Coygan by Jason

51°45’16” N 4°29’12” W

Making

The day we died felt odd, deceptive. It was disorientating to say the least. Though by that point, none of us really cared what was happening. For some time, the tides had felt thicker and sluggish, the sea had become something else. Something strange.  We were dazed, as used as we were to the tidal whims of our home, this felt different, it crept up on us sideways and left us confused. Life continued in a fashion – we fed but with no great urgency or joy, just opened our mouths and let in the not so nourishing waters. An act that felt so normal and, at the same time, so very different. We continued as long as the burnished light rippled through the glas water. But by the time the light had shifted and lost its golden hue we knew that something was wrong: a part of us had been ebbing away, a drop at a time, but for how long we weren’t sure, as if we had been slowly pouring some vital part of ourselves into the veridian tides.

By the time the light completely disappeared, we were all dead. 

We sank to the ocean floor, shells cracked or chipped as they hit the bottom. Our soft parts started to wither, revealing bone. Some of us were broken apart and what little remained was scooped up by a band of desperate heliwrs. We don’t think we gave them much sustenance: a group of them are on the other side of the hill. Listen to us, “the Hill,” apologies we are getting ahead of ourselves, we’ll get to that bit in a moment. Many of us fell on that day and the days that followed. Layer after layer and slowly, inevitably, our world calcified becoming something quite, quite different. We came to know a new way of being – the way of stone.

Where once there had been the soothing ebb and flow our world we were now rigid, static, and seemingly lifeless. We were prisoners held under ossuary guard, hardening and strengthening with the passing of the ages. Yet our awareness seeped out into the strata, permeating the solidity surrounding us, we slowly came to a new understanding in the darkness. An understanding that we were utterly alone in the rock. An understanding that hungry forces churned and kneaded what lay beneath us, moulding it to its own ends.

All we could do was wait.

 Wait till the acidic waters had retreated and the mountain makers came. Those churning forces eventually erupted forth, smashing and remaking the surface to their own design. Great tracts of rock were pitted against each other, battling till one prevailed and sat proud atop its vanquished neighbour. And so, the mountain makers created their new empire. A realm of rocks and ruptures – vertiginous, rough and proud. And when these makers had had their fill, we were left like trophies dotted across this virgin landscape.

In the open once again we were subject to new, yet strangely familiar forces: the tides of wind and rain, sunshine and ice. Over millennia they sculpted us into the world that you see today. So, here we are, in our new home, nestled deep in this grey green hillside, settled under indifferent skies, looking longingly at the slate cold seas.

We are a hollow.

A hole in the ground.

A cave, a resting place, a refuge, a burrow and more besides.

We have seen so much and, if you are ready, we are willing to share our stories… 

Memory

            I am back at the cave.

My arms are tired because I have carried a lot of wood. I nod a greeting to Caru, she looks worried, turns her head, looks at her sister, my mate, shrugs her shoulders. I nod again, I understand. My love, my Efa, sits alone on a small flat rock. Still and silent but I know better. She looks wary as if she is tracking a Blaiddmother. There is a fire inside her.  Anger. Sorrow. Loss. Her fire burns bright in the darkness of the cave. It has blazed for three long days. It has been three days since the river… Three days since our boys… since our boys… Three long, long days…

The glow in the sky is fading, turning to the colour of ash and dust. Darkness creeps across the hillside. We move into the cave because the creaduriad come out of the shadows. I put the wood on the floor with the rest and pick three good branches, add them to the campfire in the middle of the cave. The others welcome the extra warmth and light. We all move a little closer and rub our hands together. Some smile, others laugh but quietly. That other fire, the one inside Efa, would blacken the cave walls and burn us all to ash and then burn the hillside and the forest and the rocks and the clouds in the sky if it could.

I sit next to Efa. She looks at the cold rock between her toes, not at me, not at her sister or her friends. Her face is wet again. I see it in the light of the campfire. I shuffle closer to her, ready to move quick quick if she lashes out. My arm is still sore from her last hit. This time she does not move. So, I stay.

Rotri has caught some cwningen. Their skinny bodies spit and dribble as Rotri turns them on their sticks above the fire. The scent fills the cave. It smells good. We are all hungry and we need to eat our fill before we leave this hillside in the next light.

I am given a side of cwningen. It is hot. I lick my lips and blow on the flesh. I move the stick and put the meat in front of Efa. She does not move. I wait, even though I am hungry and I have collected fire wood and I am sad too. I watched them be born. The struggle and the screeching and the blood and the joy. I sang so many songs when all three were safe. Joy. I thanked everyone and everything, even the grass and the hills and the sky. Many happy songs came in the days after. I watched my boys grow fat and strong on Efa’s milk. My chest beat faster whenever I saw the three of them. I smiled more. So did she.

I move the stick and she reaches out, grabs it and picks off a good hunk of meat. Efa looks at me quick quick and eats the cwningen, blowing and chewing at the same time. She has not eaten since the river so I am glad. I look up and see her sister, Caru, smiling and we nod. One of the others sings a song, it is as bright as a spring bird. Efa rests her head on my shoulder. This time Caru’s eyes are wet. 

Light comes back to us.

Efa has slept all night. I look at Rotri he smiles and beckons me to the mouth of the cave. He is a good heliwr and a better friend. He hands me something wrapped in animal skin. I fold back a corner and look inside – there are two of them. Pale, small, strong. I look at Rotri, my eyes fill with water. He grabs my shoulder and puts his head against mine. When he stands back, I see water in his eyes too and I grab his shoulder.

Efa stands at the mouth of the cave looking at the hillside as if she has never seen it before. I show her the gift from Rotri. Two white axe heads. She takes them in her hands and for a moment I do not know what she will do next. She closes her eyes. Pulls the axe heads to her chest and she cries. These are different tears. She looks different, sounds different, the fire that sits in her chest is fading. She looks at me. She hands me one of the axe heads and we go to the mouth of the cave. She places one axe in the earth.

“Cryf,” she whispers.

“Broch,” I whisper as I push the other axe into the ground. Golden light fills the cave, I look at Efa and I am sure we will be well again.

Mothers

Matri – Den Mother – my mother.

Sits on the flat stone.

She listens for signs and meaning.

Alone. Older.

Wiser than most.

I sit below her, watching. She is listening, the hillside lies still now. Silent. Sleeping or dead? Today hard winds blew off the mountain. Colder today, colder each day for many days in a row. Too cold, too early. A White Season is coming. Matri tastes it on the air – says it will be the Mother of All White Seasons. A killer. Now, Matri sits and listens to the rocks, the trees and the grass. To what the crawlers, the warblers and the food has to say. What songs do they sing now that we can all taste the ice in the air?

Our cave feels different. We have called it home these past seasons but in this cutting air the clan huddles closer. Warmth moving slowly from body to body. Pups and elders sleep in the centre, mostly silent, save the odd whimper. The likes of me on the outside. Lips closed. Still as stone. Her ears are good but Matri needs the quiet. The clan needs mother’s wisdom. A White Season, even a gentle one, will take many. A Killer White that is savage savage. Taking chest beats and breathing mists from old and young, novice and seasoned hunter. Leaving behind carcasses filled with nothing but ice. Killer White will devour all the heat in the world, turn livers to stone and snap spines like dry twigs, and it will still crave more.

I scratch my belly with my back leg where ticks bite, nip, nip, nip. I try and scratch quiet. Feels good to stop nip, nip, nip but I catch a small stone, send it click clack clack down past the bones and into the shit. Matri fixes my face with her dark angry eyes. One more noise like that and I’ll click clack clack into the shit too. I bow my head. Look at the ground between my paws, when I look up, I feel like her disappointing son again. She raises her snout, sniffs the cool darkness. Her tail curls and flicks and I know she is worried. My mate licks at my paw and I nuzzle her neck then I close my eyes as sleep curls up with to us…

… in the golden light. Warmth. Life. Green chases us. They dance with us as we tumble through the golden. Shadow and light, A rhythm, a new song I have not heard before, shadow and light. Running. Leaping. I am running. I am leaping. We all are, even Matri. We laugh and whoop and call out to each other. I smell food. It is close. I feel its heat on my tongue. They are running into the light too. Small and fast and juicy but my mate calls to me and the clan keeps running and soon I forget about my rumbling belly and run on into the warmth, the goodness of the fluttering golden light and in the distance…

…rain. Water, thick with cold, runs into the cave past the flat rock where Matri had listened.

But she has gone.

My mate sits next to me. Patient. Looking down at me, then out at the wet hillside. I get up, stretch my front legs, fart. I don’t want to wake up. But Matri has gone and I feel the cave changing around me. It is smaller. Closing in on us. Squeezing us out. I am not looking forward to the cold mud and stone and the wind. The forest has given its leaves up to easy and far too early. There is will be no place to hide from the wind and rain.

It will be a tough march.

Mother knows the old songs. Songs her mother sang to her, whose mother sang to her and whose mother sang to her. Memory handed down Mother to Mother, generation to generation. So that we would know what to do in hard times.

Matri returns, standing in the mouth of the cave by the sharp white rocks.

Rain has dulled her fur, drips off her ears and snout. But I feel her chest beats and smell her warmth, sense the swell of it moving across the clan. Her clan. She is strong. Ready. We all see it. She barks and we rise. Ready to run. To follow her to the next cave and the next and beyond. Through forests and brush, across plains and rivers, over scree and mountains, from shadow into light. I past my mother and see, outside the cave, a golden warmth shining down out of the hard skies, hitting the distant land.

I whoop.

So does the rest of the clan.

We are ready.

Matri knows the way.

Note:

This was born out of the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Part IV course with Gemma and could be the start of a collection of flash fiction/short stories about the Coygan caves near Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, up to their destruction in the 1960’s when the caves became a limestone quarry… so in that sense there is time travel!

I am deliberately sprinkling in some Welsh words – here is my list

Glas – the kind of blue/green associated with the sea from the proto-Celtic “glastos.”

Blaidd(mother) – blaidd is wolf so this is me making up a word for wolf-mother.

Creaduriad – creatures

Heliwr(s) – hunter(s.)

Cwningen – rabbit.

Questions: as well as your general thoughts and impressions can you answer the following…

Q: Does each story have a distinct voice?

Q: Do you think this collection, despite the brevity, feels coherent?

Q: I originally had some short cosmic/mythical bits in between the stories do you think this would add anything? E.g.

Mythos I

Where there is gold, you will find green.

Where you find is light, there will be shadow.

Walking or stumbling, dancing or falling, it does not matter – the universe is in motion, gold and green always moving… changing… alive…