Expiation

“Force, the child of desperation,
Is the last resort of the hopeless.
Who understand strength only in body.

Faith, they understand not.
Thinking sorrow and torment can break
A resolve termed stubborn rebellion.”

The lyrics — his lyrics — blared from the radio. Ewan punched the power button in disgust. The slender bud vase sitting atop the machine, stuffed with cuttings from the monkshood bushes that grew at his door, trembled at the violence of the force.

“Oh God, I can’t live in memory.” Ewan cried, half-pleading, through clenched teeth.

The little purple-cowled flowers glared with ecclesiastical disapproval at this mild blasphemy. But Ewan ignored them. These monks, after all, had a murderous purpose and were in no position to give moral scoldings. The poison contained within them was the means by which he rid himself of the shaggy mountain wolves that stalked the night.

Portrait of a modern troubadour: an ethereal flush upon the apex of acutely angled cheekbones, a tinge of pink pastel contrasting a waxy complexion. Rhythmic flutterings of aquiline fingers, caressing taut strings. A lanky body moving in time to the torrent of notes churning trough the air: crashing forward, leaping back. Rolling over and over in a siren’s grandiose song of adulation. An apparition of virulent spirit: conviction like flint, touched with a vein of emotion’s glittering diamonds.

Now, look a little closer at the aging man groveling before sound waves belching from a hunk of rusting metal. See the true image: the bleached bones of a modern Prometheus staked out on an isolated peek, flanked by macabre crows looking on without compassion. Hercules never showed to free the prostrate man, shackled by his own boundless love to the dirt he once hoped to cultivate.

Yes, that song, that ode to moral purity, that anthem of inspiration, was his own funeral dirge.

What had made him think, flush with the arrogance of youth, that he, unlike all the other heralds who preceded him, could impart in his audience some desire that lasted beyond the resonance of the notes?

The same thing they’d all thought of course: the sheer strength of his indefatigable will.

At least the others had names that struck a chord in memory. Fate had him crueler to him. One song, rocketing to fame, and afterwards — not even a record deal.

The words are too fanciful. Why not use simpler meaning?

Audiences want a quick thrill, not a philosophy lesson.

There’s no melody: how can you dance to it?

So the excuses from the credentialed industry experts ran. And who were you to challenge them, you lone dissenter? You had talent, but what was talent. Lots of people have talent. They had Experience, the titles and market research. And you couldn’t argue with that.

What good was artistry if it didn’t produce results?

Just go our way, and we’ll both profit, you’ll see, they’d said. They and all the women whose sultry eyes masked a vicious insipidity. Bend a little. Let us polish your raw edges. It’s just the packaging that changes, not what’s within.

After three decades, he’d given up trying, taken what money that song had brought and retreated to a cottage in the foothills of mountains only visited infrequently by intrepid outdoorsmen. His guitar remained buried in a closet. His voice, once so pure and sonorous, only ever grunted in greeting to a passing stranger.

He told himself the absence of torment was happiness. But each day, though he prayed for absolution, the little purple father-confessors steadfastly refused to grant him exit from this purgatory wherein his flat, discordant voice, transposed imperfectly on warped vinyl, eternally subjected his captive dreams to a ceaseless torment at the hands of the soulless record machinery. The penance, perhaps, of his cowardice, of having turned tail and fled from the institutionalized forces of intransigent blindness.

The days passed much the same: the morning spent making momentous jobs of minute household tasks. Then the mad dash across the moors. All with the same purpose: exhaust the body to kill the mind: smother that irrepressible instinct for observation, the knack to translate things seen into neatly-metered metaphors, the problem of how to fit them together, into songs that would never be sung. But would lie on miscellaneous pieces of paper to be stuck into books and filed away, only to turn up at inconvenient moments, shouting angry epithets at him.

Inadequate. Pitiful. Weak-willed man. All talk, no action. False convictions.

And there he’d be, on his knees again before the record-player. But the lavender monks simply shook their heads: Without repentance, there can be no absolution.

On the afternoon he heard the singing, he thought he’d gone mad.

It was a thin, tremulous voice, breathy and uneven, not technically gifted in the least. But the fervor of its intonation was purer than even his own when he’d recorded the words.

“And I feel the past is naught but confusion,
Men tell me my world’s an illusion
The beliefs that have grown in my soul
Were sown by alien hands
By those old enough to know.
Well who are they to tell me so?”

Ewan rushed around the crook in the path he was travelling. There, in the middle of a heather-strewn field, leaning against a boulder was a woman. Young by the look of her. Her face was obscured by the mass of raven hair that cascaded down her shoulder, over her breast and reached down her waist as she bent forward over a sketchbook.

The noise of gravel flying from beneath Ewan’s feverish footfalls alerted her to an intruder upon her reverie.

Her head snapped upright. A faint furrow appeared between delicately arched eyebrows. Raspberry-colored lips pursed outward with a concern that quickly passed. An impish smile replaced her pout: she had recognized the author of the words she sang.

The iris of her grey eyes, Ewan would have sworn, was of lodestone, for though a wary twinkle darted at him, he could not help but be drawn deeper into the turbulent currents running within.

He knew he was staring and should offer some greeting, but whatever his once-meagre skills in small talk, his self-imposed exile had erased. He stood, awkwardly, twisting his hands about themselves.

She offered no lifeline to him, but sat looking up at him expectantly, one eyebrow cocked. There was nothing of slyness in the way she held his gaze as he slowly crossed the expanse of tufted mountain grass that separated them, all the while unable to tear his eyes from hers. Hers was a boldness bereft of guile, the kind of simple openness that belongs only to the blunt and forthright.

He recognized it in her because it was a quality he once had.

Standing before her, he stammered like a clueless schoolboy unsettled by the authority of the favorite teacher one does not want to disappoint.

“That song — . You — .”

“Am young and cannot appreciate artistry?” she said with mock gravity, the same expressive eyebrow arching suggestively.

“Well, yes, in a sense.” He said stupidly because he didn’t know what else to say.

There was too much to say, words too important to be got wrong. All his life, they’d flowed like a torrent down from his mind and to the tip of his tongue, but now: it appeared the well was dry.

She looked down for a second, then back up at him. A hideous transformation had worked itself into her features. They were haggard and wan, the physiognomy of a crone, not a girl young and full of life.

A husky edge penetrated the lilting timbre of her voice as she spoke again:

“I don’t mean to insult you, for your voice, your lyrics, they overflow with such spirit. And I have such reverence for the majesty inherent to such purity.

“But there is such pain there, so much of suffering, a sense of desperation that belongs to some half-mythical creature of yore, whose existence serves to teach men some tale. Soulfulness and tragedy should not be mingled in life, it is so — ”

She paused, and the swirling depths of her eyes spilled forth in two delicate tears that rolled slowly down her pale cheek.

Ewan slowly bent down, his joints snapping protest as he moved to kneel beside her. A lock of hair had fallen across her face; he reached out and tucked it behind her ear, so the misery swimming in the languid waters of her eyes was laid full bare before the world that caused it.

“What was it you were trying to be?” he murmured.

“Myself.” she whispered.

He smiled sadly.

“That’s what I used to say.”

They sat in contemplative silence for a moment. And then, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t stifle an impulse.

“Come away from the world with me.”

She looked at him, the waters of her eyes serene in their sadness, and slowly extended a slender hand for him to take.

*****

Night had brought tranquility to the landscape surrounding Ewan’s cottage. But inside, an exorcism of the soul, watched by the vigilance of the somber monks, raged fruitlessly on. The demons, so long established in their tenancy, refused to be evicted.

“All these years, I’ve been avoiding acknowledging it, but I’ve lost, Lorna, I’ve lost.”

A tremendous groan, perhaps a shriek of victory from the demons within, shook Ewan’s chest and his rigid frame collapsed in on itself. Defeated and exhausted, he slumped forward on the kitchen table.

Lorna’s physiognomy contracted. It wasn’t pity that pulled her features in upon themselves so much as an understanding, born of experience, of his struggle.

Silently, she rose from her chair and circled the table. Stopping by him, she knelt, positioning her body close to him, and ran her fingers in gentle, soothing strokes across his matted hair.

“I can’t give you any words of comfort because there are none. I won’t insult you by lying.” she whispered, her lips brushing his ear as they formed the syllables.

He turned his head, saw the concern in the eyes of the girl he’d known only for a few hours — real concern, unlike that any other hard shown him — and pulled her into his lap. She adjusted her limbs to accommodate him, making no protest against his boldness.

But was it really boldness? He wondered.

“A few hours — is that really enough to know?” his voice trailed off pointedly.

“Yes, for the soul is immutable.” she replied without hesitation.

The sea within her eyes was roiling; it mirrored the fervency of her tone.

“I’m not so sure it is.” Ewan replied quietly, “It can be starved and suffocated and whipped, Just like the body. Only it doesn’t have the sense to die after physical trauma. It lives on, a husk of its former self.”

He paused.

“Words, all my life a prisoner to words.” he muttered acidly.

“Then take action.” Lorna whispered.

An earnest light, against which he had no power, illuminated her features.

He obeyed. And she, who could understand that this was not lust, but the consummation of a love burning since his first conscience thought, resisted none of his rough caresses. The lavender clerics in the vase by the bedside drew their cowls over their eyes and blushed.

A vial of powdered aconitum, extracted from the roots of the ecclesiastical assassins, lay, empty, on the table. Two bodies, now beyond physical cares, lay on the bed.

Their last confession, heard by the attentive ears of the flowery monks, rested just beyond the reach of a stiff hand, once so fluid and adept , that had plucked at strings with a love which died long before its bearer:

“Indifference’s mercenaries took my youth and vision and have come
To slay what remains of my dried up, octogenarian soul.
They would have turned their vicious dagger upon her purity next.

Can you then call my treatment of her, borne of love, a corruption?
For her purity, once a shield, was mad a funeral pyre by you.
In me, the wolf to her sheep, she found some fleeting comfort.

Be outraged, if you must, but remember, you’ve confused being with living
And outlawed discernment. I, then, must be the ultimate idol of this idea,
For I, in bringing her down, raised her up, and then took what I created.”