step and plummeted to a broken leg or worse, alone on a mountain. She pulled herself over the edge of the final (she hoped) rock wall, and saw it.
There was indeed a baby (no fearsome monster). It was lying wrapped - or had been wrapped - in the middle of a boulder there at the top of the mountain. It was crying weakly. A track (she paused from taking in the scene to curse that there might have been such an easier way up the mountain than her arduous one) wound down from the back side of the mountain.
She went over to it - cautiously. Looking around to see if anyone was there. No one was. Just the baby, lying in soiled wrappings, so very hungry, so very tired, so very cold, so very thirsty. Boethia picked the child up, making shooshing noises. Just like her mother had done. Somehow, she found herself joining the baby crying - there at the top of the mountain the two of them, without their mothers, wept.
She snapped out of it, of course. Her nose was runny. And this child didn't need sympathy, it needed water, food and warmth. She pulled out the skin she had been using to carry water. There were only a few mouthfuls left, but the babe would welcome them, she was sure. She was glad the water was warmed by the sun. Water would not keep it long, but surely it must drink something, or perish soon. She pulled it close to her, and dribbled the water carefully into it's swollen mouth. It sputtered and cried more angrily, but the water went down.
Once the water was spent, she undressed the child. Was it a boy or a girl? Boy - that much was clear. It seemed healthy enough. It was perhaps three months old? No longer a newborn, but still a baby. She guessed he had been born in the height of summer. Were there any birthmarks, rings, notes of rank? Was there embroidery on the swaddling cloths - that would soon have been winding clothes? In the stories, children left exposed were always royal, and always rescued (like she was rescuing this little one). They always had telling birthmarks, or royal artifacts so that - when grown - they could return to their borning parents and (usually) kill their cruel father and bring joy to their mother's heart. Boethia reflected ruefully that it rarely worked out well for the foster parent who had done the hard job of raising the child.