"sun rites and honey-flies": poetry and flash fiction for midsummer
‘Is this it?’ asks Sasiru. The winds rampaging over the churning sea, turning sea spray to prismatic beads against the late-day sun, are beginning to calm as they drift further from shore.
Beside her, Issar, her body creased by time, nods.
‘Auspicious,’ comes her guttural voice.
She bends down like a gnarled branch and cups a handful of seawater. Her fingers loose, and Sasiru watches as the drops become one with the glassy surface once more.
The small wooden fishing boat creaks and whines as Sasiru shifts her weight and lets go of the oars. It is the only sound against the thick, eerie silence this far from land. A mist moves upon them. If Sasiru had any question a moment ago, now she knows this must be the place.
The sea returns a deep, low thump. Ripples on the water. The sun, which lit their journey here, is rapidly masked by an ever-opaque screen of vapor, like sea spray made motionless in trembling anticipation.
‘They call her Chaos?’
Issar shakes her head, voice soft. ‘They do. They call her many things with little understanding. They do not remember a time when the mother, the dragon watchful over her hoard, was needed.’
Sasiru wonders how a place inhabited by Chaos can be so calm. Almost peaceful.
Issar notices her staring into water and says, ‘One should never forget that Chaos has her place, for she defines order. Shape is given by the monstrous, the unchained.’
Sasiru turns east, toward shore. She would know the direction of home even in darkness, even in death. There, far upriver, Arasu burns.
‘She knows we are here. She has been expecting us.’
Sasiru waits. For what, she knows not. A parting of the heavens, a disembodied voice, a great show of power that will give her something to believe in.
If she expected crashing waves, thunder and lightning, she is made a fool. A soft swell rocks them to and fro, the water’s answer to the serpent circling far below. Sasiru startles at the movement, catching only a glimpse of movement. Her crest breaks the surface before she dives again, her body as teal as the water she inhabits.
Against her judgement, Sasiru looks. The blue-green beyond the edge of the old, rotting boat reveals her slithering form. Tiamat, Mother of Scaled Creatures, is circling.
Issar stands boldly before the awakening sea.
When the dragon-goddess lifts her head, the depression in the water’s surface nearly tips their boat. Many-faced and many-horned, the stories do not lie. Tiamat swings her head from side to side, taking in Issar and Sasiru from all angles, with the pearlescent eyes of a knowing grandmother.
As she does, there is a soft jingling, like that of bells, and Sasiru sees that it is from various trinkets adorning her horns and fins. Lost treasures of the sea—fishhooks, coins, pottery shards, the scimitar that hangs around her neck. Tokens of wars long past.
‘Mother,’ says Issar, reverent, and yet comfortable, as if greeting an old friend.
Tiamat lowers her enormous draconic head to her and Sasiru fights the urge to cower to the back of the boat. She may have lost her belief in holiness a long time ago, but her childhood fear of the gods remains, it seems. Even the old, forgotten ones.
‘I was a girl when last an enemy army lay siege to Arasu. We honored you then, as we should have, calling out your name like a war cry as you drowned our opponents from the Euphrates. Now, the priests’ calls to the younger gods go unanswered. You saved us then. I ask that you save us again.’
Tiamat cocks her head. Sasiru hears a voice, but whether it is all around her or inside her head, she cannot tell.
‘What is the worth of a place that would see its own people destroyed so a few of its men could remain proud?’
Issar nods. ‘It is not the worth of what a few men have built, but the honey-flies in the hills each evening, while the fragrant chamomile breeze blows over the babe nesting in its cradle. Our river valley, our future, that is what I ask you to protect. Only that.’
‘You come to Chaos, to violence and disaster, to protect peace? It is bold of you.’
‘It is why we come alone.’
‘Was there no one else but a priestess and a weaver to believe in this future? In peace?’
Sasiru steps forward and kneels, surprising even herself. ‘A priestess to teach of the light,’ she began, looking into those white eyes, ‘and of the darkness. To deliver the future, and nurture it. And a weaver to clothe them. What more is needed?’
Tiamat lowers the crown of her head.
‘Will you honor us with your aid?’
‘A priestess and a weaver, yes, I can aid.’
“a summer’s eve”
when once we were godlings performing our sun rites arms outstretched, erupting like roots through the soil from shade into glimmering warmth flesh relishing the way explanation leaves us while the sun rises to moon overhead in instances and memories I forget myself amongst stained glass and stone circle colors and variations of light, fences that keep us here I could climb over the stile and ferment in the field, become an atmosphere for our questioning take only one star back down with me remembering our significance only as the piebald robin lands, and then toss it to the skies anyway