"Scrubbed"? That seems oddly negative. Would you say that a limestone ecology had been scrubbed of say, pine trees? What grows in a landscape is what grows there.

This is not a radical statement of Englishness, such as Doughty's Arabia Deserta, or William Barnes's Outline of English Speech-Craft, in which the preface is the fore-say and a perambulator is a push-wainling. Much of what I write is out of love for what Alan Garner calls the "true and Northern voice," which is his by birthright and not mine. Have you read his book of essays, The Voice That Thunders? He writes of the tensions between his two languages, between his grammar-school and Oxford classicism and "talking broad": "Romance is rodent, nibbled on the lips. Germanic is resonant, from the belly. It is also simple, and, through its simplicity, ambivalent: once more the paradox." I know I have no roots in his north-of-middle earth. It's the riddling that draws me.

I love that a "riddle" is both the Sphinx's enigma and a kitchen sieve; that a "rune" is both a riddle and a running onward, a flow. A rune of blood. A rune of stars: which is their rise and turning. I love that "Cloud" and "Law" both mean "hill," that nebulous or iron-bound, they're one and the same place. I play interminably with "light" and "leave" and "wake" and "wood." And either you like this sort of thing, or you run screaming in the distance.

That kind of essential punning is hard, outside of Anglo-Saxon.

There's a tough strand in the language, running back through Hopkins to the Gawain poet (a northerner, like Garner). A green and thorny tongue, a covert of birds. Quintessentially English, being pied. "Counter, original, spare, strange." Not pure, but insular. Of many branched and braiding roots: one stubborn flowering. And I admit, the devil's own thicket to hack through. The older the hedgerow, the denser the tangle: Anglo-Saxon for rootstock; Old Norse and odd Celtic borrowings; and French gone wild, like a hedge rose. Oak and ash and thorn.

There are more voices in the second story of these three, "A Crowd of Bone": both Cloudish vernacular and a high Jacobean iambic, endlessly enjambed. But that is another thing altogether, a late Romance. "Jack Daw's Pack" is a riddle-story, almost a primary source: pure myth.

Inseparable. Words are what books are made of. The story makes itself through language, as the structure of a crystal feeds on salts.

As I've said elsewhere, "People ... talk of 'transparent' prose, as if the covers of a novel were a window on a world. And yet there's nothing there: no Middle Earth and no mean streets, no Sam Spade, no Lizzie Bennett. There is only code."

Or:

This is bloody opera, the music is part of it. It's badly scored at times--too many notes--but sound and sense are meant to be one thing.

Or:

What's Shakespeare in translation? Not that I come within lightyears of his hastiest scrawl, his least hackwork on a Beaumont and Fletcher--but damn it all, why can't I try for the thunder and lightning? My own teapot Tempest.

Do I sound self-defensive? I am. I've taken a lot of flak for my high language. Either people "bounce off it like an Ent trying to dig into Orthanc" (as Dorothy Heydt said); or they get drunk on it, like wasps on fermenting fruit, and fall over. What I'm trying for is synergy.

Odd place, Cloud. It has latitude but no longitude, being east of the sun and west of the moon, and about as far north as Askrigg. Their sky looks much like England's as well, though their cosmology is wholly magical.

Damned if I can write a linear narrative.

In epitome:
Cloud's gods are the sisters Annis and Malykorne, dark and light of one moon. Mally's at the root of things; Annis is abyss. In Moonwise, Annis tried to halt time and was defeated. She's been dwindling in the long years since, in exile in the underworld. She's begotten a daughter on herself, in her glass: her captive, her consort, and herself reborn. That daughter is Ashes. Like Persephone, she winters in the underworld; but unlike the Kore, she was born there: spring is her escape, her rising from her mother's grave. And every winter she is hunted down, recaptured. Ashes in the guisers' play is her winter stand-in; she keeps the year alive while Ashes is in hell. For the space of her office, she is Ashes: a perilous role.

Jack Daw's an upstart god. He wants to be Dis in the dyad, to possess the godhead carnally. Get bastards on it. Change the myth by force.

His gang is Jack Daw's pack.

Ashes' rape is blasphemy. And crucial: whether or not the guisers' Ashes is Ashes and their fiddler Jack Daw himself, they enact the breakpoint in the myth.

Ashes was created profoundly virginal--that empty glass--but she drank knowledge at her mother's breast. She was never a Maiden. And will never be a Crone: Death eats her as a child with child. Of the three, she is the only Mother, but she dies in giving birth.

Mally is no Mother, for all her broad lap. What she nurtures is creation as a work in progress. She's an artisan, cunning in her mystery. A wisewife. A gossip. (There are all these other distaff parts that aren't in the triad. Spinster. Sister. Aunt. Jung wasn't playing with a full deck.) There's a whiff of Cronishness about her, an unkindly edge. Asperity. But she does have a Maiden aspect, which she keeps to herself: a furiously green and thorny adolescence. You should see her Room.

Hmm. Hardly an idyllic vision of the goddess.

What patriarchy? That implies a settled power, sway, dominion. Jack Daw is an upstart. (So to speak.) An angry servant. A rogue. He's a bit louche, is old Nobodaddy. What he's playing on is the gang's misogyny, a slow resentment of the chosen Ashes. Her power of life and death. Her power of choice. They want to smash it; they want to possess it; they want to drag it down. Cock stuff. Cotemptible; but not the triumphal god-in-chariot and men-in-suits muster that "patriarchy" calls up.

There's no cult of Jack Daw. I can't imagine a Cloudish wizard. (They'd call him a man-witch.) Nor a priesthood. Theirs is not a hierophantic culture, but demotic. Their rituals are communal; their guisers put on godhead as a coat that may be doffed. Being Ashes is a heady and a perilous term of godhead; being caught in Ashes is hell.

What I'm working at is how the crystal of the myth is flawed. How it might change. As meta-demiurge, I've been turning it about, trying new ways it might fracture. Or dissolve--the shards are dangerous. Or even, in the end, sublime.

The myth was shattered and remade in Moonwise, and it grew back crooked.

Jack Daw would love to drive his wedge in, splitting off a new triad with himself and Ashes and his seed.

Ashes wants only to break free, to not be Ashes. In "A Crowd of Bone", she blasphemes herself, seizing on the body of a naive and besotted country lad: with tragic ends.

And Ashes' child--but that's another story.

And yes, the Crowd of Bone is also the Totentanz, the skeletons that dance to Death's fiddler.

In Cloud, at Lightfast, on the shortest day, the wren is hunted by the guisers. He is hung in a cage of thorns--his crown--garlanded, and borne from hearth to hearth. The guisers must be let in: they bring the sun. The cortege includes a Fool; a Fiddler; an ambiguous Awd Witch in petticoats, who sweeps before them with his broom; the Sun; and Ashes, who is silent, all in mourning for the wren, who was--they say--her lover or her son. (Cloud is a scattered world; there are as many variants of myth as there are hills.) She carries a bag of ashes of the old year's crown, with which to mark the faces of the unwed girls, the childless, and the bairns. At every house, the guisers give a play, half mockery, half rite, in which the Sun is slain. Then Ashes resurrects him. In the fullest variants, they dance and weave a knot of swords to head him. But even in the roughest, bang-the-door-and-beg plays, there is a combat or a heading-game--a brawl at least--between an old man and a young. Sometimes the old man is called Craw's Eye; elsewhere, he is Hulver, jovial and deadly (much like the Green Knight); or he is Slae, their Saturn-figure, black and bitter in his cups. He is always Jack Daw.

Any clear night, you can see the guisers, reeling round the sky. They're hunting the Wren (that we call the Dolphin), but they never catch him. First comes the Hobby Horse; then the Wren's Cage or the Old Year's Crown (if you've sharp eyes, you can see a ghostly Wren, a nebula, within); then the Fool with his Tabor, brandishing their Knot of Swords. And last comes the Fiddler. Their Cloudish Orion is called by many names: the Hanged Lad in Hallows and the Fiddler at Lightfast, when he plays for the guisers and the starry hey to dance. (In a ballad, Jack Orion is a fiddler "who could fiddle the milk from a maiden's breast"; he played the lord asleep to bed his lady, but his knavish boy forestalled him: for which he hanged the boy.) In spring, he is the Flaycraw, who wards the seeded sky; and in summer, the Sheaf, whose binding is a belt of stars. Like John Barleycorn, he is reaped. Three witches brew and bake him, share him round. He is drunken; and he drinks. In the fall of leaf, he is the dreamer, Tom o' Cloud: he wakes wood.

"My mother was burned for a witch..." comes from a guisers' play, from North Yorkshire. It's the Fool's part, which makes it all the more poignant for me. He comes to it after boasting, "I killed me an urchin [hedgehog] as big as meself / And it made me a rare apple pie."

Haven't counted the folk songs and ballads--like the "Two Sisters"--that are hidden in the text.

They're real places in Cloud. Anyone can walk between Cold Law and Soulsgrave Hag, sell sheep or buy pepper and needles, and walk back again; but not always. Sometimes Cold Law is Law.

Law is the underworld, the sky below, as the heavens are the wood above. Law is where Ashes is held captive; where the stars go when they set. Law is also that unchancy constellation which we call the Serpent-Holder, the thirteenth in the Zodiac. They see it as a circle of stones: Annis' stronghold is all breaches, and impregnable. Like Spiral Castle. You can stray there, or be snared: you can't get in or out.

And yes, cold law is Annis' rule, her myth, inexorable as Gorgon.

The patterns in the stars are accidents, creations of the constellating mind: the same that turns random synaptic fireworks into dreams of prophecy. We can't help it, we see patterns everywhere.

I once handed out maps of Avebury with an invitation to connect the dots and find the Goddess.*

So. A map of the heavens? Not as such. Not in Cloud. In the underworld, in Law, Annis keeps a microcosm of the heavens, done in yew and stone. A labyrinth. Death's garden. But then, she's the goddess of fixity, the mistress of unchange. Cloudish cosmology is Mally's province, so untidy and ambiguous. Remember, they don't have a Book, but scattered leaves. They're not pinned down. Not that there aren't quilt knots here and there, stitching heaven and earth. Houses, in the astrological sense; or sacred places, which are realer than the world, and have a way of disappearing like the egg in Alice. Woods, stone circles, sheepfolds. And the one long seam, the Milky Way.

Besides, some of their constellations are walking about. The Fiddler, Ashes. You can meet them on the road, get them drunk or with child. Or hunt them down, like the Wren.

Others are things. You may find the Riddle hanging in your kitchen, near the Ladle; or prick your finger on the Broochpin, scrabbling for a bit of silk to match your old petticoat.

I'm thinking of the sky-on-earth as worldwarp, something inwoven.

A note on the wren:

As a scholar, I know that the White Goddess and the Golden Bough are flights of fantasy, that the most evocative and ancient-seeming rituals can spring up overnight, like dew. Every morning is the dawn of time. But I'm writing as if their lunacies were true, were science. As in another history of the world, they are. In AEgypt and in Cloud.

*From GEnie (17 January, 1994):

All of the above has me musing on patterns and potsherds. And on crackpots.

Ronald Hutton, writing on "alternative" archaeologists: "The climax of [Michael Dames's] vision is the discovery of a great figure of the Mother Goddess delineated by the Neolithic monuments and natural features of the Avebury area. The trouble with this is that it is a matter of joining dots selectively upon a map. So many Neolithic sites and natural features have been recorded in this district that a great many different patterns can be 'discovered' by the same technique. I myself produced a perfectly nice unicorn by it, and thank Mr. Dames warmly for the sheer childish pleasure of that experience."
--from The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles
(Blackwell, 1990, p. 131-132)

"Avebury as Rorschach," says a friend of mine, an archaeologist. There are no constellations, only stars; but we can't help drawing them. What's interesting is that we want our patterns to inhere. Our fates, we hope, are in our stars, not in ourselves. So we project. We are in love with all our fortuitous unicorns.

Or rather, once you're in the myth, there is no out of order: only variations on a stated theme. The art of fugue. Cat's cradles. As I see it, stories are temporal; myth is spatial. It has a crystalline structure, fixed laws of relationship. I could try to show you, if I had enough toothpicks and gumdrops. A sort of molecular mythology kit. Or--do you know those toys made of wire, linked warped polygons that twist and tumble and turn inside out? Like that: configurations in space. Except there's this Moebius twist to it, so that one person is at once child and father, or mother to herself. A and O. The earth's womb as Klein bottle.

Does that make sense at all?

In the myth he is. The starveling boy--the crow lad--is Whin's son is Jack Daw's seed is the Ashes child is her lover is the boy in "The Rattlebag." Which is his death. Having slept with Ashes, he becomes that constellation of avatars, takes on that past, that doom.

Everything Whin touches turns to Ash.

This story is a hall of mirrors. No matter what door he comes in, it vanishes; and every way he turns, he sees himself recurring, all the way forward and back.

Acu tetigisti.

More mirrors, now I come to think of it. Selves begotten in a glass.

And--this is weird, I've just thought of this--he does meet his other, darker selves in that barn. His pack. Incest as gang rape.

Hmm.

As we imagine her, in all her fierce primeval holiness; and not as scholars have decreed, as a Romanesque satire or sermon on the flesh.

Though the crone is not Whin, but Whin's anagoge: a vision or a memory of what she fears. Her other self. As the crow lad fears the child in the furrows, Whin dreads the hag.

And meets her at the ragthorn, in a blind beggar's guise.

In Cloud, what we call Scorpio, they call the Scythe. It shears the Poppyheads, that never rise in their heavens: the ever-blooming flowers of the underworld, the souls in Annis' lap.

And he does take part. However badly he botches it, he's still there with his cockerel out, kneeling over her. Complicitous. ("'Boy and all,' said the beggar. 'They set him on.'" Though bear in mind she's not the most reliable of narrators--but we'll get to that.) Certainly, he's laid hands on her, helped hold her down: that's his blood under her nails. ("'But I marked 'em, aye, I marked 'em all.'") He's cursed with all the others.

And he's haunted by this rape. Not only the enormity, but his failure to refuse. His impotence. His shame at what he did and didn't do. He's damned either way. That's the burden he takes into the third novella, toward the breaking of the myth; that's part of what drives it.

Matriarchal? Yes. Scarcely a utopia, unless your idea of idyllic involves sheep muck, oat cakes, and the odd child sacrifice. Myself, I'd say it was feminist with a small "f", in that women matter. They're not just objects, but real characters, in all shades of grey: flawed and powerful, rooted and journeying. My world is gynecentric.

Are men unimportant? No. The sun goes round the earth, that's all. Tom a' Cloud has not a few essentials in his keeping: bread and balladry and dreams. He's the scarecrow of shadows; he's the seeded earth, the sun made harvest, and the cup; he's the guardian of the Wood. A kindlier cradle-god than his aunts. Even his shadow, the acrid and ithyphallic Master Daw, hauls a packful: chance, war, venery, and commerce.

These are not ideological choices, but straight from my archetypal cellar. Not a king in the pack.

Mally and Annis are the primal powers of the earth; they were before all else. They are one and they are other: two faces of a coin, dark and light of one moon. They are creation and annihilation, timeless; he is born and dies each year. He's a harvest, like corn, like apples. Like a dandelion, whirled away. He's fleeting. He indwells.

Think of the Cloudish year as braided endlessly, so that even as the Sun dies he is rounding for his next rebirth.

He's born at Lightfast.

In spring he's something of a blade; he begets himself:

"He gives the meadows green gowns. And flowers falling to his scythe lie tossed and tumbled, ah, they wither at his fiery kiss. They fall in swathes, in sweet confusion, to his company of rakes, his rade of scythesmen all in green. The hay's his dance."

"Vaunting, he calls the witchstone, Annis, to the dance, for mastery of the year, and wagers all his reckless gold. But he has spent his glory and must die. The barley is himself."

"Ashes reaps him. By harvesting, she's sunburnt, big with light." The child she's carrying is his and his successor. This is Ashes in her red mode, daughter of the huntress. "She wears a wreath of poppyheads; her palms are gashed, they're red with garnering. They open like a cry...She's three then, each and all the moon, his end: her sickle shearing and her millstone trundling round, her old black cauldron gaping for his bones."

At his wake, at Hallows Eve, the witches share him out as riddlecake, as round as the wheeling sun. They drink him and he makes them giddy. And they hoard his seed. He will be scattered like Osiris, hanged like Odin: not for knowledge, but as guardian, the genius of his own rebirth.

"They waked him through the winter and they scattered him: the earth his grave, his lap. His last sheaf was the Flaycraw. They hanged him on the Gallantry, to blacken in the wind and rain, to cry the crows. And so his green seed sprang."

I owe the vision of the Scarecrow/Hanged Man/Child Sacrifice to the late miraculous Lal Waterson. Her song, "The Scarecrow," haunts me, and it has for years. Three verses. Spare. Intense.

At Lightfast, Ashes bears her son.

In the Cloudish vernacular, the Sun myth's tangled up in ritual and rowdy play. The wren is killed as his stand-in; but not so long ago, a Sun was chosen at the fire-leaping, danced with Annis at midsummer, and was slain as offering for the light returned. In the guisers' play, it's done as a sword dance, a heading game: part mystery, part slapstick.

"Click! Clack! He knocks the old man dead, that headed him before. And tumbled by the knot of swords, he rises, flaunting in their gaze."

The raven's a dead giveaway. And her blindness and her bluenailed hands, her braid of wind. Her mirror with another's face in it. All attributes. Oh yes, and her ravaged beauty, her scarred throat that was pierced by shadow. Her virgin milk: which is the river and the road of death.

Being Annis, what she says is all mirrors: cold truth but cracked, refracting.

It is the last night of her stint on earth. At dawn, she turns to stone, returns to her demesne of silence and her chain of souls. But for now, she is incarnate, carnal: which means "crow." Like her creatures, she is avid and contemptuous of what she feeds on. All flesh is carrion to her.She would eat the earth to clean bare bones, gorge on death, to rid her sight of it. Her loathing is desire. Sylvie's broochpin waked a fury in her, fixed hunger in her very marrow.

In Moonwise she was innocent of good and evil, mere self becoming more self, unvengeful as a virus. Innocent as entropy. A law of nature. Back then she had a kind of grandeur: she was rock and stars and numbers and cosmology. Her crown was souls. But then her solipsism nearly turned the world to someplace tidier, like Neptune. She has fallen now from Law to tyranny. And knows it. And rages.

She made Ashes so that she might be reborn, in all her old fierce primal chastity; and found another fury in her fork. Making love to her impassive mirror, she is shattered, she is pierced with an unholy ecstasy.

Ashes is herself.

And as she feels with Ashes' body, she is caught in Ashes' rape.

"They hold her down for him, the moon's bitch, twisting, cursing in the filthy straw. A vixen in a trap." Caught in her own mirror: no wonder that she claws and rages.

That atrocity is crucial. That resentful drunken gang of rustics is suborned by godhead, turned aside from their guising to enact a mystery unaware. Whoever their Ashes and their fiddler are in body, they are god-possessed. In theological terms, there is real presence. And the crow-lad knows it. "She is Ashes and holy."

The rape is .

In the myth, was and will be, memory and foreshadowing, are all one adamantine Now. Those men had histories, as Whin has. (Note what scenes are in the present tense.) They chose brutality, or failed to stem it; they will hang, burn, drown. Yet they are also chosen, ravished by that harpy, myth. It needs pricks, and it snatches theirs. Instruments of Law.

As I've said, Annis speaks in riddles; but her curse is real enough. Those men are crow's meat. They've raped death.

"On Whinnymoor she lurks, and bids the silent traveller stand; takes nothing of him naked, but a coin, a clip. Those waifs that shiver, dance and shiver on the moss, in nothing but their own brief souls, she laps in her rough jacket, earth and bone; she slaps them squalling into breath. She is death's midwife and her go-between, the third in marriage beds. Her clip is kindling." [CoB]

Whin knows her: "It's bonny on this earth, this morn; I'd linger."

But Whin is Ashes still. There's no home in this world for her. Her road is the Lyke Way, back of Law. Like Ashes she "walks it in her bones, and waking." And like Ashes, she is singled out by Brock, sained, chosen.

Brock has work for her.

The keeping of the myth is in her hands: "It's done, and long since done, and all to do."

That planet we call Mercury is Brock's star in Cloud. As I've said, she's Mercurial, a mingling of mischief and gravitas: the god of tinkers, thieves, and travellers. A picklock of maidenheads, a poacher of hares: "He's for Brock's bag, caught kicking." But she also has a gentler aspect, a rough tenderness: she's the goddess of childbirth and of lambing, a healer. She initiates.

She keeps the Ashes child from foxes and from crows.

She lies with Tom Cloud in his madness and the Hanged Man on the Road.

She brings the Sun. Remember that in Cloud, the Sun is mortal: he is born and dies like any traveller, and walks the same road out of death. He has a soul, "of many, one," like Wordsworth's Tree.

Not least, she steals Ashes from her mother's keeping, out of hell. "I've keys to all locks, and I come and go."

Whin is her initiate, her novice in the craft. With the cord of the soulbag, Brock takes her in, admits her to the Eleusinian mysteries of Cloud. A stony sanctuary. By "A Crowd of Bone," she is death's journeyman. And in the third tale--ah, but wait and see.

As a master, Brock is enigmatic but just. She asks Whin, "Will yer gang wi' me?" Take note of that. Consent is rarely asked or given in this history: its concerns are power and identity. Possession. The rape is grisliest; but everywhere are souls enslaved and captive bodies. The child on his leash. Ashes in her mother's glass. And for Whin, the burden is unwanted godhead. It instones her. She is Ashes, she is Annis, endlessly reflected in the mirror of the Gorgon myth.

The guisers' Ashes reigns as her shadow on earth, her sake. The chosen is unnamed. It's giddying at first, as in its root sense: god-possessed. "Ah, but she can feel the power in her marrow, like a vein of stars." Her part bears with it certain powers and dangers: she may chose what lover she will, work certain arts; but she must keep nothing that she gets by Ashes. If she gets with child, that child is forfeit, a sacrifice among the furrows; and his mother is kept nameless and apart by the community, and used at will until she dies. Anciently, she was caged like the Sibyl. That crone in the poppyheads was kept for prophecy, as she recalls: "If you suckle at her dry breast, drink her darkness, she must speak your fortune, love and death." But in common practice, she is whored.

"I'd not be ended in a tale," says Whin.

Brave words. She's not just running from her family or her hillfolk neighbors, but from Law. By her refusal, she is starving earth, calls down a hail of ravens. Hunted, she is still defiant, flaunts her gold scarf and her rings: but everything she touches turns to Ash and mirrors. There's not much farther she can run.

You can't put off godhead like a guiser's coat. But you can work with it. By taking up with Brock, she's turning ill to use, riding fate where it takes her. In time, she will be--not resigned, but enduring: "What I is, is Ashes. Same as earth is earth. Her coat that she put on." [CoB]

Creation, as I've said, is no big bang, but endlessly unfinished: women's work. What with stars and instars, and the biosphere, and all that mending and remaking, Mally has her work cut out. The leaves! The hailstones! Not to mention all those baskets of souls. And the gathering of light and carding it and spinning warp for the endless web, the story...

As they say in Cloud, she's thrang as Throp's wife. Over-ears in work. She bustles.

Annis is her other face: you can't create an eye or a butterfly without Atropos' fatal shears. Ontogeny is ruthless; it carves. But Mally's not what I'd call squeamish; she hunkers down with her gossips, with Annis and Ashes, for her share of Tom Cloud:

"She's three then, each and all the moon, his end: her sickle shearing and her millstone trundling round, her old black cauldron gaping for his bones."

"Ah, but he's for Mally's lap, she haps him all in snow. It's winter and her loom is bare. Wood's her cupboard, and her walls are thorn; her bower's all unswept. Thou can't get in but she lets thee. And she's Tom Cloud's nurse."

Look up, you can see it in the winter sky.

In winter, the Wood's above. When Annis hunts on earth, and Ashes languishes in the underworld, the stars of Hallows blaze in heaven: Mally's Thorn, the Witches who undid cold Law, the Fold, the Fiddler, and the Nine. So bright you could almost touch them. Tantalus. "Thou can't get in but she lets thee."

And when you do get in, there's nothing there. That's Mally's other paradox. In the long sun and the green world, Hallows is nowhere. At Ninerise on May morning, it all turns inside out, unhallows. Throughout the triumph of the summer Sun, the dark stars reign: the Scythe and Ashes, the Raven and the Crowd of Bone. No roof but Law.

(Note: the stars you can't see are important. Influential. And the dark side of the moon. All but the Unleaving Stars make their journeys to the underworld, and all return in their seasons. Like Ashes' captivity, these sojourns under earth are crucial. Some are named: the Wren has its Cage, and Nine Weaving their Kist; the Flaycraw has his Fallows. And some stars, like the Poppyheads and Annis' Chain of souls, lurk forever in her realm, unrising. In Cloudish astrology--but that itself is a monograph.)

Turn and turn about is their cosmology.

Malykorne in winter, waking, is the root of all; in summer, she's a hedge-witch. Common as haws. In winter, Annis is a striding hag, a huntress on the fells; in summer, she is the grave of all. Unbound, each goddess is unhoused. Occulted, she is powerful. Their cosmos is chiastic, crossing and recrossing: hunt and hallows; hell and hedgerow. Counterchanged.

Their crossing-points--the hinges of the year--are perilous.

"Mam, let me in!" cries Ashes in the stubble field. Which Mam? Which goddess is the light and which her shadow? Out or in? She's in a field of poppies. Is she in the underworld, beating at the sky? Or here above, with hellmouth shut against her? Devouring inverted is indifference, revulsion. And O turned inside out is nowhere.

Ashes "may rive at Mally's thorn for shelter; owl's flown, there's none within. No hallows. So she walks barefoot and bloodfoot, and she lives on haws and rain. And moon's her coverlid, her ragged sheet." Cold comfort. Yet the moon is Malykorne: what she has, they share.

That's in October, toward one crossing; in April, "the hare runs, towards hallows, to the thicket's lap, unhallowing in white. He sees the white moon tangled in her thorn. Her lap is sanctuary. He would lie there panting...But at dawn, the hey is down. The white girl rises from the tree; she dances on the hill, unknowing ruth."

White girl? Ah, we're getting to that.

"Whin saw a girl unbending from the tree...a grove of girls, of sisters, woven in their dancing, scarved in light. A hey as white as hag. Nine Weaving."

"'She dances now,' said Brock." If Ashes is Annis mirrored, left hand to her right, then she is Malykorne. Not captive in her, but re-crescent. Another turn of the spiral, bow beyond rainbow. Annis catches things in crystal; Mally scatters through her rain. Her bow is now and nowhere: mere instress of light. What Whin sees fleetingly is Mally's work, her mystery: Ashes transcendent. And if Ashes, then her mirror, Annis, is renewed; if Annis, Malykorne: so round the spiral, each to each. In Moonwise, I giggled at the thought of Mally as a vernal goddess, "frolicking crossly with a garland." But at the crossing, now and nowhere, three entwine: like graces in the Primavera, crescents of the moon. "I stand among a grove of girls. A garland, woven all of Ashes." [CoB]

Oh dear, I still have to write this thing. Don't know if I'll bring it off.

Recall that Annis is also a crow. That's the mocking name they give her Erinyes aspect, the harpy that pursues Whin. A crow, and a mistress of crows. And May morning is her death, her turning into stone, as Hallows Eve is her awakening.

Hare and crow seem both to be androgynous.

Hubris? That seems alien. The Cloudish mythos is not about crime and punishment, but inevitability. Implacable fate. But with Jack Daw and the beggar, there's a note of vengefulness creeping in. Spite.

Could it be that his fate is in the hands of the guisers?

It's what it is, as green leaves are green.

And anyway, much of it's darker than bawdry. All shades of green. There's some wicked wordplay for a bit of spark. There's love, lust, nightmare; mysteries, sacred and profane; abuse of innocence, naked whoredom, bloody childbirth, alchemical incest, and the rape.

Or so I think.

Sex is a strong force: it holds things together and blows them apart. Myth, like physics, deals in what has energy, how power interacts with bodies. Mass and charge. Plus strangeness, charm, and up. So: love and hatred, birth and death, jealousy, the forbidden and the inescapable.

Do you think Oedipus is about sex?

Riding rantipole with witches is a long way from "Corinna's gone a-Maying."

Ash and Whin, the crow-lad and the crazed old whore are common folk, caught up in myth. Their lives are shadowed with significance; but nothing that befalls them is unearthly in itself. Other girls give birth alone; other children starve and shiver, and are beaten for their fears. Other old women wander, mad and homeless. And other reckless boys are hanged or drowned or die on battlefields: all carrion for crows. Being caught in a story is ambivalent. The burden of godhead is fatality; the crown is meaning.

As for Ash's astonishing good luck with ladies--remember when you meet him, he's the rampant Sun, the lord of summer; and he's fey.

Then as ever, Mally revelled in her immanence, in leaves and fractals. What she is, she hallows: she indwells in commonplace made numinous, the endlessly unfinished and untidy world. Chaos and old nighties.

But Annis was and is fastidious. In some archaic age, she tore her shadow from herself, and bound it in an iron brooch. She was then ethereal, the starless crystalline. Cold Law. The witch in Moonwise is an eidolon, her sending.

And then, as you may remember, Ariane and Sylvie broke the spell. The skywitch fell and shattered, the stones danced, the year turned. And Sylvie pierced Annis with the iron brooch, and bound her to her shadow. Old Cloud and high Cloud were ended; low Cloud began.

See Stroke, Dolorous.

I rather like it that the travellers from our world don't heal Cloud. They set it going again, but it's scarred.

Annis now is bloodfast, pinned and dwindling to a hag. In her captivity in Law, she keeps a crazed and clouded grandeur. Think mad sorceress, brooding on her hoard of souls. Mad as rats in a ruin. She is Law itself, the labyrinth in which she paces, and the fell it stands on: hell is in "the image of a woman sleeping, with the hooked moon at her heart" [CoB]. The sky below. Her castle is her mind. But in Cloud her avatars are carnal. She's the witch that stalks the fells, insatiable for children's blood, that hangs their tattered skins to dry on bushes. She's the earth that eats the Ashes child, the crow that makes "carrion of halfborn lambs." She's the crone in the furrows, the grave that gapes. All shadows of our mortal fears. She hates them, and she broods.

Stark mad.

And Ashes is her last device, her means of sublimation. Annis has a shard of her old self, air and darkness, that was shattered in her fall. The seed of Law. All she needs is a flawless vessel for this alchemy, an empty self to fill...