Lindwurm well hell….
When a hero goes into the Valley of Death,
All primed with Kipling,
“Ours is not to question why,
Ours is just to do or die…”
You know it is not going to turn out without complications.
What happened to Tatterhood ?
when she went over the wall,
Plunging down amongst the clambering clammers?
I see her goat disappearing and finally her wooden spoon.
I can hear her battle cry still, and repeat it often:
“If my life be short may my fame be great.”
“I suck on the pap of life and I shall be a hard butcher to anyone who tries to take it from me.”
I can see from where I am how she disappeared into the blood thirsty masses, the smell hairy oafs, deplorables, tattooed and unglued, heaps of gnashing and spittle.
Oh I remember that raging of battle outside the castle wall. And later, her triumphant return, her marriage to the younger prince the celebration.
All of this is well and good.
But not, at the moment, helpful.
Whilst Tatterhood is off at the holy war,
In my configuration,
There is another sister at home in the castle…..
And I don’t mean, said fair innocent
with the golden ball and a penchant for golden eyed frogs.
I am talking about another one.
Another sister. The oldest oldest oldest.
It gives one pause to wonder:
How could there have been another sister?
What did the ‘barren’ queen not talk about
that night of the red and white flowers,
just before the highly anticipated conception of the twins?
Oh we’ve seen the press clippings about the happy couple….
the king the queen the selfies etc…
but from what I can tell, in my world,
this has been a fairy tale ruse.
And not an uncommon one.
On some deeper truth
The queen with her ripe and red inner garden was refusing the king.
This deserves, requires further exploration.
We must be clear,
The queen was not a passive, succulent field
waiting for an old king’s seed to fall
onto her soil,
bleed her nutrients
whilst growing common weeds.
The golden apples,
protected with the jealousy of Hera herself,
did not start with dismal possibilities,
waiting for worms to impregnate them.
I know this, as surely as I know my own mother.
The golden apples were royal,
And potent,
And full of possibility.
and my mother was not going squander them.
This, I believe, was a decree sent down from Hera herself.
My mother and her children, her brood, her flock, her little ones.
We fluttered and sang along beside her, in her beauty, and food and adventures.
She had us skiing early, and wandering through snowy paths to school.
She found us some horses at an old ranch, and she set us to wandering through the green undergrowth.
She drove us around up and down the dusty roads.
Galavanting around.
Stopping at the country markets, looking at antiques.
And long long stays, swimming at over the shale at Craigleth and at Black Rock.
The older, older, older sister might have been a shotgun child.
There are many of them around.
Children of dubious parentage or questionable timing.
“ wow, such a mature baby born at a mere thirty weeks, Such a surprise”
Or maybe, and more likely,
the older child was conceived in the cold, brutal fumble of clumsy early sex.
Before the queen knew that all this was all could be expected here
in her sex bed with the king.
The same clumsy fumble, awkwardness, dryness,
“as if… as if… as if… there was no pleasure in this for him, either.”
She grew to hate him.
“Think of the queen,” he said
Female sexual pleasure was not even a concept in those days…
Grinn and Grimm and bare it…
“think of the Queen. Think of the Queen.”
And that would have been fine,
Only, she was the queen.
Tatterhood’s mother.