Of Gods and Myth

[Sarah Tubbs]

 

Opening scene: introduces protagonist, side character, setting, and foreshadows the underlying conflict.

“Soothsayer”, my mother had called me, but I scarce believed. Assuming I dreamt through the eyes of another, she held hope that I embodied the gift of prophecy. Yet I bore no divination. These scenes dancing behind my eyelids left no poetic riddles to distill in their wake. For a time, I called them memories, believing the gods made a mistake when weaving my soul and instead of one, had woven many. Seamed together in jagged lines, each fabric of being stitched unto the other like a quilt made in darkness. The wistful tales of a child for soon those dreams plunged into horrors, ones reluctant to return me to the waking.

And then when I spoke of the dreams, fear had replaced my mother’s wonderment. To stave off my mind’s turning in slumber, she rubbed on me salves of poppy and pig’s fat to deepen rest. Rosemary and jasmine she used to make me smell sweetly for the gods’ pleasure because surely, I’d incurred their wrath if they sought to dangle me in the realm betwixt the living and the free souls. All the while, she muttered prayers learned from the clan she fled, for they, above all others, knew how to please the gods. Or so they said. Though, I did not believe the gods held sway over anything anymore. For five thousand years, they had left us to their silence. 

 With the dull pulsing behind my eyes, I felt the charm my mother made me like a brand between my breasts. Another dream suppressed, its madness resulting in such twisted aches. Herbalism. Rune magic. I found I cared little for their connotations so long as nothingness awaited me past sleep’s grasp. Naysayers riddled the land, pushing comparisons of witchcraft, of debauchery, feigning ignorance from which such gifts the gods sprung, but I knew better. Within the splintering walls of my village, most of us did. 

As I wove a copper strand of my sister’s hair under the next, Rory squirmed, pulling loose the beautiful intricacies of my work: well, as beautiful as one might expect given the head of hair being attached to someone who refused to hold still.

I heaved a sigh at the ceiling. In the pale light filtering in, my attention snagged on the cobwebs clinging between the beams. Lazily, they waved in the waft of heat from the fireplace. 

 “Stop wiggling, Rory,” I said, and with all the same gentleness, I faced her forward—again. 

“Niamh.” Her voice reached for its shrill whine. “Do I have to go?” 

I drew in a breath to assuage the tightness in my chest, but it did nothing. “Yes, you do have to attend.” I continued weaving the ivory ribbon in with her braid—a twin to mine. “Just sit still. I’m nearly done.” Fant shouts drew my gaze up to the adjacent window. Across the freshly shorn wheat field leading to my village nestled in the grove, those in the community busied themselves with preparations for the offering. A bit frenzied, honestly, from the sound of it. Perhaps they’d gotten a late start. 

Being so far away from the everyday commotion offered us a much needed reprieve from their antics and though Father never said, I suspected that to be one of the many reasons he'd chosen to build our home separate from the others. 

Our home of stacked stone stuck out like a ram among sheep. Father built what he knew, what his father knew, and his grandfather before him. Sat atop the slight slope butting up to the forest of yellowing aspen, the window caught the sun perfectly most days, bathing the patched armchair across the way in a rich, buttery glow just as it had when my mother had occupied its cushion. 

Rory slumped in her chair and threw her head back to frown at me, nearly ripping her half-woven braid from my fingers. I eyed the bit of dirt smeared across her jawline, her cheeks, and even the pointed tip of her ear—as if she'd been the one rummaging around in the garden all day and not myself. 

Rory was caught in those awkward in-between stages of adolescence and maturity—her face still rounded by youth, making the dimple in her chin far less noticeable than it otherwise would be. Each freckle splattered across her nose reminded me of red clay and matched her round eyes in near perfection.  

While I shared in the coloring of my mother’s hair, I did not much look like either of my parents. While my father’s eyes had been as bright as star flecked skies, and my mother's dark and chaotic as the churning Saor with its blue-gray tint, I'd been told my eyes were reminiscent of fractured sea glass littering shores and harboring a soft green. 

I pinned her with a warning glare, but she eyed me with vague innocence. 

“Can I skip it?” She fanned her pale lashes at me. “Oh, come on! Just this once!” she added when I shook my head, and I felt a twinge in my neck from how often I seemed to do it.

I twisted my lips, trying to ignore the pulsing which quickly surmounted to a throb. No matter the amount of willow bark tea I’d forced down the pain had yet to ease. 

“Searmanas is only once a month,” I reminded her, carrying the left strand over the center—a few wild spurts of hair darting off in different directions here and there, refusing to behave.

She glowered. “Keely doesn’t go.”

“Keely is full grown, my love.” I offered her a wry smile. “It’s her decision if she chooses not to honor the gods. You, on the other hand, are not."

Elven from all walks of life, clan or no, offered sacrifices in the names of the six gods during Searmanas—a ritual held once a moon. The hope that the gods would someday again stretch down from Spéartha to brush their fingers across the realms had yet to be relinquished, however hollow. 

“Niamh,” she drew out my name in a long-winded groan, "please! I’ll do anything.” Ah yes, the bargaining. “I’ll go to the garden right now and finish pulling the weeds and gathering the herbs and—” Her eyes brightened as she twisted to face me, the ends of her hair slipping from my grasp altogether. “I’ll even hang them to dry,” she waggled her brows, her lips stretching in a near-fiendish grin. 

 I watched as each strand uncoiled itself down the back of her dark blue dress in a cascade of copper seemingly out of spite and made the mental note to rid myself of such futile efforts come next moon. “Clever.” I flicked her nose, and her hand flew up to bat me away. “But I finished that this morning.”

My gaze flicked to the string of drying herbs and flowers above the soot-stained hearth on the far wall, a myriad of dulling purples and greens and blues.

Another groan, and I looked back in time to see Rory’s face fall at the sad state of her plait. “I’ll do it myself,” she grumbled, scooping her hair over her small shoulder. Her fingers set about twining the strands back together.

I blew out a breath. “You know, my efforts on your hair would’ve looked wonderful if the head it is attached to would’ve stopped moving,” I said, as I sidled in between her chair and the wooden dinner table to the wall brimmed with closed shelving. Though they were not labeled, I knew precisely which drawer my henbane rested, in the furthest top corner to keep it far from reach of little hands. From aniseed to yarrow, my herbs had their place tucked within.

 Rory quieted her quibbling enough that I couldn’t discern her words from the crows grating coos and rattles.

Even long dried, the henbane’s foul odor wafted to greet me when I pulled open its drawer. Stains soaked into the wood’s grain and shriveled leaves still remained from my mother's time, yet I kept them as a reminder of her years in my place. 

I coiled my fingers around the twine binding the stems together and carried it to my worktable beneath the window. 

“That’s not lavender.” Rory felt the need to state the obvious.

“No, it certainly is not.”

Carefully, I unbound the leafy stems to separate them over the wood. Like thorns pricking my skin, I felt the poison riddling its fibers. With a breath, I willed it to flee. The black spores of its toxins seeped from its pores and arched beneath my nails. 

“What is it for?”

“Len tells me Darrah has refused to sleep since the other night,” I answered, dunking my hands in the clear bucket of water I kept by the table and scrubbing my nails against the soft pads of my palms. “And truthfully, I can only heighten the effects of valerian root so much.”

I couldn’t be entirely certain it would be effective, but the soporific properties of henbane were potent, feared among common folk as it often plagued one with creeping visions. Yet with its poison swirling in the bucket before me, I hoped its remnants might be enough to send Darrah into a dreamless sleep. 

“But what does Darrah say?”

 I threw her a glance over my shoulder, drying my hands in my skirts. “That, of course, he’s fine.”

“Then why—”

“Because he’s never fine, Rory.” I pitched my voice over hers, unable to shield her from the bite of my words. “Now, mind your work and I’ll mind mine.”

Her expression pinched with a huff, her fingers working down. 

She held no understanding of what it meant to fear sleep.