That daughter is Ashes.

  In Cloud, they know that Ashes is her mother’s captive in the underworld, an anti-Persephone. Yearly, she emerges into light in the very earliest spring, in lambing-time—we’d call it Candlemas. She brings the snowdrops. As long as she walks Cloud, through spring and summer and the harvest, its earth and air are kindlier.

  My mother got me in her glass.

  Still as snow on snow I pass;

  But green in greener world I wake

  And lighter of the dark I make.

  In my coming I do leave;

  Death of dying I bereave

  Kit and Thea reenact this story in A Crowd of Bone. He’s another of those hapless late adolescents (he’s only about 19) who is press-ganged by myth. He hasn’t a clue what’s going on as he’s a stranger to this country—Out Lune—and amazed with love. But Thea’s trying desperately to break the myth, to wrench the heavens off their immutable course. She knows what must come at Hallows, when her vengeful mother hunts her down and drags her back under Law. The tragedy is that she never tells Kit.

  “My mother fed me to her crows, she burned my bones and scattered them; my braided hair she keeps.”

  Thea

  I told the story of Cloud & Ashes to my mother—she found the prose impenetrable—and she said piteously, “Couldn’t you have made her an aunt?”

  That’s the story. In the myth, so in the ritual, Ashes goes down with the summer constellations under Law. Winter and the long dark come. But Ashes holds the world in keeping. Without her, it would die. So the Cloudish womenfolk choose one among them as her avatar; or rather, Ashes is on whom she lights. They “late Ashes”: seek for her at random on the hills, with fire. By the pseudo-period of Cloud & Ashes, around 1600, they have heirloom lanterns; and whose ever candle goes out last is she.

  Ashes is a she, and so is Brock, but they are breeches roles. Cloud, in some ways, is a very gendered world, though one in which the women turn the sky. But in this world, boundary-crossing—between male and female, death and life—is numinous. Among the companies of travelling players who enact the great myths as a sort of rowdy sacrament, those who take on Tom o Cloud and the goddesses are vowed to those parts for life. So the born-male player who is Annis in the mysteries is My Lady to the world. And when the child Noll Grevil speaks the couplets that I quoted, “He is she, is Ashes now.” For that moment, she indwells in him. He will have been Ashes to the end of his story.

  In her transformation, the person that was is obliterated, greyed out; her face and hands are rubbed with ashes, her hair is braided with amulets that jangle and chime; she wears skin breeches. Last of all, the chosen one puts on the Ashes coat, which is itself a nameless demi-deity, a sort of Ursa Major. It awaits her, whatever way she turns. From that moment, Ashes is mute.

  At Lightfast—that’s the winter solstice—Ashes goes round with the guisers, crossing every threshold of their scattered community. These aren’t the vowed players, but a company of local men and boys. At every house, they play the combat of Leapfire and old Lightfast, who will slay his son; over and over, Ashes resurrects the dead sun. Then she sains the children of the household, marking them with ashes from her soulbag. Her tutelary role is silent.

  When she speaks, it is to tell a death. Mourners come to her with ashings for her soul bag, something that their dead beloved had kept against his death—an earring, a charm. (Ashmothers give them to newborns; sailors break them with their lovers.) What she tells is not the shape and shadow of an earthly life, but what a person is, herself essentially, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” What Ashes “speaks and spells” is an ingathering, a book of sibyl’s leaves. To die untold, judicially, is more dreaded than the hanging. Thieves, whores, beggars, bastard children, and (I think) a class of the untellable, however prosperous: those wretched souls are wrecked on Law.

  (I’ve only just thought of this: there are Ashes who do try to tell outcasts, out of charity: but they must find some link to these forgotten lives.)

  Cloud & Ashes began as a telling. Jómsborg, the fantasy discussion group at Cambridge, held a story-circle, getting on for fifty years ago. (My goddesses!) Somebody started a raucous comic tale about Diggory, whose fiddle-playing would wake the dead, and handed it off to me. The worth of an ashing is irrelevant. I was possessed. Chanting, I told an embryonic, vatic “Jack Daw’s Pack.” That’s never happened since. At least not in company. In writing, if I’m fortunate, I do get wordstorms. White-outs.

  Is Ashes a “sacrifice or scapegoat”? No. Being Ashes is an honor, though a scary one. Women who are twice or thrice Ashes are admired; great tellers are revered. The burden can be awful; the rewards, exhilarating. Ashes may walk anywhere, at any time, unharmed; she may do as she wills and take what she wants, materially, sexually. But with freedom comes the forfeit: she must not keep anything she gets as Ashes, not a lover, not a farthing. If she bears a child begotten in those months, he (he’s always been a boy) must be sacrificed, his blood spilled on the land. That indelible image came from “The Scarecrow”: “And to a stake they tied / A child new born…” And with that, the wretched woman loses all her will. Like her child, she is no one, and the common property of all. Remember the madwoman that Margaret encounters in the fields? She was Ashes and still is.

  And here again, the story breaks the myth. Whin was Ashes, and bore a son, and did not give him up for sacrifice, but left him on a fellside to his fate. He’s no one, and the common property of all. Being nameless, he is called the crow lad, and with Thea’s daughter, he will change the world.

  The crow lad

  SS: Do you really think people don’t read you because of your delicious dissolved iambics? Have you heard that, or read it? To me, the language is the number one reason to read your books! Personally, I don’t open Cloud & Ashes unless I have time to read the whole thing, because once I start, I can’t stop.

  GG: Bless you. To be read like this—to be the element in which you move—is why I write. I have been greatly fortunate in readers, from the first. Writers whom I love and honor—Diana Wynne Jones, John Crowley—have said heartlifting things about my language. John Clute and Michael Swanwick have championed my work. I have a small, impassioned following. My readers have become my friends. I rejoice. But I am not for all tastes. Indeed, some reviewers have found my style precious, pretentious, silly, even offensive. I shrug it off. At least I try. But sadly, some readers I’ve encountered do feel put off—excluded—by my style, and they’re aggrieved, as if I were mocking their intelligence. That hurts.

  My mother found my stuff frustratingly opaque. Back in the late 40s, she had a budding career as a journalist and screenwriter. She wrote a Nero Wolfe treatment that was optioned by Spyros Skouras for 20th Century Fox. She didn’t tell me about that Hollywood offer until sometime in the 21st century. What happened? I asked. “I met Daddy.” If I was going to insist on writing, I think she wanted me to have the rest of her career. “Why can’t you write books that people can understand?”

  I developed style long before I found anything to say with it. So for many years, I played with comic pastiche: a Canterbury Tale with learned footnotes by one Tattersall-ffoulkes; or (and I could slap myself) take-offs on other students’ stories. That was unforgiveable. No malevolence intended—if I heard a distinctive voice, I wanted to do it—but the gibing must have stung. They had the courage to write what they felt; I was hiding behind the fireworks.

  Neither of my best beloved English teachers is enamored of my high style, but they have been my unfailing champions.

  At Wellesley, I took the time from my pre-med schedule one semester to do an independent study in creative writing. My dear Barbara Whitesides says, “I just signed your study card.” But what she gave me was a reader. She made a space—a nursery—in which I could discover what I wanted to do with my linguistic toys. She let me play. As it turned out, what this prickly self-protective satirist really wanted to write (and illustrate) was Eugenie &, a middle-grade book about an Edwardian nursery full of precocious viola-da-gambists, who said things like, “De minimis non curat lex. Alexandra doesn’t care for trifle.”

  Barbara is the soul of generosity. (She once came to a book launch at the incomparable Toscanini’s—ice cream for all!—bringing a truly marvellous, poetic puppet show.) She’s immensely proud of me, but loves essays and memoirs best, and treasures clarity and human comedy above the sublime.

  At Cambridge, I did Pract Crit with the brilliant Sylvia Adamson. We spent two years in a conversation—sometimes an argument—on stylistics, close-reading English unseens, both prose and poetry, from many centuries. A writer’s voice, I’d say, is music—though the sense I hear it with is not quite hearing—and is also what he leaves unsaid and how she moves through space-time, like a chess knight, or a window-shopper, or a skipped stone, waking waves. And how is that achieved? she’d say, and make me analyze. We looked at rhetoric and grammar, sound and sense, at figures, etymologies, allusions, prosody. I am still immeasurably proud that I got a starred First on that paper.

  Sylvia is a great scholar and a very dear friend; but fantasy averse, and cool toward ecstasies. What we both love is Wodehouse, early moderns, and philology.

  For some, the prospect of reading Moonwise or Cloud & Ashes can be daunting. I find that hearing my language does make it easier to understand, as moving to music helps dancers to dance. After readings I’ve been told, Oh now I get it. I wish there were recordings.

  SS: I’m intrigued by the idea of “proper worldbuilding.” Of course it’s possible to work out a world, as Tolkien did, in meticulous detail, taking care that everything lines up. But like you, Tolkien had a strong sense of the “feel” of his intended country, of the images that kindled and supported it, and without this vision, the result could have been quite dry and uninspired. In other words, the fact that Tolkien devised a complex Elvish grammar is less important to his worldbuilding, as I see it, than the fact that he really liked the thought of elves flitting through the moonlight, or that he was thrilled by the image of a dragon’s treasure.

  GG: Oh but Tolkien’s grammar—like my dissolved iambics—is a form of magic in itself. A bespelling. Gramarye. (As a philologist, Tolkien knew the twining of those words.) Just seeing Welsh for the first time on the page, he wrote: “A flash of strange spelling and a hint of a language old and yet alive. It pierced my linguistic heart.” Remember the iconic story: how, grading exam papers, Tolkien scribbled on a blank page, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Hobbit? Words summoned worlds for him.

  SS: I take your point! And, as Tolkien leapt from grading exams to dreaming of hobbits, I want to return to your refrain, “the numinous in the commonplace.” I am thinking of Sylvie’s marbles, which are worlds. There’s something rapturous to me in this image of the shabby bag of worlds, an object threadbare with play, that you can pull into bed, spilling cosmos on the quilt. It’s a feeling from childhood, I think—Stevenson’s “Land of Counterpane.” You’re a little bit feverish, but not too sick to play. You have to stay home from school, and you’re scrunched up in bed with your favorite books and toys. It’s an image of a person who’s stepped outside the workaday world, with its duties, clocks, and instrumental logic, into a space of wild creativity, where the humblest objects glow with vitality.

  GG: O my, what a lovely image! I was not that dreamy child, though I admired her in books. Who doesn’t love Sara Crewe? (Miss Minchin excepted.) Not that I was dull—I was wildly eccentric—but I wasn’t a singer, a storyteller, a visionary. I was a bookworm, a puzzled clown, and later a wiseguy. My feeling for the numinous has deepened with age.

  Imagination comes hard to me. That is, my inner sight is dim. I don’t get vivid scenes and figures moving in my head; I don’t have lightning-swift invention. It’s just not in my wiring, any more than a river of red-gold hair to my knees is or a kingfisher’s flash of wings.

  What I do have a sort of seventh sense for likenesses, for metaphor. I can see the otherwise in things. I can assemble.

  As a child, I loved to turn a slice of watermelon on a plate into a Japanese woodcut: green bridge, pink sea, black fish. The bathtub hardware was a cloaked and hooded governess, like Miss Clavel, between two many-pigtailed girls, with a princess in a Spanish farthingale, with streaming hair, running far out ahead. There wasn’t a story. What I loved was the simile.

  And yes, I keep congeries of beloved things: toys, talismans, findings. Marbles, yes, and metamorphic toys like prisms and kaleidoscopes, and minikin blue-willow china, wheeled hedgepigs, pilgrimage badges of suns, moons, stars, and a tiny wren cage that I wove of twigs and hung with threads. My space is a cabinet of curiosities.

  (I adore lists in literature as well. If you share my passion for miscellany, do try to find The Faber Book of Cabbages and Kings, edited by Francis Spufford.)

  The thingness of things fascinates me: how poetry is made of etymologies and phonemes, and art of ground beetles and rabbitskin glue. Next to stylistics, the study I loved best in college was a workshop in the materials of art: a blissful apprenticeship in grinding pigments, piercing egg yolks, and not breathing while an airborne foil of goldleaf goes fluttering down, like the robe of an annunciate angel.

  I love interiors in books and art: Mole’s house and Mr. Badger’s; Edgewood; attics, nurseries, mantelshelves, and kitchens. Light falls from the left on the milkmaid pouring stillness into stillness; light indwells in earthenware. My copy of Kingdoms of Elfin falls open at spring-cleaning:

  A mysterious pair of spectacles is found in a sauceboat; a rusty strongbox in the muniment room is forced open and contains nutmegs; … when the brown bed-hangings from the Librarian’s bed-chamber are hung on the line and the dust beaten out of them, they are discovered to be cloth-of-gold and fall to pieces.

  And I so love when nature herself writes the rebuses. What else are constellations but found metaphors? Some mysteries can be pocketed, like upcast pebbles from a beach with pictures in them: a leaf, a cloud, a flock of seabirds, or a grove of birches. Others I must visit: the reflection of a certain flowering dogwood in a pond, like the silk of a kimono; standing stones with dancers caught in them; a tree that holds a dryad or a leopard or a word I cannot yet read.

  SS: Do you have thoughts about the relationship between childhood and fantasy, childhood and art?

  Gwen Raverat has said it beautifully. She writes of a path at Down made of large round water-worn pebbles, from some sea beach. They were not loose, but stuck down tight in moss and sand, and were black and shiny, as if they had been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean literally, adored; worshipped. This passion made me feel quite sick sometimes. And it was adoration that I felt for the foxgloves at Down, and for the stiff red clay out of the Sandwalk clay-pit; and for the beautiful white paint on the nursery floor. This kind of feeling hits you in the stomach, and in the ends of your fingers, and it is probably the most important thing in life. Long after I have forgotten all my human loves, I shall still remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path. In the long run it is this feeling that makes life worth living, this which is the driving force behind the artist’s need to create.

  I read memoirs of childhood, so I can share in them. I can borrow Raverat’s path of pebbles. I can be that dreamy child scrunched up in bed, like Nabokov, wrapping his chewed bedsheet round a garnet Easter egg, “so as to admire and re-lick the warm, ruddy glitter … that came seeping through with a miraculous completeness of glow and color.” I can marvel at the extraordinary paracosms shared by siblings like the Brontës or (deserving to be better known) the Farjeons.

  Most wonderful of all, I’ve been playing with a child. He’s nearly five now, and his vast imagination is a nursery of nebulas, aburst with stars, with worlds on forming worlds in orbit. Everything he sees is fiercely alive, is new and marvellous, and endlessly recombinant. I get to share his marbles. It’s a joy.

  © 2021 Greer Gilman and Sofia Samatar

  Greer Gilman’s books appeared in A Conversation Larger Than the Universe, the 2018 Grolier Club exhibition on the history of fantastic literature, across the room from Mary Shelley and Hope Mirrlees. What a party! Other than her Cloudish works, she’s written two metaphysical mysteries set in the theatre world of 1610s London, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Cry Murder! In a Small Voice and Exit, Pursued by a Bear. Her critical works include her prefaces to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin and Of Cats and Elfins for Handheld Press, her chapter on “The Languages of the Fantastic” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, and her essay, “Girl, Implicated: The Child in the Labyrinth in the Fantastic.” Her most recent poem, “Unselving,” appears in The Deadlands, #2. Wordwise, she does everything that James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Sofia Samatar is the author of four books, including the World Fantasy Award-winning A Stranger in Olondria and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her memoir The White Mosque is forthcoming from Catapult Books in 2022. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

  POST MASSACRE PSYCHE EVALUATION

  by Abu Bakr Sadiq

  I know what I’ve seen of blood & death—what the night forgets

  to cover in its shadows; what part of paradise a bullet

  undresses before the body‚ before stealing light from its eyes.

  What was asked is, are you healing or still hurting?

  I don’t know what you’re looking for in me

  but in my sleep, I keep talking to dead bodies.

 

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