Selections from The Toppled Ash
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The sound of the bracken field greeted him from all sides: a dry sighing barely audible sliding in close to his ankles. The sound itself nudged his bootlaces, traveled up his walking stick and caressed his face. A light wind prodded the tall fronds of green, green with scatterings of tawny gold and quick tips of yellow. Dry leaves from a solitary tree began to fall slantwise, giddily whirling to the ground, the deep lobes of the leaves blurred by speed. He stood without moving as he watched the shedding of those old leaves, so blithely wind-borne, falling and falling away.
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Even now, so many years later, Runa could hear Aksel’s voice telling the children how the Stag was the guardian of their Forest. That he bounded into the heavens each night catching wayward stars in his antlers, then leapt back to solid earth again. Thus, their world would continue to flourish, and those wayward stars would become bright spirits, living amongst them. Their Stag could stride above them forever among the galaxies, Aksel told them, free from any worries in the human world. But he chose to return each day inside dawn’s light, carrying ancient wisdom from other realms.
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But she set aside the question, distracted by some commotion in the underbrush. A pheasant, startled, beat its heavy wings laboriously into gorgeous flight, its raucous cry strangely at odds with the eloquence of its plumage. She watched it fly out of sight, stood without moving, then turned her attention to what lay around her. Cushions of moss. Vines coiling among the shrubbery. Shadows and light. Drooping branches. The leaf-strewn floor underfoot. And now, a pheasant’s feather, brick red with scallops of white. She tucked it in her hair.
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And he would tell her about one evening, an evening without any stirring of wind in the ragged grasses or in the yellow gorse or the pink-belled heather, all the doleful whine gone and the last light sliding away, tell her about the Cragstones covered with white sea birds resting. Resting and waiting on the shoulders of those Crags. Resting and waiting along every edge and ledge and crevice, their white necks turned toward him, their white faces emptied of all their shattering cries. And how with one accord, they lifted into the windless air, all movement of wide-spread wings wheeling and dispersing until what floated across the sky and what entered upward changed from white to brighter white and thence to empty air laden now with nothing but light and a scoured and stunning silence.