An Ogham Wood (Novel)

Sometimes a book has its own enchantment. An Ogham Wood by Cliff Seruntine is firmly in that category, when it landed in our inbox we changed our policy on not accepting fiction for it as it clearly needed to be brought into manifestation for readers seeking something to enter into its beautifully written world.

The book is now available for pre-order from our website (quality trade paperback, 280 pages ) and if you order before the end of the month you can do so at the special introductory offer price. See our website http://avaloniabooks.co.uk/221/?page_id=441 for details. You can also read an extract and find out more about the author on the book's website www.oghamwood.com

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From Chapter 1

'Such cries the fair Asrai weep,
when Wisps no more the fens will keep,
O who will guard the Westering Land,
with shadows dashed,
enchantment banned?'

[The Lament of Hawthorn

Seoridean, Bard of the Westernmost Tuath]

~~ ~~ ~~

The most beautiful thing about the sea was how it made him forget. Sweyn had always held to that. After his mother died of cancer when he was a child, Sweyn used to paddle a sea kayak with his father to numb the pain. When he and his father bitterly parted ways many years later, sailing helped heal the wound. When he lost his wife, he simply floated away like so much flotsam upon an ocean whose greatest gift was forgetfulness. It was so easy to get lost in the rhythms of his small ship, the routine of checking position, keeping watch, mending sails, washing lines, polishing and varnishing endlessly. There was always activity to do in the small space of the vessel, and the creaking and the groaning of the timbers, the timeless play of waves, the liquid music of water rolling across the hull, all of it conspired to wipe out the thoughts, the memories.

Sometimes Sweyn awoke and did not know for certain how long it had been since the last date he remembered. Sometimes he was not even certain of the year. Best of all was when he could barely wrap his mind around the things he needed so desperately, so desperately most of all, to forget. When the gales blew. On approach to one nameless port or another, at night, when the phosphorescent waves washed over sea walls and broke over submersed rocks, unseen but deadly, well capable of ripping away keel and bilge should he wander back to a memory and forget to watch his compass and stay his course. At such times all his concentration was focused. There was only his body working hard to make his vessel do what needed to be done. Reef a sail. Shorten a sheet. Dare a jibe. The vessel required seamless attention. He knew the vessel and worked her automatically. His muscles were wiry but strong, flowing like fluid over bone, wrought of long days’ exhausting work, all to make a vessel of many tons do the will of the single man who piloted her.

And all to forget.

The sea was a balm. It could wipe away memories. It could do away with the pain of the past, with the pain of loss. And so he called the sea his abode. He had for many years. Once it was the salt air, the sound of rolling surf, the lucid skies that called to him. Once it was the thrill of seeing far-flung shores, the promise of peoples and places unseen. But now it no longer mattered. The sea was an amnesic. Better than alcohol. Better than a vat of the hardest liquor. It was a place to lose the self and the soul. And so he drifted, from bay to cove and port, and sometimes merely hove-to upon vast aquamarine expanses, always moving, going nowhere, not in long years. He drifted, detached, looking only for the oblivion of the waves.

And there were times when Sweyn could almost forget. The dreaded memories could almost be shoved totally aside, or pushed most deep into the dark recesses within the human soul where they might be buried and forgotten and never resurface again. Several times he had come close. But when he approached the precipice of such oblivion he felt he teetered on the edge of some sacred space, perhaps akin to the Nirvanna of nothingness sought by so many monks of the exotic East. If he could just tip across the threshold of mind and spirit into that tranquil emptiness, and let go once and for all, perhaps the past would release its death grip and he could be the one thing he had always longed to be, a man not haunted. But his ghosts were cagier than he, for at those very moments when he stood at the frontier of his long-sought bliss, a black cold formed in the core of his breast. And foolish questions provoked his mind to unwanted thoughts.

Do you want to forget, truly? Who will remember her if not you? What would be left if you let her go so completely that you could not recall her at all, not even her name? His father and all the hell of his traumatic youth, sure, he could let that go. Gone, like the waking after images of nightmare, that side of him could slip away and he would feel none but the better for it.

But when he stood on the brink of forgetfulness and the relentless beauty and indifference and vastness of the sea promised to swallow up his mind and thoughts once and for all, he could never let go. The bitter truth was, the memories which pained him the most were also the dearest. They haunted him with their warmth and tormented him with their loss. He could bear neither to look back upon them, nor to release them.

At times he had thought about letting the sea go a step further, and make his oblivion complete. So easy it would be to go to sleep in his berth in storm-tossed waters, and leave his vessel to its own devices, to its doom. Easier still to simply step off the transom on a good beam reach somewhere far from shores. He had thought it out, how that might be. He would do it near sundown. He would just fall in, tread tropical waters and watch the beautiful form of Starry Sea reduce in the distance, till at last she was a spot upon a dimming horizon, following her course by the guidance of the autopilot. And when at last she had gone far out of sight, perhaps to be found and claimed by some lucky soul and change his life for the better, Sweyn could just stop treading, close his eyes, and let himself float down to where forgetfulness is assured, into the dark place beneath the rolling ink of the nighttime sea.

But he never could do that. It wasn’t that he was afraid to die. It would be more true to say Sweyn was afraid to live. But it would be the same as coming to that mindless point when he let the abandon of the sea swallow up his memories once and for all. All the goodness ensconced in those painful recollections would vanish with him, and he could not bear to let what those memories contained vanish entirely from the world.

And so his memories drove him to persist. And something else, perhaps, but for the life of him he could not understand what. Whatever it was, it kept him from simply drowning in a bottle, or in the waves. It kept him merely drifting, bobbing, atop and over one endless wave after another.

In that moment his vessel was cascading down a rolling wave, heaped up high and steep by a rapidly building wind. He was an adept seaman, but he hardly noticed. Nor had he plotted a course. He only went, sailing swiftly, mindlessly, keeping a beam reach to the wind, following it wherever it led, for what else was there in life for him but to follow the wind, a storm-tossed spirit condemned to relentless journeys.

He ignored the world around his vessel and looked only inward. There, a side of him, cold and analytical and professional, and more dead than the rest of him, told him he did not have to be this way. He could get help. He was suffering an illness, a deep bitterness of mind. Depression. He needed to mourn, and to say goodbye. But he could not. It hurt too much to mourn, for mourning required thinking on that which had been lost. And that which had been lost had been too wonderful to lose. He could not bear to go there. And so his heart was torn. He could not hurt and heal. He dared not mourn and forget. He could only drift, and drift, and wander, carrying his pain and his memories at as much distance as the sea allowed.

A girl came up the companion way. A woman really, but the way of her was girlish, somewhere between that shy age of discovery and the full blossom of womanhood. Her hair was ruby, so lustrous it possessed an inner fire like the fine garnets cherished by gemologists. She was pale skinned, in the way of most true red heads, but her eyes possessed that unusual red-gold hue sometimes found in very fair folk. They were like the eyes of a cat, clever and astute, burning with an intelligence that seemed to hint at an awareness of hidden things. She moved with the grace of a cat too. Her slender form ghosted up the steep steps of the companionway and into the cantered cockpit as though she walked on a level surface. She moved across the short space of deck, up over the bench, to rest in the seat beside him with the fluidity of a ballerina. Often he had thought she must have taken lessons and been quite good somewhere back in her teen-aged years, but when he had brought it up to her, she had laughed and shrugged it off, saying she had never danced that way. “They say some of us have the grace of the little people,” she had told him once, her reedy voice spiced with a thick brogue that told of links to the British Isles. But she never spoke of her past. For her, it was a closed book. And given his own tumultuous childhood, he could understand her desire not to go there. Her past was past, just like his.

She held a mug of steaming tea in her hands. Though they were en route to Hawaii from Washington and had already traveled five hundred miles south and west away from the mainland, they had had the misfortune of encountering a late season northwesterly, moving south. In its death throws it brought increasingly bitter air, to the point where Sweyn was beginning to see his breath in wispy streamers that vanished behind him in the building wind.

“Do ye think it’ll be a gale, then?” Eilwen asked of him.

He scanned the slate sky. Amorphous clouds formed a lowering ceiling. It seemed as if all the sky were swathed in a sheet of mist, and the air itself was getting heavier. He nodded to her, took the mug gratefully in one hand, and gulped down several swallows of the warming liquid.

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