Hedgehurst

Romany 

So out stepped this young man – half hedgehog and half human being. And the king stood and looked: he’d never seen a creature like this in all his days.

He said, ‘What type of being are you that could do all this? Have you anyone to help you?’

‘No’, said the hedgehurst, ‘I need help from no-one.’

‘You mean to tell me’, says the king, ‘that you built this place by yourself and you cut all these trees, built all these things and made this place like this?’ It was the most beautiful place the king had ever seen.

‘I have’, said the hedgehurst, ‘I’ve done all this myself. But anyway, getting back to you: what is it you want of me, for I am king of this and this is my kingdom.’

‘I want nothing from you’, says the king. ‘But I am amazed! Tell me, what are you?’

He said, ‘I am a hedgehurst.’

Duncan Williamson, Fireside Tales of the Traveller Children

          I am Hedgehurst. I, snow-

          slumbering, the loaf of my body

          ovened in a bole beneath

          a flame-leafed sycamore,

          uncurl from my coiled hole.

          Whose is this scorned skin?

          What weather rouses me

          to lag my limbs with lichen,

          to fold fresh thatch around me?

          I roll, I loll in fallen leaves.

          They melt me asleep; I

          blunder through dream,

          weaving that way then this,

          from Februaries of thawing

          to nodding November.

          My mind measures out claw points,

          paw prints but snarls me into a ball.

          A jury of jays jabs me, scolds me.

          Why are you dozing here? they jabber.

          What, what is, what is your story?

          Born blunt, born blind, I pawed

          the mist of my mother,

          sensed her shawl around

          me like leaf-dry shelter.

          Her love, a raw rend across

          her womb; she wore my birth

          along her thighs in rips, in wounds.

          Childless, she had chided

          my father in tears, in years,

          until overheard by a wider world –

          in the sleight of a stranger who

          held a hedgehog on her palm,

          who smiled her spell through

          their walls. Worlds were unspun.

          I nosed through that cottage

          for six years, eye-high to its locks.

          Outside, my father’s axe lit

          lightning from the oak’s flint barks.

          When I found my feet

          I floundered forwards on all fours.

          My father flared and fumed as

          I fumbled with gravities.

          I lapped spilled milk while he

          watched me, as wary as a hare.

          My bed was strewn stale straw.

          I lay still on my spines’

          springs, napping on my nails.

          My father’s weasel whine

          seeped and stole through

          my rough wall each drab night.

          My mother’s muteness was enough

          to shut me into some bright

          burial ground of myself, to grind

          her halved child into ground.

          I was space between an axe-edge

          and the oak’s white wound.

          I was seven in nothing but age

          when I left home with no word.

          I wound my way through the walls

          of their world and into this wood.

          The tines of my pelt, draggling,

          made me stronger as I went;

          and, when I made camp,

          found myself no stranger

          to that wood’s world. I called

          my name into the night. The trees

          shushed me, then answered

          with caterpillars baited on threads.

          I called again. Moths moored

          in bark-fissures flickered out,

          fluttered towards me as I spoke

          as though my voice were alight.

          Pipistrelles unfurled through firs.

          Fireflies bloomed and doused.

          I called until dawn into the next

          dawn. I spun and unspun their names

          with my name. When I had worlded

          the woods with these creatures

          I lounged on my spines.

          I then called out the birds.

          Clamorous as alphabets in a cloud,

          starlings strew down. They settled

          like a harvest in the highest

          trees and sang, drizzling.

          Then came magicians, green

          woodpeckers, the greenest men.

          They were circling laughter. They

          were soft rolls on the oak’s drum.

          Ceremonially stabbing his prey

          on haw, sloe, dog rose,

          a shrike shrieked down to feast,

          his larder stiff on thorns.

          Woodpigeons unwarped their wings,

          clapping through larch canopies.

          Wrens buzzed from bushes. Tree-

          creepers moused down yew-

          towers. Rolled bodily from a nest

          a solitary cuckoo came

          closer than comfort, bearing

          her unchilding charm.

          Arcing down the air’s stair silently,

          those emblems – snowy owls

          bowed whitely then blinked.

          In the brimming underworld below

          their bowing branches, ptarmigans

          moved, still smooth with snow.

          I kept my call up – the starlings

          now imitating – so I swerved it,

          narrowed it, arrowed my voice

          down the bolt-holes of hedgerows,

          calling up the fields and the further

          afields of floodplain, lake, river.

          A tarn’s surface flickered with the ore

          of rudd, orfe and roach.

          Dace, carp, and loach spun

          on their rudders to the fly of my call.

          I viewed the arc of my kingdom:

          a rainbow righting itself above water,

          its likeness mirrored and ringed

          under and above the surface of all things.

          I latticed hedges in high tension

          about the wood’s borders,

          their branches barred, all twigs

          cats-cradled. No low doors for badgers.

          No runnels for runaways. Even roots

          rammed deeper. Those windows

          between leaf and leaf I made

          shatter-proof with web and web, spiders

          garrisoning them like a million eyes

          in a wall. For twenty years I had peace

          when a door unlatched where no door

          was, its hasps hidden in a space

          of a second guess. Striding in circles

          of his own dream, a hunting king

          came upon my clearing while I crafted;

          needling me for directions, marvelling

          at my work. I needed help from no one,

          so returned that king to his kind,

          he, gifting his word that the first thing he saw

          within the world elsewhere would be mine.

          I had kenned from my wrens

          how to cave-mine my call,

          to speak through soil, make

          speech slither through a hill,

          and I learned from my bats

          and owls how to hear it all back,

          the echo resounding slow

          in the swirl and swoon of a beck,

          given tongue as it trickles from

          rock-pool to spill murmurs

          along a lake-bed, passed through

          caddis fly to bloodworm to fish

          before the catch is ospreyed

          up from the water and sprayed

          back through the nets in my ear.

          In this way I overheard

          the worlds outside my wood:

          how the king had come home,

          how his daughter, his dearest child,

          had been the first to greet him.

          But no word reached me. I let

          the seasons sing themselves slow.

          I let the winds wind through

          on their migrations. I lay

          my ear to the lake and listened.

          Silence and then ice. Jays

          mocked me to life in March.

          I rose and called twice

          for what it would take –

          I called all my creatures.

          I could make war with water,

          by damming ducts, flash-floods,

          by underwhelming wells but I

          could not take a field with fish.

          I had noise enough to light out

          for territory – snipe’s throb, woodpecker’s

          drum, stork’s clack, heron’s bill-clap,

          and at dawn, the lapwing’s thrum.

          The birds went before me, and my army,

          the earth’s creatures, they followed me.

          Fat rain soaks an unwringable soil.

          The sun’s hand fumbles at a rag

          of earth. It can do nothing with it

          but shape steam or ice. The slog

          of roots as they ply through rock,

          murk, moisture – this was my work

          that half-day. When rain runs

          over rain, when deep roots are delved,

          high banks breached, the araucaria’s

          canopy’s reefed, leaf-land on a lake,

          drench-drowned, its green throat

          gasping; so it was when we

          showed up at that king’s fences

          and forts; he, done over in a

          heartbeat, his whole kingdom

          drowned by hoof-beats, antlers

          clattering in his pallid palace;

          and his people, his, peering

          from their portholes, from

          prison ships of their tenements.

          Leaves allow answers to a season:

          when to give way, when to hold

          hard. I had these humans

          in the hands of my branches.

          I held them up to the spring:

          showed them the month’s doors

          opening on each other, those

          rain-crafted courtyards of a year;

          offered them the openings

          of a fern, the currencies

          of those smote-eyed seeds;

          gave them the conditions

          written in grass-blades

          as a wind wicks through them;

          read softly the rules

          of the rain as it retreated

          to its ravines and rivers;

          and when this was done

          the king’s daughter came to me

          without question or ambition.

          In the broken and in the woken

          dreams of the king’s people

          I moved to teach the tongues

          torn from them: my creatures’ calls.

          In the palace hall, the court spoke

          at me on their stilts of speech;

          I scythed those sticks: tottering

          tongues stammered and spilled.

          In the city I was the space

          between a shrike’s spike and prey.

          I was a holly bush among them.

          Carnivalled in star-lit nails

          I nightwalked the city. Will

          to will, my wife met me,

          while the silk king sulked.

          For its wands of low light

          to wane through the windows

          to douse my blood, to slow me,

          to slow me so and so clench me

          that coward king waited on winter.

          My beasts were busy unweaving

          and reweaving the city: wood wasps

          worked the wrecked timbers

          of the tenements, ravens

          refreshed the roofs. Snipe,

          scaup and scoter settled

          at reservoirs, sweetened inrunning

          rivers, drilled then dredged

          the silts and sands. Crossbills

          and finches fossicked field-seed;

          horses hauled those harvests home.

          I foddered my creatures by starlight

          steeling my skin against the moon’s

          zero. My hearth held some secrecy

          of spring: to win through winter

          I would need that fire’s hand.

          Each night I knelt nearer its blaze.

          I strained with my spines. I stripped

          myself clear of my cladding, then

          made my way numb beneath the moon.

          Three nights with my nerves

          on knives; three nights clad

          in the cold’s clay; my hearth,

          pelt and wife waiting for me at dawn.

          I was almost blunt and blind,

          my mother’s mist rising

          as I yanked fodder to the stalls

          calling creature to creature.

          On the third midnight I plucked

          then placed my pelt. My wife

          watched from our bed then

          waving once, wondered to sleep.

          I staggered through a sheer snow

          of stars. I made everyone safe.

          I smelled before I saw my broad

          skin broiling where the king

          had stoked it high on a bonfire.

          And then the king came to me,

          soldiers before him, bright buckets

          jagged and acid with ice-water.

          The water’s wile, the wound of it,

          it winded my mind; its ice spermed

          through my veins, hatched in my heart.

          Breath blew from me and I fell

          into a glacier of my blood. I saw

          the king handed my father’s axe;

          my wife running from her room,

          out from dream; and then

          his daughter flying at him, bearing

          down on a boar, her white

          wrists writhing. All this. I saw all this

          before a wind flew back through me

          and I whispered my wife’s name.

          The stars shushed me, then

          answered me with caterpillars

          baited on threads. I called her again.

          Moths stirred in bark-fissures.

          They flickered out, fluttered

          towards us as I spoke her name,

          as though my voice were a light.

          Ramsons whiten into life, slow-

          slumbering through the thaw.

          After spring showers, my halved

          children will tread paths sprung

          and sewn from their scent alone.

          I wake half-dreaming. For seconds

          I do not know myself. What hands

          are these that are lacerable

          but sprung with spines?

          What weather rouses me,

          unclenches my limbs from frost?

          Where is my second skin?

          It is winter gone.     It is worlds unspun.

          I judder awake as jays bounce

          and strut about my body.

          I rise, I shout, and they scatter.

          They jump screaming into the sky.

          It is time to call everything to life

          for I am king of this and this is my kingdom.

          Who am I?      I am Hedgehurst.