64 | swanspirit
May 22, 2009 at 1:28 AM

My favorite story within a story

Chapter 10
THE TALE OF THE UNEXTINGUISHED MOON

A tale told in the bothies . A tale of the long nights of winter– but one that was never told in the hearing of any priest.
Once upon a time the Moon fell into the earth .This was after the mountains had been created, and the seas,and the straths, and the forests, but there were no men or women. This the folk on the bothies said , was how men and women had come into the world.
It was the Bog King who caused it. When the straths were made, many wee glens were made with them, and the water from the mountain burns got trapped in some of these glens and became stagnant,and the earth there became soft and the two blended together water and earth , and so the bogs were made,and the black Bog King sat at the bottom under the reeds and the mud and the sticky green slime, and ruled it all ,and the bogs became full of ghoulies and bogles and dead things and horrors that crept in the night . The all walking creatures learned to fear the bogs, because whenever a fawn or a boar , a badger or a cuddie, or even the harmless little hedgehog entered them in dark moonless nights, the bogles would rise up wailing out of their holes and the wisp lights wuold flicker , and the slimy hands of of all the dead horrors beneath the mud would grasp at the poor creatures legs, and pull it screaming piteously down into the terrible death that waited grinning in the Bog Kings court.
Now the sun was distant and wouldn’t stir himself for the sake of the animal-kind , but when the moon heard of all the evil that was going on in bogland whenever her back was turned, she decided to go down herself and see what could be done. So she covered her shining body with a dark cloak, and pulled a hood over her gleaming hair, and entered the bogland, stepping easily from tussock to tussock by the light of her white feet; and whenever the ghoulies and bogles came wailing and gnashing at her, or the horrors and the dead things rose and scrabbled at her with their cold fingers, she threw back her hood and the light of her beautiful face flooded the whole country side, and the dead things fled shrieking away.

( Mungo crossing the burn, feet scuffling the wet stones, fingers scrabbbling for a hold among the tufts and the waterpurple, running, walking, running again with the gait of a hunted man)

But it was a huge bog,and the squelching mud seemed to stretch away for ever and ever, and at length the Moon began to weary of picking her way across it. So she sat down to rest on the trink of an old tree that was lying half submerged in the ooze. She sat back thankfully and rested her feet on one branch and laid her head on another . Then the tree began to move! Aaah
but it wasnt a tree at all ! No, it was the Bog King himself lying basking there like a hippopotamus in the slime , and the two branches were his arms . He grabbed her feet in one hand and threw the other round her neck and struggle though she might the Moon couldn’t get free. Then the Bog King drew her down, down into the clart, down under the peat and under the very roots of the reeds; down into his own dark kingdom, and a black bubble or two burst on the surface , and the Moon was gone.

I need hardly tell you how great was the rejoicing among the bogles when they realised that their hated enemy was gone, and that every night would now be a black night with only the faintest starfire from heaven to watch their evil doings. They jumped and skirled and screeched with joy. They made the very branches of the forest dirl and ding with their clamour.
They grew bolder in their forays from the bog; they crept by night over the moorland tearing and butchering any living creature they met; and the owls and the eagles and the ravens perched higher and higher on the branches for safety; and the squirrels and the badgers burrowed deeper, and the deer and the boars, the otters and the beavers, even the smallest beasties, the very beetles glow-worms and spiders retreated further and further yet from the marches of the bogland,and darkness and death were on the face of the world.
Then Goban the creator stamped his hoof, and the trees, the real tress of Scotland began to talk and move. In the wind their leaves whistled to eah other; in the still their bodies creaked and graoned tree language. Where is the Moon? they asked. The swiveled their heads, turning from side to side. Where is she? The sent out their leaves in the days the world would later know as autumn, Find her! they said to the leaves, and the leaves went fluttering and whistling across the straths. The birds took to the air, the burrowers took to the earth, and the fish plummeted the lochbeds; they all sought her. But the Moon was nowhere to be found.

(And Mungo , clambering the learigs entering the forest as the fist bird awakens,sense rather than sees the disturbed hunters in the bracken that rustles an scrapes noisily under the hem of his cassock, Mungo desperate with mission )

Beside the bog grew a small hawthorn tree. She was so close to the bog and so small that the bogland folk had forgotten all about her. Well, the hawthorn held her wheesht until all the other trees had had their say .Then she piped up . “Ahem folks, I think that maybe I just might ken where our Moon is” though she had to repeat her self several times before they all heard her. Where ?? said the rowan Where? said the birch, Where? said the yew and the pine, the fir and the alder. Where? rumbled the old oak, last of all. And so hawthorn told them how she had seen the Bog King pull the moon down below the surface. When they heard this, the trees marched in a great mass– yes the entire forest moved–down the mountain slopes and along the straths until they had surrounded the bog on all sides. Then they sank their roots down under the reeds and into the slime and mud until they found the hall of the Bog King, and began knocking on his roof. Ar first it was a gentle tap,and then louder, then louder still, until it sounded as though thunder had sunk under the earth in pursuit of the vanished Moon, so loud did that hammer sound.
And that is exactly what the Bog King thought it was.
“Who’s that banging on my roof he called and the pine answered “ME, GUITHAIS, with the thunder in my roots wanting out Moon” “Away to hell,” said the Bog King, and laughed.
“Who’s that thumping in my loft, he shouted next, and the Alder replied , Me, FEARN , with the thunder in my roots wanting our Moon” “Ach away and boil your heid”, grumbled the Bog King.
“Who’s that skirling down my lun ?” he growled a while later , and the oak said ME, DARACH, with the thunder in my roots wanting our Moon ”
And then the Bog King fearing that the roof and walls were going to fall in about his lugs, broke the twining chains that held the Moon, and the trees saw the strange beautiful face of their lost Moon rising up through the foul waters of the bog, and a moment later she was shining down on them again from heaven, and all the bogles and ghoulies and dead things fled shrieking away . But from that day to this the Moons face is pitted with dark shadows whenever she remembers her stay in the Bog Kings hall.

( Mumgo, resting against a trunk, raises his face as the cock crows and thinks of Mairi sleeping. And asks himself, “is there any sin I would no committ to save her life?” And there is none . And he smiles knowing it.)

Now the Moon had twin bairns by the Bog King , and the laddie’s name was Nechtan, and the lassies name was Mongfinn, and they were bonny to look on, but as they were made in part of the cold black mud of the bog,they could not fly up to heaven with their mother . So they stayed right here on middle earth, in this world of ours, and whiles they would look up to heaven to see their mothers shining face, and whiles they would look down below into their fathers darkness; and they were the first humans, because they were tall and and slender and supple as young trees, but their roots were not anchored so deep in their earth ,nor were their heads held so high to heaven; and they had legs like the deer, and eyes like the hawk, and a throat like the song birds, and and appetite like the wolf,and pride like the the eagle,and cunning like the fox.
That was how man and woman first came into the world, they said in the evening in the peat firelight.

Well grass grows and water flows, folk lust, and one day Mongfinn was heavy with her brother’s child. A boy it was; but looking at the wee squalling thing with the pride and joy that all parents have felt since,
Mongfinn and Nechtan had a sort of premonition that things were not as they should be. And as there was this shadow lying over them which they couldn’t understand or explain in any way , that is what they called the bairn . Shadow, because he had come between them like a shadow in the night.

( and Mungo smells the morning in the forest , the sweet summer morning and finds himself among the blue and yellow flowers that are slowly opening to the first sun, and AH! he sighs suddenly, cheerfully breathing the morning and his fears take bat wings and fly off with the vanishing night)

The mountains were still moving in those days, the thunder giants still rolled boulders for sport, and cast great slabs of warm rock at each other across yawning ravines. One bright forenoon when the rainbow was standing high among the clouds and the water was dripping from the heather flowers,a hundred and more young firs fell to their knees and bowed themselves like young novices,and when the earth closed again it closed around their topmost branches and all below was gone back into the earth once more, tree and leaf, squirrel and nest, and Mongfinn and her Nechtan, who walked no more in the light of the world.
What became of the son? Human, he had the appetite of a wolf, and the wolf folk found him hunting. Strangely enough they didnt kill him, because they thought he was a wolf, so they raised him as one of their own, a young wolf cub.
Shadow grew strong and forest wise and stealthy. He killed for food,and he killed for pleasure too; but then sometimes a feyness would come on him, and he would take a scunner to himself and his bloody hands and his dripping jaws and then he would wander away into the solitude, away from the blood and the stink of blood, and talk gently to the trees and beasts,and while he would press his face into the soft moss round the tree roots and weep. Then the forest folk looked at him and wondered.
All except the corbie. The corbie is a wise bird, and understood things better left unspoken. One day, as Shadow walked disconsolately beneath the branches, the black corbie perched above his head and spoke to him. “Shadow , Shadow, what makes you so sad?” And Shadow answered her ” O, It’s all alone I am sister, and no one to share the burden of life with me ”
So the corbie spoke to him again and told him to go to a certain birch tree,and to take the tree and to make from it a woman of white wood, and Shadow did so; and because her body was white as the heartwood of the tree, and because her hair was fair as the shoots of it, he called her Bas Barra Geal , which is Princess Bright Palm; and from their loving line the folk of he Scotland and of all the world are descended.

(And the warm sun glowed in the green over head,and down into every glade and clearing it spilled the cascade of its golden apples. on Such a day thought Mungo I ken that life is immortal. And reassured by the miracle with which he was surrounded, the old man pushed on, to work his own bit miracle for the folk , there in the forest’s depth)

from SONG OF THE FOREST by COLIN MACKAY