WOLVES

The lord

questions

Told to Thorkell, Tapmaster, Queen’s Arms Pub, Castletown

The night was cold and damp and my journey brought me into the warmth of a pub. I sat next to a wizened old man and asked him what he was drinking. He was rather old, perhaps a hundred . . .perhaps two hundred. He was so old that he looked out of place, and so I asked him his name, and if he would like to talk. He accepted my offer, and I brought him a glass of whisky.

”No one remembers,” he began thoughtfully. “No one likes to remember the old times, but it is the old times for which my heart beats.”

”Do you remember the thirty?” I asked him.

”The thirty have faded into memory,” he answered. “But I have not forgotten them. And though they have went across the Great Wall, their spirit still wanders, as does the spirit of the Lord.”

”Were they not devoured by the wolves?” I asked.

”The Saints would make an unsavory meal to a wolf,” he replied. “Vargas knows this though his fast is unremitting.”

”Why do you call them Saints?” I asked.

”The poet knows, for he followed the martyred saints over the wall into the Otherworld at the heels of the wolves, and though the poet was allowed to come back, the Saints’ fight is ever more, and the land is safe.”

”And the poet?”

”The poet remembers,” he answered, “for the poet never sleeps.”

I went up to the bar to bring the man another glass of whisky. I wanted to know about Vargas, and I wanted to ask about the Great Wall, but when I returned, he was gone, and my walk home through the dark streets was even darker.

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

A passage of another kind.

offerings

By the end of the second year, the people no longer expected the return of the thirty, and they were considered lost. No trace of them was ever discovered.  And so the prayers of the people now turned to other things, for they were convinced that the prayers they had said for the thirty had been received, and that now the time of mourning was over, and they were to continue on with their quaint lives by the sea. The people went back out in their boats and heaved tons of herring up from the deep, the men went back into the mines, and the Inns and pubs cooked breakfast for the visitors from England and Wales and men of means from the island.  The priests no longer said the names of the thirty men, and their sermons turned to other things.  Life was returned to normal, but the good people of Man could not return to normal so fast, and they invented ways to honor and remember the thirty.

The years passed, and with each new generation the memory became more and more vague until no one was left alive that had known any one of the thirty, and the memory had now turned to legend.  And as each new generation passed, even as the memory of the thirty began to fade, the legend of the Hedgewood Wall continued to grow, and to take on greater and greater significance.  And even as the once great Hedgewood Wall continued to crumble over the centuries, it was slowly being reconstructed, stone by terrible stone, inside the dreams, and inside the mind of the men and women, and the children of the Isle, until this very day.

And so, on a raw day, beneath the cold and biting mist from the sea, an ancient oak tree was felled.  The tree had been struck by lightning, and the men gathered to cut it down.  This was not the task of humble woodchoppers, but instead, because of the value of the tree, the job of clever men with clever saws and clever calculations on paper.

When the tree was felled, the men cut it up and began carting it away, and that is when a strange thing was found.  Near the top of the tree, nearly the height of all six of the men, was a band of metal, broken and rusted, but still clinging to the body of the tree like a claw.    No one had any idea how it could have gotten there until one man remembered a legend, first told to him by his grandfather on a cold night.  The legend was tied to the legend of the thirty men . . .but this legend was not about the thirty, but instead, it was about those that honored the thirty.  The people of this island are strong, but they have a soft spot in their heart for the heroes that have proceeded them, and they have invented new and strange methods of expressing this love of the past. And when the writing was discovered on the metal, and the words were slowly drawn out of the rusted years, the men agreed that this was just such an artifact.  The words were scrawled awkwardly, but as best as could be understood, they said:

I planted this tree in the memory

   of my brother Gawain who was called

away from home by the wolves and

forgot his pipe.  If he should return one

 day, tell him it is buried beneath this tree

The finding of the marker resurrected an age-old tradition that had been largely forgotten by the good people of Man.  And though the thirty men would never return again from the realm beyond the Hedgewood Wall, the people would mark their sacrifice and their existence, even as the Great Celtic Crosses marked the resting places of the great Saints in the time of Brenden the Navigator, one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland.

Ancient and already crumbling in places, the Great Hedgewood Wall had been constructed to protect the good people and to ward off the evil spirits of the fallen angels that had been cast out of heaven by the Lord.  But the angels were defiant and they would take out their vengeance upon the chosen people, sometimes coming in the form of dreams, sometimes coming in the form of wolves, and sometimes coming in the form of serpents and leviathans, devouring the helpless Manxmen as they worked their strong and calloused hands for herring and flounder out on the reach.

And so it was that the loved ones of the thirty men took to immortalize their sacrifice with tokens of the thirty men, a boot, a knife, a ring, anything that would symbolize the soul of the lost man.  These items were buried carefully and with purpose, but with the expectation that they would be unearthed again, symbolizing the rebirth and resurrection of the Lord, for it was believed that once lost from beyond the Hedgewood Wall, their spirit would forever be lost to the Lord.  When an item had been found and unearthed, the people would meet inside the Inns and smoky pubs to discuss the significance of the find, how many years it may have moldered in the earth, and if it had ever been unearthed before, for there were instances where some things were unearthed which never should have been unearthed but best forgotten.  The people would say a toast, and they would drain their glasses together in sympathy for the spirit of the lost man.

In this way a connection of the people of the isle was slowly formed out of the misery of a few, and a brotherhood was created by this shared grief which far outlasted the memory of the thirty men.  And even as the Hedgewood Wall crumbled and the powerful prayers built within became weak, the people were upheld in their righteousness and their spirit, for they knew that they too, would one day have to cross the once mighty wall.

And so it was that one of the woodcutters, whose name was Ian, came back again and again for three days, to the site where the fallen tree lay.  He brought with him sharp tools and axes and other items that he would need, and he set to work chopping and cutting through the hardened roots until he discovered and unearthed an object, wrapped in several layers of sackcloth.  Within was a pipe.  He held the pipe in his hands and felt the power coming up from the ground beneath.  He had once again, brought to life, the spirit of a man, lost beyond the Great Hedgewood Wall.  And so he took the pipe home and he would hold it and try to imagine the hands that had once held this pipe; he thought about it and he dreamed about it until he was satisfied.  One day he would re-bury the sacred object . . .but not today.

 Copied from an old manuscript found within The House of Keys, Castletown. 

Author unknown