Photo received from Corvus O Diomasaigh
Once alone in the Welsh woods
there lived a woman and her son. Her husband had lived with them at first; but
he had a tendency to turn hairy and sprout horns at the full moon–not every month,
perhaps, but as often as not–and to come back in the morning scratched and
covered in dirt, with leaves in his hair. So she’d sent him away to a hut
further along the track. From this hut she would summon him when so inclined.
And often she was, provided he agreed to keep the stipulated distance and
pretend that the full moon was irrelevant.
The boy grew up remarkably
unacquainted with ordinary society; he had a heart at once innocent and yet given
to murmurs of unpredictability. Through the drinking of a draft prepared by his
mother from herbs planted by many other hands, he lost most memory of the
father who died before the son was grown.
The loss of childhood did not
come easily to him, and no more the putting on of manhood. Amidst his long
mourning for the one and his confusion at the other, he sought the help and
teachings of a smiling wizard who took him to the wizard’s tower, opened all
the wrong books, taught him the wrong spells, and sent him off along the wrong
path.
The boy remained nameless for
longer than comfortable to anyone in the story. As he travelled on, he came to
a gleaming palace, was invited to the requisite feast, saw the requisite
bleeding lance carried in before the wounded king, and failed to ask the
requisite question. In fact, he got into something of a habit of walking into
such places, sitting down to such feasts (although they always seemed at the
moment like new experiences, not old ones repeated), and never managing to ask
quite the right question. His path came to be littered with wounded kings whom
he could not cure, although from each of them (had he cured them) he longed to
hear his name and learn the secret of his true identity.
One of the wounded kings was
especially dear to him–the last in the series, as the legend relates according
to the available sources. He chose to remain in this palace for some time after
it became evident that the moment that might have cured the king was long past.
In this palace he did indeed ask the right questions, more or less, but too
late to work the necessary alchemy. Because he thought that tweaking the
questions slightly and trying again might produce more auspicious results, he
became a master of thwarted persistence, admired by some of the courtiers for
his good will, ridiculed by a few (though as time went on by an increasing
number) and arousing the impatience of several who wanted him just to get on
with it.
Finally, the king himself
announced that enough was enough. The boy’s frustration had been mounting for
some time, both at his own failure and at the king’s singular passivity in
refusing to offer such promptings as he might have provided; yet he was
devastated to be exiled from the court at which, despite the king’s
suppurating, ulcerated flank, there had been good company (such as he’d not
experienced in childhood) and three square and very pleasant meals a day. There
was also the king’s own company, which the boy, who had now grown to be a youth
in a body old enough to be his father’s, found agreeable, endearing, and deeply
familiar, providing the obvious was not mentioned. The youth began to blame
himself for so often attempting to ask the right question at the right time.
When he finally left the palace, he had in fact convinced himself that the
responsibility lay with him and him alone for not achieving the desired outcome
to this adventure.
In another part of the forest
dwelt a tribe of magicians who travelled widely and with whom the youth began
to cross paths. They had come to constitute a tribe not by birth but by common
consent and a shared awareness of their powers, which were in fact less
consistently reliable than they liked to admit to one another. Those powers,
however, were real enough to be soon evident to the youth (in a body now old
enough to be his father’s) and so he fell in with them, despite his misgivings
that the wizard of the tower might in fact have been one of their number.
One day, consorting with one of
these magi, he found that they had crossed together into the Otherworld, where
his brother magus began to snuffle and snort like an animal; to his own surprise, he did as well. The visit to the Otherworld didn’t last long,
but he shortly came to be absorbed in scanning the ground around him for hints
of other such portals, not knowing exactly what lay on the other side of them,
but increasingly convinced that going through these portals would lead to a
very important discovery about himself.
Whereas these meetings with the
forest magi were intermittent, his meetings with a kindly hermit, who stayed in
one place, were a regular feature of his week. The hermit was on the whole
remarkably accepting of the youth’s explorations among the magi and seemed
inclined to respect the importance of these encounters. The hermit was
committed to helping the youth reverse the effects of the draught that had
expunged the memory of his father. His good will came to be more important to
the boy than was the releasing of the spell, long deferred as it was–it being
the practice of the hermit that the youth must master each clause of the spell
for himself in order to break its power. It was a long and very complicated
spell, some of it in archaic languages, the grammar of which had to be at least
minimally deciphered before moving on to the next phrase. Some of the magi were
inclined to scoff at the hermit; others were deeply respectful of his longer,
slower, and less spectacular wisdom.
At times the youth grew weary of
the whole enterprise. He found that wandering through the forest had become
tiresome without the magic of the tribe, but the excitement of their magic
trivial without the patience of the hermit. He had no desire to choose between
them. The memory of his excursion into the Otherworld as an animal self with
the magus who accompanied him there continued to burn in his mind, but more
importantly, in his heart. And he came to bless the blood of his father that
ran in his veins.
He continues to wander the
forest: quests have a way of being endless, whether one wishes them so or not.
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