Bardskull

by Martin Shaw

In the middle of watching stories I am being watched. There is something up there, on the ridge, looking at me. No, it’s not what you think it is, it’s not Death, at least not especially. No more than usual. But there’s something up there. It seems to be talking to itself, but the words are mangled. I just can’t make them out. When I was Numbskull I always thought someone was watching me. This watcher would leap benignly from behind a bush and inform me I came from another family, far away, and I had to leave, immediately, for some kind of sea voyage. It was all terribly important, and both they and I would require cloaks to pull the adventure off. Then you get older and you realise that no one’s eyes are on you most of the time. You’re not even in focus to the general public, just a kind of nervy blur. So finally, today, I am being witnessed. Isn’t this what I’ve been waiting for? It doesn’t seem so intoxicating now. This is not Jack in the Green, or Gerónimo, or a giggling Dalai Lama, this is some guy on a horse speaking backwards words to himself. I don’t have time for this. One thing I have learnt in forty-eight years is that there are certain things we need to turn our head away from. And I turn my head away from you. We don’t have to see everything that is out there to see. So I choose to not see you. You are a-blinded to me. Horseman pass by.

Let me talk about Ted and Robert again, turn the volume down on this, this egregore, this watcher. I mean, I’ve heard about this kind of thing. That if you do enough magical work, you attract the attention of a spiritual companion, a spooky being you half glimpse that sort of pads along beside you. Sometimes a parasite, sometimes a saviour. The whole thing is complex – they may become your lord or your servant but I, right now, am changing the subject.

There are other traditions. The bardic schools and the information inside them weren’t just sequestered breathlessly away. Women: grannies, sisters, aunts, mothers, we told stories too, sang songs by the fire. We weren’t scolded for it, we delighted the settlement when the embers glowed. We may not have had a swan-feather cloak like the preening boys of the high hall, but we carried the nutrition of these stories just as much as they ever did. Our cooking pots simmered, spat and made magically delirious the stories of our grandmothers, our hands pulled tales from the earth as wonderful as the sweet potato or the onion. Imagine that! We had our groves, our rituals, our mapping of the year. And don’t you dare say we didn’t. We have held fairy tales in our breast milk for thousands of years and fed them to our kids. But we made the world, baby, we seized the sky, and the earth, fire and water. No nailed-up horseshoe could bar our way, no scuttled male-magic, we emitted loose chirrup and the ramshackle truth of fawn and cockle, our very mouth juice was a swagger den of the deep dreaming bell of things.

When spirits come in the forest something happens first. It gets quiet. You get about ten minutes of acute, padded stillness. It’s not like any other kind of stillness, any other kind of quiet, any other kind of atmosphere. This is your moment to run, if you still have the legs underneath you. Otherwise, the assumption is, you’re in.

I’m an old man Gonna get on blue elk With my blue heart And head to the North Farm Find the woman of milk and light, cream and grace I’m the young man fixing to thump My black magic arrows in the old man’s arse

I mean, where does it stipulate that a missionary has to be living to do their work?

There’s no haven in this world. Ever since Cain killed Abel there’s Been nastiness soaked into the dirt of the earth. And this is where You are going to have to live, amongst killers and thieves. There’s no other place to find. Every day such people whittle long Knives. So be alert with a hard shield and sharp spear, a bold character. A weakling’s heart is no reward, But a man of courage deserves his bright helmet.

To be wisht is to fall into an odd melancholy which is more than personal. Places have wisht. The forest has its wisht spots, and I was careful not to end up in one these last 101 days.

In the early morning, I find I have something in me that wasn’t there before. Something is in me like a mineral or splint of bison bone or a spirit light.

Elk Bone people would have navigated from deity to deity, not by grid direction, their canoe laden down with gifts. Road Men remember this time of being low-key, keeping their heads down, going with stealth. But in those days it was not to rob a pound shop but to court a deity.