Where there were no rivers, where the crushed holly berries ran over his own skin, crushed by his own heel, and became a flood of rushing water, there are three rivers, swollen with the harvest's fullness of rain. Over-blessed, one might even say. The mossy stones, green and vibrant, are suddenly surrounded by the winding, rushing currents of silver-clear water. Where the land drops in sudden vales, cascades pool loudly, and the dark wood is illuminated by the sudden glint of light upon the scales of jumping salmon.
     This is a world in a forever spawn...
     Life blossoms and ripens, every vine is heavy with life, every tree pregnant with fruit and nuts and sap. The woods are in constant sound -- of thrush, of starling, of fox, of stag. And the twelve trees that surrounded him in his crowning have spread to cover the earth in a thick, formidable tangle.
     But not half as formidable as the wall of thorn trees now surrounding the periphery of the Holly King's kingdom...
     The world shudders. Trees moan in the lifting of wind. Leaves preparing to fall rattle on their limbs, the percussion that summons him forth. Shimmering green, the waxy leaves of the old holly trees, gather and shift as he moves among the trees. His cloak is the earth, it is born and ripens to fullness behind his every step. His feet covered in soft boots. His skin as white as the bark of the holly trees. His hair as red as the apple. Upon his head a crown of thorns and spiked leaves, thick with clusters of holly berries, even grape.
     All hail the Holly King...
     Davydd ap Owain is his name...
     The trees whisper his coming. Poetry runs like the thrice-made river through the dense woods. And behind him walks a red stag and a white stag, the red upon his left shoulder. The mark of the King of the Dying Year...

     "Why are you crowding yourself?" silvery voice asks. A pool of gleaming salmon huddle together, looking up with their fish eyes, as if they are actually watching. The school of salmon wriggle to keep themselves in place, a slithering mass writhing against the stream's natural pull. "We know who you are," the single voice says. "This is your kingdom. Are you trying to prove something to your own kingdom, Your Majesty, or something to yourself?"

     The stag remain exactly twelve paces behind him. At the speaking of the salmon, they stop, even as the Holly King stops in his wandering, his eyes opening. Deep, deep green. The thorns around his kingdom are a metaphor. But of what? Like the thorns within his mouth? Is it death? Or is it the struggle through which one must fight in order to be reborn? Like the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty...
     Beauteous the crowned head that tilts to the voice of the salmon. The water sloshes as he walks within it, becoming in mere moments, a salmon himself. Trying to prove? What makes you say so, Gwydion the Blessed? Blessed with poetry, with enlightenment, with wisdom.
     Hazel nuts plop (such music!) into the silver river, immediately set upon by the salmon that linger in the pools. And by the Salmon Holly King himself.

     "The land is you, you are the land," the voice affirms, this time from behind. A tree reveals a youth, walking from behind its large trunk. Dressed as before, the adolescent sheens in a translucent silver coverlet that stops at his upper thighs. "These things, around you, on you," he motions. "Why are they there? Why is your hair so red. Your eyes so green. The earth your cloak and holly upon your brow?"
     A smile comes as the boy walks forth, more fully into view.
     The fish disband, going in their paces once more.
     "I only ask. A curiosity," he goes on, walking to the edge of the stream to see the kingly fish there. The boy looks down, and in another world, he'd be as likely to drop in a line and have a seat.

     There is a shimmer of water. The stags bow their horned heads to drink and, dry, the red-headed king appears on the boulder next to the golden Gwydion, as if he had never been a fish at all. Or ... had always been one. Are fish considered wet? Truly?
     "I am a reflection of it, it is a reflection of me. When I am transformed, it is transformed. I live, and look around me..." He marvels at it still, though he feels he has walked in it now a thousand years. "... how changed. Full. More living now, in constant harvest, then when the trees were full of bees and honey at the end of spring. Spring is the promise. Harvest is the Realization of that promise." Davydd looks over to you, then at himself.
     "Living is a part of Dying," he shrugs. "More than it is the other way around. Why is my hair more red, my eyes more green? I am more of myself, perhaps. It is the ...change brought by the seasons. Oaks go scarlet in the fall," and the scarlet oak is just another name for the holly.
     Red and white, the colors of the king...
     "It would be," Davydd smiles suddenly, "...like asking why you are so golden. Why your eyes are silver. Do you know the real answers to those things?"

     His eyes are silver?
     They are blue.
     "I am not in my own kingdom," the boy explains. He smiles though. "I am as I wish to be seen by you, here."
     "Why are you still here, alone?"

     "I think I am sleeping where I normally walk, so... I walk where I normally sleep," Davydd offers. His eyes look from the blue-eyed, golden haired god, to the world around him. To himself. "I come here at will. But now... I cannot seem to leave," he murmurs. "It must be daylight in the mortal world," he posits. For why else would he be stuck? "I keep to evening hours. The sun... my brother... is my mortal enemy." There is a slant to his mouth.
     "Just like in the old stories..."
     "For a time, it grieved me. For another age, I fought it. For yet another, I resigned to it. Now, it is as it is and as it should be. The full moon is an echo of the fullest face of the sun. It really is no different. And... besides... if I were consigned to the day, I would miss the stars..."

     "The sun is a star," the adolescent observes. "I like them both."
     "Maybe you should wake? The kingdom will be as you are. It is eternal. Maybe you should wake and do what it is you do there?"

     Davydd looks at Gwydion again and then to the canopy of the trees. Very little sky can be seen from here. Just enough to see the tail of an autumn constellation. "Maybe it is," he whispers. "I have much to do... but..." Red eyebrows cock upward and the Holly King smirks beautifully beneath clusters of berries, crowned in glory as he is. "I don't seem to be in any hurry."
     And what will I find upon waking...?
     Hunger?
     Thirst?
     A universe changed?
     Or will it seem merely as it has always been, now that life has imitated the artifice of centuries...

Posted by rowan at June 18, 2004 02:09 PM