by Jonah Jones
Three hours before dawn, Grimalkin crouched in her cosy shelter above the conjoining of roads, listening to the creak of twisted hawthorn against wayfaring tree as the land continued to cool and the sea drew its breath across the cliffs and away from the westerly lands of the faerie.
She settled down into the campion and archangel to wait for her next encounter. As the darkness hung over the stone-walled fields of the lonely Preselis, she licked one paw and then the other. Catch them this way and that.
Nine times for a cat
Five skies for a bat
Higher and higher the flight of the wren
None but two for the choice of men.
The forked road beneath her remained empty as darkness held its slow cloak over the land, but she knew that come dawn, there would be travellers, lost, lonely, frightened, thrilled, God or Devil-seeking pilgrims amongst the enigmatic stones, older and holier than the cathedral in the hollow.
Never grey, she was named for her supposed companion, not her colour. She was black as His heart, dark as His malevolent soul. Her station was to guide the wayfarers to their proper doom. Some called her The Temptress, some gave her the name of Devil-cat. She revelled in both, for the name given reflects upon those who give it and the choice they make upon meeting their guide.
Now in the pre-dawn twilight, Orion no longer strode the sky, yet she was feeling the cold. Even huddled in her shelter under the crumbling wall divided by the rowan, she felt the bite of the mean wind, keening across the open mountain-side with howls and sudden shrieks.
A movement caught her hunter’s eye. Hunched and bundled against the cloth-stripping wind, a lone traveller was making his slow way up the slope. Such clumsy creatures, these humans, with no grace about them, yet some competence in reasoning. She was amused as she watched this one, single-minded in his purpose and with a strong stride, using his oak quarterstaff angled to the ground, as a counter to the buffeting wind. This was a Pardoner, making his way to the rich pickings close to the cathedral where the pilgrims, finely tuned to their own sin, might seek means of absolution. Rigid as the oak staff in his thinking, his purpose was his driving force.
She wondered which way to send him – Arthur’s Grave or The Mount of Angels?
One road leads to agreement with all others where nothing can be learned, the other leads to Annwn, the world inside the agreed world, where shadows have a greater strength than those who cast them.
But which shall be which?
And how to send him? Was he one who regarded a black cat as unlucky or lucky for his soul?
She leaped down to the wishbone of the roads to stand upon one of the two from one.
The Pardoner stopped and gazed warily at this monstrous cat that had come from the Faerie-ridden hills. Grimalkin yawned and he stepped back, demonstrating that he saw her as unlucky. She had already decided to send him to Carn Ingli – the Mount of Angels, where the broken stones tried to render the sky into their own shapes. He would learn fortunate lessons up amongst the ravens and the soul drinkers, so she stood on the other road.
He crossed himself, then extended his staff and crossed the air between them.
She yawned again, wider and more slowly to show him that being crossed had no effect on a cat with the craft.
‘Are you here to tempt me away from the path of righteousness?’
‘No, Master Pardoner. You will choose your own path.’
‘Then what brings you here?’
‘To clarify what is set before you.’
He looked at the two paths that led forward, then set his gaze upon this fate-bound creature sitting firm upon one of them.
‘I am a man of faith, I offer redemption to those who have strayed from the path by the whiles of the cute Devil. You see before you God’s servant.’
‘Which god?’ she asked.
‘The only God.’
Evidently, he knew nothing of the pantheon, so she abandoned the subject, knowing there was nothing to be gained from logical exchange.
As they conversed, the Pardoner grew in realisation that she had trodden darker paths than he, causing him to hold a greater respect for her. Mingled with that respect was fear for the companions she had met along the way, once invisible to him, now forming themselves in ranks behind her dark shape.
The cat says this, the cat says that
Who knows the thinking of a cat?
Soft as her paw
or hard as her claw
Better you decide
Though the cat may know
which is the better side.
Slowly, the light and the warmth were increasing, bringing the buzzards flying in to take their stations on the fence-posts, waiting for the thermals to carry them into the lazy circles for high hunting. The Pardoner saw them as demon-inspired, closing in upon him to sway his judgement.
In trepidation, yet afraid to remain in that limbo, the Pardoner took the path she had left free, the one that led to where the angels squabbled and danced like Atlantic clouds scudding across the jagged stones. All his reasoning was based upon the same foolishness that makes the rocks seem soft when toned by lichen and edged by feathery bracken.
Good path or bad path, she watched him make his way towards his own destination, then she turned to find a good resting place amongst the cotton grass. As she settled in the soft seed-heads, and cast herself out in sleep, Grimalkin heard the old cathedral sigh while the jackdaws bickered in their roost inside her tower. Day and night, in seasons’ wheel, these events had been repeated so many times. She was growing weary of the rain that washed her purple stones, weary of the sound of the stream in front of her door as it babbled pagan mysteries down to the Celtic Sea, and weary of those expecting to be shown the way by the ghost of a saint long gone.
Those that formerly came here
Stayed a day, then left in fear
What did they learn from those who reside?
What could they teach the never-died?
The Cat of the Cut Ways was drifting between worlds and could see the branching veins in her eyes, pushing sharp detail from her view. She closed her eyes but the veins persisted, changing colour with the pulse of her heart. The dove that flew from Merlin’s hand rested lightly on her shoulder and spoke with gentle authority.
If a brain cell only makes two connections it hasn’t made a difference. Only when it makes three or more do the possibilities multiply. The brain is like a cloud that brings the rain to the furrowed, tortuous mountains, so together they may form the rivulets that run back to the source.
From the heart, the tree trunk, the ocean and the cathedral, the paths move out and divide as they go. Branch from branch, vein from vein, stream from stream and pilgrims’ road from pilgrims’ road.
Before allowing the wind to carry her to the northerly moorland where the people touched by magic go about their lives, the dove called out ‘I spoke for my master, wait for him.’ Grimalkin squeezed her eyes shut and opened them to clear the shadows of her veins from her vision. Something required her to be of the sensible world.
From her vantage point on the mountains’ keel, where the Fair-folk play their flutes with soft glee, she spied another human traveller.
Slit-eyed against the wind, this graceless one was wending from side to side of the road, looking this way and that, like a zig-zag backed adder searching for prey.
Searching for prey indeed, for he was a Summoner.
Casting his gaze over the ditches and the hedges, behind the standing stones and over the walls, he also made his way towards the cathedral. His pace was slower than that of the Pardoner, because he was more likely to discover victims on the open road, so he took his time, watching the foxes and the ravens, lest they should steal the gold he had accumulated along his twisted journey.
Grimalkin understood the behaviour but not its driving thought. She was wont to dally on the edge of society, happy to be there, uninvolved and free to go her own way, engaging with others only when it suited her. That was the way of all cats, she supposed.
How should she treat this one? Send him to The Black Monastery and The Bell Rock or be gentle and send him west back down to the foothills where the faeries might taunt but he would be safe from the darker denizens of this Annwn-touched place?
‘Tell me Summoner, which road calls you?’ she asked as she approached him.
‘Truth and falsehood,’ the Summoner replied in a tone that belittles censure. ‘Men will ever be seduced by the latter.’
‘Indeed,’ Grimalkin agreed, indicating the two roads by the turn of her head, ‘yet these are both truths of a kind.’
The Summoner considered that last statement. His guide gave him time, then walked from one path to the other delicately and deliberately in a feline dance, flicking her tail to the music only she could hear. ‘Will you follow me or eschew the path I take?’
‘I will decide when you have taken one path.’
‘Will you not parlay with me for the answer?’
The Summoner made his living by argument and prided himself in his ability. His was a greater task than that of the Pardoner, for he had to convince the gullible that they had committed sins when mayhap they had not.
The Pardoner recognises those who carry guilt, whereas the Summoner induces it. Both have suppressed any sense of guilt in themselves. They both speak of such matters but Grimalkin knew that neither had made a deal with a demon, walked the corridors of Arianrhod’s castle or been touched by monstrous emptiness.
Yet in his pomposity the Summoner held himself as an authority in the offices of the Almighty.
‘Your trickery will have no bearing upon my purpose,’ he told the cat from another world, ‘for I am resolved to be about my Lord’s business.’
Grimalkin accepted that she had taken against this parasite of the church and that she would send him the difficult way. Perhaps he might learn something from the longer road. On his part he had decided she was of the Devil and reasoned that she would be trying to deceive him. He therefore chose the right-hand fork where the sinister may not stand.
Once he’d gone that way, she reflected that her master is neither Devil nor God and that they work in concert with each other. The Pardoner had taken the road to God. The road he would have chosen if he had known.
But God doesn’t pardon the pardoner.
A hedge of hawthorn stands askew
to pluck the wind like harpist’s hands
The wind responds by singing and ringing
and like the harp strings
moulds the fingers that give it voice.
Grimalkin watched the twisting and the moulding for many a turning of the moon while allowing folk to choose one way or the other. She experienced an inkling of Déjà Vu which sharpened to a memory. Knowing all this had happened before and would do so again, led her to consider the sewin out in the pathless ocean, swimming above and through the ruins of Atlantis. How they understand these montane pathways better than any other. They sense the water’s history as it flows into the sea, so make their choices as they swim up the Cleddau, Wester branch or Easter as swords become sword. Decision made, they move to the next fork, tumbling in growing excitement as the mountain rain washes the salt clear and the smell of the stream stirs memories of birth. From the skies of Chough through those of Jackdaw to the wilder territory of the Raven, they tell their tales of the great world beyond these shores, to all that might listen along their way. Here in the uplands, studded with standing stones as watchmen and guardians, are the shallow gravelly beds where instinct has led them, where tales are told of their glory and the strength of life is renewed.
Almost expected in her heightened awareness, a Wiseman, follower of Elen of the Ways, came along the road that leads to the Black Monastery. He leaned on his thrice carved staff as he saw the cat approaching.
‘I am Colomen,’ he called out to her.
‘Greetings, Colomen. I am Grimalkin.’
He smiled and extended his arm towards her. ‘I have reached that time in my life that I need a familiar. Could Grimalkin be persuaded?’
She looked the old man up and down, seeing the subtler body he carried, aligned with the gross. This was an old soul, old as the moon creatures, older than the cathedral.
‘I would be persuaded, but I have a task laid upon me. I must provide the reasoning for every person who faces the road’s fork. I can’t leave my post.’
The Sage approached The Cat of the Twyroads and caressed the back of her ears, causing all the cat’s instincts to speak of stolen pleasure in a cruel world.
‘There are many places and times when the road divides. Come with me and I’ll show you.’
Grimalkin rubbed up against the Cunning Man’s legs and purred as his hand stroked her head while he spoke.
‘Don’t you think the Summoner and the Pardoner have divided their paths a thousand times in the past? Good, evil, truth, falsehood, manipulate, nurture.’
They followed Elen for twenty furlongs. Grimalkin could smell wood smoke in the air.
‘Not far to go,’ the Sorcerer said as the smoke became apparent, smudging a blue-grey sky from a stand of twisted yews, encircling a stone-roofed cottage.
They walked up to the door, through the herb garden and their wilder brethren, the Hart’s Tongue and Hawksbeard, Stonecrop and Sorrel.
Warmth and old magic permeated the interior, comfort and possibilities, dim light and the smell of burning pine.
Over the following days, they grew together in friendship and trust, walking side by side in Annwn’s landscape, communing with her other residents. The first flowers of honeysuckle were breaking open around the cottage doors and the greedy moths were upon them as the evenings fell. In the daytime, pipits twittered in parachute glide as they followed the slope down towards their loves amongst the twisting travellers’ joy on the lower meadows.
On certain moonlit nights they saw Arthur’s familiar roaming the mountains, sniffing at the air, scratching at the ground, in anticipation of his master’s awakening.
Seeking the Graal, stalks Grimalkin
with fey companion.
Cat and catcher from Hell
Church in the hollow
Soul hunters fell
Silent ways follow.
Having wrestled with angels and other forces of retribution along the Preseli’s wild roads, the Summoner and the Pardoner had reached the hamlet of Saint David’s. There they made their way to meet the Inquisitor in his cottage above the gatehouse on the ramp down to the Cathedral.
Over ale and a mutton pie, they told him about the devil-cat in the mountains. A beast that could converse in matters of philosophy, which had led each of them astray into the dangerous lands of the unholy. The Inquisitor decided without reference to anyone else, lest they preach caution, to assemble the Milites Christi and assign them the task of destroying the cat and any company it might be keeping. He commanded the bell-ringers to toll the royal ten bells with the muffled third and ninth, to muster the holy troops into the cathedral close.
The wizard and his guide, already experiencing the disquiet before the storm, heard that strange cadence and knew what it meant. The righteous were deploying their warriors against them.
‘We will prepare ourselves,’ Elen of the Hosts replied. ‘We may also call upon an army.’
In the long slow twilight of summer’s dawn, when dew first sparkles and pink-tinged clouds cast shadows on the high slopes, the Milites Christi reached the wizard’s cottage. One by one they extinguished their torches, save one. One torch carried by the Inquisitor if damnation required it.
Those with crossbows, cranked back their strings, those with swords drew them from their scabbards and the poleaxe bearers lifted their hafts from their shoulders to set themselves as vanguard, surrounding the cottage with a wall of sanctity.
As they stood in a close-packed circle three ranks deep, a terrible roar rolled across the mountain slopes and down into their very hearts, freezing blood and shaking limbs. The bear had returned to guard his children.
‘Stand firm!’ the Inquisitor urged them. ‘This is legend – not truth!’
Neither legend nor nursery rhyme are embellishments, they are the core, and here was the legend at the very heart of the British race. The Great Bear of the North rose up on his hind legs in the centre of the circle and roared again, causing the mightiest of men to quail.
‘Light the torches!’ screamed the Inquisitor and the troops of the church clustered around their leader, reigniting the torches with quaking hands until the bear was surrounded by a fiery barrier.
The Inquisitor gained confidence as he shouted at the bear ‘Bow down before the Godly!’
The creature watched the torch carriers as another figure rose from the smoke behind it. This was of the Other Times indeed. Arthur the King, protector of the Christian realm, addressed them all.
‘You have chosen the wrong path, as I once did.’
In his armoured right hand, he held up the sword of the Britons by the blade, so that the weapon became a cross.
‘Godly you are not!’ he cried out. ‘You are of the self-spawning Devil.’ The great warrior held up Brân’s huge, severed head in his left hand and turned in a circle to let them all see.
‘This heathen knew more of God than any of you.’
He lifted the head higher so that the rising sun might shine upon its time-raked features.
‘Here is the true protector – Brân the Blessed, whose magical head I mistakenly disinterred for my own pride’s sake.’
Placing the massive head upon the threshold flagstone of the cottage for a plinth, the king stepped back as the wolves and beavers, bears and lynxes, led by the mighty elk – all the creatures driven from these lands where once they roamed – formed up as an army of the Old Faith. The mist swept across and the head was gone. Behind them the giant Brân raised himself up from this ancient holy of holies to look around at the sea on three sides while the stones danced with the glee of pre-Christian times. His namesake children flocked from the wild crags to roost across his mighty shoulders as he gazed upon the ungodly in the circle.
From the White Mount he came
to the angels’ acclaim
To where he was born
from whence he was torn
so long ago.
In day’s full light, where the red kite sweeps the sky and the buzzard mews from a distance, the Christian army, afraid to look upon itself, dispersed like sheep before the wolf, allowing the land to restore its old ways.
* * *
Sometimes the Cat, the Conjuror and Macsen’s lover walk down to the roads through Brân’s mystic mountains. Sometimes they meet you. There were times when you saw them and perhaps followed for a distance but most of the meetings were in the mist and went unnoticed.
Find them. Let them lead you. That will be the end of this and the beginning of the next. Without them, you have only limbo and your story ends where you now stand.
This is the Will o’ the Wisp they saw
that danced and pranced across the moor
that led the people rich and poor
down to stand beneath the tor.
That worried the cat
that murdered the bat
that sang in the night
that darkened the path
that led from the house
the ravens built.
© 2024 Jonah Jones All rights reserved.
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