Reed Among the Stones

By Keldon Stanford

Three families have lived forever beside the Mother River, the Stone folk, Reeds and the Bee cousins from the red hillside where flowers bloom. They are at peace until slave raiders come from across the mountains. Brother Snow of the Stones rises to the challenge and is caught up in a war not of his making. He is wounded and as he lies between the present world and infinity he remembers his life, loves and struggles.

Snow's grandmother, his widowed father and his foster sister Rain of the Reed folk come alive as we learn the myths and magics of this long forgotten people. Will Snow be forced to marry Rain, binding Reeds and Stones in treaty kinship as the elders demand or will he marry Scythe, his mysterious first love? His answer is not at all one for a modern man, yet it fits what we know of his culture and time.

Will the mysterious Axe men from beyond the mountains end Snow's people, selling them into slavery, or will corrupt influences from within their group weaken them to the point where they destroy themselves? Or will the Stone folk continue to weave their tapestry of destiny, myth and psychic wholeness to overcome hardship and death?

Snow's story ends with resolution as complex and allusions as deep as the fragmentary carvings we sometimes find in the bogs and ancient gravesites of the European countryside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Dec 14, 2004
• ISBN: 9781466958814

Keldon Stanford

Mr. Stanford lives in a log cabin beside a meadow deep in the Alabama hills with his wife and two large dogs plus an elderly cat named Sunflower. He makes glass beads, casts an occasional metal figurine, and collects fossils. He is especially fond of Appalachian music, coon dogs who bay in the dark night skies, mules, persimmons and good country people. He recalls a former co-worker's words, "There's not going to be any telephones in heaven, nor fax machines either," and hopes to find a place further out of town. This is Stanford's first novel, but he has three more in the writing process. The next one in print will either be a sequel telling more about the Stone folk and the Axe men or a southern novel stripped of many of that genre's overworked plot devices.

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© Copyright 2004 Keldon Stanford.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

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ISBN: 978-1-4120-3925-3

ISBN: 978-1-4669-5881-4

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Contents

CHAPTER 1 FOREST

CHAPTER 2 LIGHT

CHAPTER 3FLAX

CHAPTER 4 STRAW

CHAPTER 5DARKNESS

CHAPTER 6 SCYTHE

CHAPTER 7 SHADE

CHAPTER 8 BETRAYAL

CHAPTER 9 WOMEN

CHAPTER 10 BOWER

CHAPTER 11 WAG

CHAPTER 12 FOREST

CHAPTER 1

FOREST

I wait this long day as if I were new born and without memory. In the peaceful forest I rest, hoping for my brothers to return. My patience is ever abiding as they are very slow to find me.

The sun gradually reached its highest point in the sky as I slept, unknowing. Then when I finally awoke I saw it cast my shadow very weak and small, grey on the shining snow, except where it darkened my red-brown bloodstains. Only in those places where my blood puddled was it black as shadows should be, strong and deep.

When I woke to myself after the morning’s battle the winter sun was close down to the south, the day half over, and with it my own last day on this world. Blue on blue on black was the sky, reflecting almost the black heart of the Mountain beneath me, and the snow was so white it was painful to see.

The needles of the pine tree overhead were bursts of silver and green, waving about as they were tugged by those breezes which come down from high up the great mountain beyond us. One fell, piercing my hand with its sharp little nose, like the goose’s splinter bone our women use to sew up garments.

I felt nothing at first then a tiny little burn in the cold and wave of aching rolled up my arm. It was indeed a surprise such a small thing should echo to throb so and for a time overshadow my other throbbing pains.

It was a mystery, the last I supposed, of a life filled with newness and change. I drew a sharp breath to try to calm myself but in doing so a greater pain shook me. Before this tearing, as if my whole chest were on fire, all the sensations of hand and arm ran to the green horizon and disappeared.

So great was the spasm of hurt from my death wound, such little pains as those from the tiny pine needle passed as quickly as they came.

I closed my eyes before the pain, my sight momentarily dimming to grey in waves of pounding insistence.

When they could finally open again I looked down upon my hand and beheld one of those double surprises one sees which make his life and death such things to truly experience with wonder. There was just a tiny drop of blood, so thin and pink, not redblack and strong like blood should be. It was so minute it froze as it welled up, not splashing as had the other torrents from my cuts before they dried.

It was a wonder to lie here and see such a great event, though it was sad I must come so far to see my first needle fall alone with arrow precision. Usually they stay in threes and fall tail first all together. But like myself this one had separated from his kinsman and fallen the wrong way, perhaps shaken loose by a tiny breeze the others did not feel.

So silent were the woods I wondered if I had been deafened by the noise of our battle strife which will have killed me before the sun sets. Then I realized such deafness would matter little for my ears would be silenced soon enough.

I listened, afraid for a moment I was already dead, then in the distance heard chirping of a little ground rat, soft among the trees. Such a tiny animal, so soft and helpless, would never show itself if it thought there was any danger near by.

Looking about, as if my eyes had opened in this life for the first time, I saw I lay in a snowy meadow with drifts running half into a thicket of wood. It was cold but at least it was sheltered some from the ever present breezes, in its saddle cove half way up the Father Mountain. This was not merely a meadow; rather it was a battlefield.

This day was not just a noontime in the sun; it was longer and somehow more real than all the days of my life and all my lives on the wheel. I cannot yet fully remember the eternal spirals of my lives but it seemed they came closer to recollection as I lay there half dozing.

The snow cooled my wounds and cooled my heart hour by hour. I felt no more of the fighting passion, just cold. I lay half supine with a spear or an arrow in the back, which prevented me from turning. Not being able to move my arm to feel it I said aloud to no one in particular I will just have to suppose it is an arrow. I wonder if I am truly alive here. Is there no one left who can speak aloud to me?

I saw a man from where I lay half buried in the snow, my leg caught against the base of a pine tree. Perhaps he was an enemy I could not tell at first. (They are mostly great in size like my Reed cousins, both red and hirsute, but he was small like the Bee clan, those cousins from high on the red hillside.) He was dark, almost blue in death, even his blood underneath him was nearly blue-black, like a pot left too long in the fire.

The snow cooled me from the heat of the battle even as it chilled him further. It frosted us all, who remained like scattered coals in the ashes of some forgotten camp fire. Once someone cried out but I could not see him, turned away from him as I was.

There was just that one cry, then for a long while all was quiet again. I strained at listening for what seemed like hours longer then when no more human sound came forth I relaxed again to welcome the embrace of sun and snow.

For so long, it seemed forever, I heard nothing else but the sigh of the wind overhead and the rustlings of my little ground rat in the distance.

Even among all my pains the wonderful peace of my scant remaining life felt so good I laughed, shaking the peaceful calm with my voice. Not even the lightning pains which followed any movement could stifle this laughter.

The ground rat fell quiet again and was not heard for a long while. I supposed my laughter to have hurt his ratty dignity so I laughed again at the thought. Then the arrow moved about a bit and made me cough until I thought all my breath would wheeze and bubble away with renewed pain and fresh welling blood.

Some time passed before I could pay attention to the world about me again. I found I could see my shadow ever stronger and blacker before me but the sun was past my sight. The little ground rat started his grumbling again, I suppose he was assured by my long absence of movement, thinking all was safe for him again.

As I pondered, imagining his little rat self stirring up his courage to peek out over his strangely changed wood and meadow, I laughed again. I wondered if he could understand such strange happenings such as this day had brought him. So I laughed until I was forced to spend my substance coughing and wheezing out the little froth of bubbles at my lips.

Even while my laughter sounded its echoes died unanswered. This day of battle was a day of cold solitude.

I spoke aloud again. My name is Snow, did I say it before little rat friend? You see today my namesake covers the ground? In it reflects the full fire of the sunshine even as the sun falls brushing into the first of the trees behind my twisted self.

This time my forest rat friend ceased his quiet grumbling. He fell silent, not to be heard again. So he left the scene of disturbance and those odd bloody lumps of men interposed between himself and his favorite meadow.

Perhaps he left to wait for tomorrow when all will be entirely silent again. Then he will return and harvest the seeds hidden here beneath the snow. Or perhaps he will stay in his burrow until a new snowfall hides the carnage.

Regardless, I never heard this particular rat again. It was as if his time before the camp fire of the world, telling his story to the little listening children, was ended. So he took to his bed and that was his end as it related to me.

After another while came the flutter of a little brown bird, flying in from the distance to fill the silence left by my little rat friend. It was one of those who are called sparrows, starting to sing its evening prayers.

The twittering sound came and went and with it the flurry of tiny wings, just barely in my hearing at first. As it all persisted and strengthened I dully realized it was not just my imagination running on after the vanishment of friend rat, my only other company for so long.

I could only catch glimpses of its movement among thickly clustered pine needles, full blown like thistle flowers but green even in winter. They were such a shining green between the blue above and black and red and white below they hid all but an occasional flutter of bird-ish shadow.

Pity these weeks past I so seldom looked up at the winter sky. I could have been watching the sparrows for all this time if I had but thought to stop my endless strivings with other men. So the bird must have known; it scolded me for my late inattention. It went on and on always scolding, as little birds do, but it seemed such a happy scold.

After the first few glimpses I could not find the little bird again among the foliage. Maybe it was not a bird after all but was instead my Grandmother back to chide me into movement when I would rather lie asleep in the biting snow beneath warm sun and puffy clouds. She was always such a grumpy bird.

I could recognize her tones from the time I could first distinguish her voice. She ever sounding impossible chirpings and grumblings to herself and all others who listened wherever and whenever she went about her routine.

Today I would have gotten up and gone to her if I could, but I found I could not arise, or so it seemed. So I merely lay there and listened to her noise, resting in its familiarity.

Strange and in a way mysterious, how a man would lie in his puddled blood exposed to the cold and wind, not caring for any particular thing, enraptured by the sound of a tiny bird hidden somewhere beyond his vision. And so the mystery of it made me try at sitting now and again.

The effort did little but make another wheeze and bloody bubble escape my chest. At least I was able to crank my neck down to see where there was indeed the bronze point of an arrow protruding from my linen shirt and woolen overcoat.

After a while I got my good hand to working and so sought to reach across and break the offending point off by the front side of its shaft. But the arrow’s head was all bound about with string, not easily separating from its place and so it was still bound to me as well.

It was like a curse, or worse yet a half completed promise. I could not finish breaking it off nor pull it out nor release myself from it. So I left the broken arrow end with its blade to dangle on its tangled string.

This string was just a stout thread of linen, wrapped about its shaft like one of those briar vines which clings tightly about the young trees of the forest, choking them year by year. So it choked me by its persistence and my inability to break it.

As for the back side of the arrow I had no heart to even reach it, for the pain the movement caused me. So after a while I gave up on my struggles with it. Again, vision fading in black waves, I lost myself in the grumblings of the little bird.

So much did it sound like those same complaints I recalled from years of listening to my grandmother as she aged, sounding more like a bird with each passing season.

Not that Grandmother was anything tiny resembling such a sparrow, at least in the beginning of my life. Nor was she at all brown like these little ones who flit among snowbound branches searching for bright red berries.

She was so tall and pale and angular; Grandmother resembled the race of storks rather than a such a tiny creature. So she was like the greatest rather than the least of bird kind. Yes, it is the way I remember her, as some ungainly stork.

Her gaze was most storklike, as if seeking the best way to spear up a little fish like myself and gobble it down. Sometimes she did just that, grabbing me up for a strong hug. I in my childishness never understood these hugs, swinging my feet into the air and often around in a great arc, was as much for her own pleasure as for mine.

When I was a little child she was all narrow body and long head with great beaked nose on thin yellow legs. But unlike the stork, which speaks but once a year on New Year’s Day she chattered nonstop. So it was that her resemblance to the little bird was only in her chatter but not her size.

Although I profess these last few years of her life I never saw those yellow stork legs; she could have had no legs at all for all I knew. She could have rode instead on wheels underneath like the wagons and chariots of the men who come seeking to enslave us for all she ever showed us her old arthritic legs.

She was not a shy person, but she followed the conventions of our people. Since she could first hear my talk making words like a tiny herald of the tall man to come she hid her body. So she hid as well her deeper mind and all of herself as do the women among our people, hidden from all men save for lovers and little infant children.

So as children we do see what is otherwise hidden. In later years she would never allow me to see those skinny legs, nor would I think to try to look. So I could but imagine they must have gone thinner season by season under her long dresses and woolen robes.

Sometimes I could almost imagine them under there growing wrinkled as did her face and arms, through the years, until they took on an aspect of tree bark. Perhaps in the end they did turn to something resembling sticks of wood, for as she aged she grew less stork-like year by year.

Those last few years of her life she grew (at least the parts of her it is polite to see) more solid and more like the wood of our village furnishments, than any living thing. She grew more bound to the ground until one could never imagine her as a flying creature even such an ungainly one as a stork.

In the end she was entirely solid. On the day after her death Rain, in her role as my foster sister, washed her and bound up her body. But it was left to me to heft her up in one final embrace of love onto her bier, there to be burned.

She resembled nothing more in my arms than a stick of wood, fragile and light yet dry and strong. so she laid there all wooden upon her bier before the fire took her, all trace of life gone.

But that is not the way to remember her at all. To me she will always be full of life.

The year I first was freed from swaddles is the time I best remember my grandmother, her and her storkness. This was before I was old enough to provoke her modesty so she would sit with legs uncovered, tending the fire. Having just her inner chemise of linen covering her nakedness she would stay beside the pit on those chilly mornings, letting the fire’s warmth soak into her joints.

Even then I suppose she must have been aging and growing stiff and woody though she would not let such a thing be known for a long time to come.

Tending fire as she spun linen or wool thread, she directed me at a dozen small childhood chores. I became her feet, moving about our hut, perhaps fetching a ball of fiber for spinning or running to stir the grain pot as it simmered. All the while she kept up a steady patter of command as to assure I never sat down, or so it seemed to my tired feet.

She continued to go half naked until the weather grew even colder so the ground outside froze solid. Then wrapping her legs securely in her blankets she found herself content to sit still over the hearth while I became her tool of ambulation. She never went fully lame however and through all of her life her wit and mind stayed young and free though always peevish like the little brown bird.

In my infancy our home was a hutment built of sticks, like the bower of those other little birds, the yellow ones, I forget their name right now. It was made of supple green tree branches woven together with smaller broken sticks and straw filling the crevices between.

Though my early life was marked with tasks as rites of growth my favorite recollections have never been those of my easier manhood. Of these I best remember learning the simplest baby work while singing with my grandmother. So even now I seem to hear those baby songs intermixed always with her crackling monotone, in the world just beyond my ears.

Once I recall a happenstance we worked and sang while she sat too close to the fire. So she set her blanket to smoldering, then called to me to come and put it out. Most likely she could have done it all herself but she included me almost by reflex, such a great teacher was she.

Together we beat the sparks out with wet rags then we poured water upon it all from our household drinking gourd. Surely it stopped the fire but made a generally foul smelling steaming smoking mess of our hearth, all to the accompaniment of her endless scolding and chattering.

The little bird stopped its own chattering suddenly, making me startle awake. I came back to myself in the wood for a few minutes, then dozing once more I returned again to where Grandmother sat, all awrapped in the remnants of her smelly blanket by the fire, trying to sort out the balls of thread tied to her loom.

The old woman made such a funny sight I nearly laughed aloud, but something of her seriousness stopped me. So I squatted there beside her watching her sort through the threads. Tangled in the process as she had danced about to snuff the smoldering blanket they looked at first to be hopelessly ruined.

She took her threads in hand slowly and deliberately, laying first one across the top then pulling another free from the mess. As I watched she sorted them one by one, in the end salvaging her entire half-woven cloth and all its various threads.

Finished, she looked at me triumphantly, You see, all that needs to be done here is to sort them out carefully. If you do the task one bit at a time as it is laid out, then you will find an end in it no matter how difficult is its middle.

I recall I had no ready answer for this little bit of wisdom nor have I ever when I recollected it. So I allowed my remembered scene to fade once more until I found myself lying again in the cold.

The thought came to me there might be a fire somewhere beyond the trees. No visible smoke reached me nor any sound above the whispering wind. Only the faintest smell, resinous and carrying a hint of cooking meat was there to tickle my nose with its feathery presence.

From my low vantage down in my pool of freezing blood and meltwater I could but guess its true direction. I could not tell if it was our encampment fire or that of my dead enemy’s comrades. Not knowing, my imagination played with me like an otter mouths a pretty shell.

I thought perhaps it was neither encampment, sober thought, but a fire of the woods coming to warm me one last time. Perhaps it was just that, a fire of the underbrush, unseen behind me as it moved to envelope me and all the others lying close to the edge of the thicket.

Then I realized it was not a wildfire. If it were such the blanketing snow would most surely douse it. Unlikely though it was, the thought had cheered me until I had dismissed it, for a little warmth would be good even in dying.

On reflection I could make out a faint but unmistakable charnel tinge to the smoke smell. So I deduced it must have been some poor hutment off in the wood, burned with hapless souls inside.

They might have died huddled in defense against massed invaders who had flamed them in passing fancy for their meager resistance. Or maybe they had fought but had been more easily overcome, then burned in revenge for the poverty of their booty.

Knowing our folk as I do I thought it was more likely they burned themselves with a quick torch on their own thatch rather than suffer indignity of capture at the bloody hands of the invader.

For my folk know these are evil ones we fight. They strike out long into winter, preferring death and looting to the warmest of hearths. Though they risk starvation themselves to advance their cause they burn out our storehouses so we in turn might starve. I suppose they hope we will starve first, then they can take the leavings of our goods, such is their madness.

I have heard tell of many torchings but once I saw a particular home they burned at harvest time over in the next valley beyond the high passes. It was on a march some few of us were pursuing to rejoin a group of my brothers.

These friends we followed were men only a half day ahead. They in turn chased our enemy perhaps only another quarter day beyond. So the three groups of us, one enemy and two friends were strung out one in pursuit of another.

As we tracked the others we saw a plume of smoke in the dim distance, then it gradually burned out the closer we came.

By the time we had approached and found the wreck of that hapless farmstead the flames were entirely gone, with just that same lingering smell I recognized again today. We did not immediately continue our chase but stopped, tired out, looking for some drinkable water and eatable cheese.

This was disappointment though for quickly we saw none was left. The spring was fouled with a dead goat and there was nothing we could do but remove it for whoever came in the future, then press on about our chase.

We did pause briefly to search the home for some durable implement or token to show what family had lived there. As it was a home of Tree Cairn folk none of us knew them directly.

We still stopped, hoping to take some tokens on for their brothers, those who continue to fight along beside the rest of us though their homeland is mostly overrun.

There, in the lingering embers were the charred remains of one larger and two smaller figures, perhaps a mother and two children, but they were burned beyond recognition.

The evidence they were our own people was revealed both by their few poor artifacts lying with them and their own resolute position amid the ruins. There was a single long broken flint knife lying between the bodies and their posture was the one of peaceful repose, not even twisted from the fire, as if the mother had killed the children laying them together upon her bed of moss and furs before ending her own life.

They had burned their home well, so there was nothing remaining for the enemy to take. What water gourds and buckets which were left were burned and charred so they were no longer whole nor could they be salvaged. No more urns for seeds and fruit were left except cracked shards, nor of woven fabric but the stick end of a hand loom hanging from a single remaining post.

Our folk believe it is better to die and face rebirth a hundred times as one of our own selves than to risk living a single life as another’s bound servant with nothing of selfhood remaining. So I could see as the enemies approached, the young mother would have chosen to kill her children then herself, certain at their meeting together in the next life.

For a woman of our people such a death of stubborn refusal was entirely better than watching son and daughter taken off while submitting to rapine oneself.

Though we had pressing business my brothers and I paused to take out the bodies to burn again on a pyre we gathered from what little wood was left whole. We reburned them there with the remainder of their scant implements.

The larger of the bodies had on its neck the charred remnants of an hempen necklace and on it were two glass beads of the style of our smith, Shade.

They were yellow as pure as the mountain ocher and wrapped about with black stripes and were unbroken by the fire, though they were a little misshapen from its heat. The beads were proof certain and I took them to give to our Tree Cairn brothers later. But even before we found them we knew the bodies could not be enemy.

Our enemies, even their women, would have chosen capture and rape and slavery over the transitory pain of death such are their perverted senses, and most likely would have given over the children first, making dealings with their captors, or some other such wickedness.

Their lack of hesitation to give themselves to slavery and their constant attempt to seek advantage or even to enslave others is their curse and their weakness. They are cursed to seek to gain temporary power and to recruit all before them as slave soldiers, slave farmers and slave weavers.

Those weak souled folk who fall under their curse will seek to rise to false brotherhood and buy a vassal’s existence as soon as they fully learn their language and evil ways. The prisoners they cannot use or who will not submit, they sell far away to the cities along the shores of the great ocean beyond the river.

But this urge to capture and conquer remains a great weakness. They are folk who hold no freedom dear. They have no certainty of path nor love of kinship nor habit of folkway. So if they consider nothing holy how can they know who they are or where their path lies?

They spend all their days always watching one another for sign of disloyalty and escape, pledged in tangled webs of slavery. They cannot see that to endlessly watch one’s slave or even need a watcher is death to the freedom of the master as well for it consumes his soul in jealousy.

So they fooled themselves, thinking freedom to be some game where one wins or loses among men and not an absolute where one only deals with the infinite world of the soul.

Our people are not like yours my brother, I spoke aloud to the dead man as a small breeze ruffled the beard on his upturned chin. "We live and breath and move with freedom, bound only by our loves and our needs.

But you must constantly think and scheme and ponder for days to seek some pretended advantage over another. So likewise your habits are most profoundly ignorant and wasteful of life, at least they are to me and my way of understanding.

He appeared to move, then to sit up and I saw he was changed to resemble my cousin, Fir, dead these many months but returned again. Well spoken cousin, he said, and drew me up to walk with him. The pain was great as he held my one good hand, careful to not touch the other hand whose shoulder was pinned through its blade with the enemy arrow from behind.

I nearly fell on him but he held me with firm grip until the waves of darkness in my vision passed and I could walk, slowly but with surprising life and vitality.

We first walked over and looked at the array of bodies strewn like straw on a threshing floor. There were many stains among them, all of brown and red and black. There was no movement anywhere, the last steam of body heat long cooled and the last breath ceased to make any chest rise nor fall.

As we walked my cousin paused from time to time, stooping to gather a bundle of sticks. These he proceeded to carry with him as if to build us up our own little fire.

I could not distinguish the faces of my brothers from those of the invaders, blue and twisted as they were. I had to make do with recognizing them from their clothing and weapons. This was not so difficult when I saw how ragged and thin were our clothes in comparison to theirs and how fragile our blades, how small and dark our armlets and torcs when compared to theirs. Even our woven straw boots were easy to distinguish from their horse leather footlings.

I bent, groaning, to pull the torc from the neck of one of the dead enemy. It was gold with the symbol of our River Mother Danu cast into its surface or carved, but in the snow glare I could not tell which.

Wondering vaguely if the wearer had really known Her Who Lives Under the Great River or merely had stolen Her symbol from one of my Tree Cairn cousins I slipped it onto my own neck. There it rested easily on top of my thin brown copper torc, nearly covering it.

By then we’d walked a half circuit around the clearing and I looked back to where had been my own cold bed. Startled, I