6.The Beasts - Duncan McGibbon (inspirational novels .txt) 📗
- Author: Duncan McGibbon
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The Beasts
1.Maimona
Alka
Cold fear and darkness still at early dawn:
fifty galleys at slow scull. Three rows of oars each
cut spurred wakes through a thousand years’ tides.
The mude surges against the waves, Malta vanishes
from coastal shallows to uncertain troughs.
L'alba part umet mar altra sol.
Here, memory lays out no seamless mould,
grasps images in flight from drying fact.
Day’s ploughshare turns darkness to quicken the sun.
Sunlight filters through rushed pelts of cloud;
coils of eel-brown rope, men crouched by bulkheads,
stiff canvas plucking at nervous gusts.
This day sought shadows thrown to action,
Poy pasa bigil mira clar tenebras!
found the black gull trembling to trim shocked flight
banking to veer beside a darkened swell.
Light shines from shadow, spills across the Alps.
Chroniclers will cast their nets, unsounded
to dredge up the ruin of those scared hours.
Living memories will die unheared.
Portolani charts enmesh chance mouthings
from scattered shipwrecks and survivors’ tales.
"Il n'est mie jours... l'alouette nous ment,"
but none can draw the acting primal sight.
Slowly the sweating mists unwrap themselves.
"It isn't daylight yet. The bird's song lies"
A thousand, two hundred years have framed
an unsure fret for the God’s City repentants.
The black prows, glistening, lunge and thrust,
turning to Genoa, while the rasping winds
disperse foamed traces of the trail laid down.
Spiculator pigris clamat 'surgere.'
The tattered, salt-starched hulks hold pilgrim's robes,
bales of paper and barrels of gall-nuts.
The watchman's warning will wake the sleepers.
Their action's trace will be etched onto stone.
Sarcophagal effigies stare naked and grey:
the Terra Incognita more unknown than Hell.
Dark fear in the navigator's steerage:
not yet time to extinguish the lanterns.
Dark fear, in the choirs and houses of faith,
founds Cologne, the Sainte Chapelle
and the Alhambra mosque.
The gull hurtles heavily to a living prey.
A chronicler's mind drops on his evidence,
which grows uncertain in discovery,
or leaves myths as charms against the real.
Quos suadet freco clamans "surgere"
to embalm fatal fact in images
which cash human eyes for the night of time,
again the watchman's voice forbidding sleep.
The flowering sea plants, brown, green
and deep red Alka, gleaming from the blades.
Now the ice sheets deliver cold cargoes
foaled from the glacier’s featureless stretch
the small ice-age, drying the Great Plains,
to populate Mexico and overrun the Toltecs.
The foaling icebergs still equatorial winds
a calm that that urged the Almoravides
over the sands to burn Kumbi
and Kublai Khan to crush the Song
resistance on the Pearl River Delta,
learning the art of the cannon,
as Europe decodes Roger Bacon’s
magic formula for black gunpowder.
Deed of Sale
You, Oberto, and you, Antonio, two humble
notaries of Genoa, would have remembered
the slave, Maimona, from Malta,
taken in the season of flowering hawthorn.
She would have lived, dumb to the world,
had you not scrawled the bill of her sale.
She had arrived on the ship that morning.
“Done in Genoa, on May the Eleventh, Twelve Forty-Eight.”
"I, Giunta sell, give and hand over to you, Raimondo.
Maimona, a slave, once of Malta.
I give you power and, physical dominion of her."
Each wild wave’s rush to the shore specifies dissent.
Maimona's event conspired, unconscious,
to make a new world of Genoan things
Can't you remember Raimondo?
She was the only known one among scores.
Reges cannot cohere.
The searching waves’ undertow specifies
the counter drag of death on love.
If the waves mismatch, much more the heart
that wrangles with fast rule
in a tide of scattered debate,
rouses a torrent that will wrest Europe
from its rooted, residual shelf
and thrust it breathless into new hells.
The Greeks said the institution was
contrary to the freedom of God,
yet modified by Biblical tradition.
Augustine said by Ham’s unhappy fault.
Ham was an infidel. The law lay down
Infidels could be enslaved as a pagan race.
Maimona was denied the privilege
of keeping silent: admission forced
from a Christian slave. "And I, Maimona
admit I am a slave and wish to be
handed over and sold to you, Raimondo."
At Terce behind the Church of St. Lorenzo.
In twelve seventy four, Aquinas died,
at Fossa Nova, a new ditch dug to name
a point, spoken by men on speechless earth,
seen as the eternal changing moment in God’s eyes.
The reliquary pointed to no clocked salvation.
Warring acolytes, regum and sacerdotum bar
the Simple Soul, his way brokered by Avignon.
Early sun strands brightly filter through.
This day the living lived. Such facts die
when men's eyes fade to die.
Three centuries fear formed a doubting
framework for personal Man,
to wake only to keep face with fear.
In early dawn light to wait for the sun
to break through darkness.
Tarbagan Fur
In Thirteen Nine, Kublai Khan
was no more and in Pistoia,
Richo was born,
son of Buonomo, butcher.
The popolo minuto
remembered
him, chopping meat for his father
in the market
place at Pistoia;
red blood
falling onto the firm stones
Yet the crust quivered.
Rocks flesh would not rest.
Stone arteries tensed.
Subsoil blood welled up, made dry flint to flow
and erupted, harsh,
against the skull strong mountains, ligaments
of the great frame.
Infertile chasms opened underground seas.
Tsincheu, the mountain
fell into the dark. At Ki-Ming Chan
one hundred leagues
of anxious water gaped wide.
While river plains
dried to dead gravel. Locusts, famine,
death, floods then
thunder heard below the earth.
Beasts fled the tremors.
By Lake Issyk-Koul,
the tarbagan arrived in great numbers
from the celestial
mountains, Tien-Shan, and pleased the hunters
who traded its skin
along with wax, alum and sandalwood.
and an enemy,
with the tarbagan fur;
Pasturella Pestis,
a plague virus
stomached in the flea's belly.
Xenopsylla Cheopis
bit men's hands
hundreds were suddenly dead with buboes.
The Tartars bought pelts
to make fur-collars for their families
bought the flea and virus,
along with male and female slaves mostly dead
within days, of terrible pain.
Then the human flea sucked deep
of infected blood
from captive wares and the trader lay dead
with his bound trade.
The celestial range had heaved endemic
fever to a rush.
The slaves transmitted
pandemic to free men.
Eighty-five thousand
were to die in Crimea, the arid land
of Cusman Tartars.
In Tana, a brawl
erupted and blazed to a seige
The besiegers
began to die.
Frustrated
they hurled
the bodies of their fellow men,
infected
over the walls of the port.
Fatigued,
stupified with crowding fear,
the Genoese
took ship to Kaffa
dying
as they sailed
then hurled themselves,
scared, westwards.
Taking secret fear
first to Sicily
then to Genoa
where Maimona
was un remembered,
shapeless,
somewhere,
placeless.
Jute Sacks
Cold fear, darkness at early dawnlight,
and a convoys row slowly.
Membranes of day filter through
pelts of fragment- fringed cloud bank.
Pink light breaks on unseen details.
Two men, Oberto and Antonio
would have forgotten the slave,
Maimonia. Holy scripture settled
just slavery, Thomas concurred:
over custom but not inheritance.
The person is led by the spirit,
as the boat is led by the pilot
and in the hold, a slave
arrived in port to-day.
Charts show surfaces. No navigator could
tell true distances from under-inked towns.
The West lay in shallows before the great cold flow.
Poor men and land, no longer distinguished,
rage, or fear, or pogroms, patterns of acts
unique to the day shaped an incomplete sense
the whole coast line guessed thought's physique.
Cold fear and darkness distilled in early dawn.
These boats know nothing of the harvest's decline.
By Thirteen Fourteen the West's corn ran dry
and Antwerp paid double that chilly year
leading to inflation in all French towns
and depression across the channel, forced ruin.
La nuech voi e'l jorns v’a a newer trade
now lay bundled below,huddled
under sacks of jute in the hold’s darkness.
Saverouse au cor gent si m'aid amours
Night vanishes to proclaim the daylight.
Sweet-tasting one, how you spur my love!
2.Fevronya.
La Mória
“Took pen, ink and vellum
and scratched all night
until an hour before dawn.”
Caroldo's chronicle
did not wish to mention
the covering of well-heads,
dead lands, ice, dead people.
On January twenty-fifth
Thirteen Forty Eight,
tremours shook him,
his cronica, citta' di Venetia
e sua edificatione.
Three bell-towers collapsed.
In the heat of later months
brought forth black death.
La moriá extinguished
fifty noble families
and two fifths of the people
according to Anonymo.
Caroldo lived on, unamused.
Those same years
saw dead lands
come alive with jackals.
'Men surrendered
to the most shameful lives,'
Villani muttered.
'No-one had known such ways
before La Moriá'
'Servants and foul girls
wore the fair fine garments
of noble dead women'
The popolo minuto told tales
of how the humours came
in the holds of Genoese galleys.
“Some are masters,
some slaves by nature,
some slaves by wartime.”
Caroldo copied from Aristotle.
Sparse labour worried
the Florentine Signoria,
but infidels were being bought
'de partibus et genere infidelium.'
The jurists said,
'Slavery was instituted
by divine law and conformed
by customary and canon law'
Three hundred and fifty seven
arrived in sixty three
thirty four puellae under twelve
and eighty five under eighteen,
'healthy and whole
in all her parts
both visible and invisible.'
Coggio whispered in Sicily
'We have as much enemies
as we have slaves.'
In Avignon, Richo played off
pagan popes,against each other
Who paid for 'bridal caskets
all of fine gold
and painted in fine azure
with figures of ladies and knights.'
He married in Avignon,
took a Florentine of sixteen,
Margherita di Domenica Bandini
of Gherandini blood and sought
to build himself a house in Pistoia,
city of his birth.
'Fourteen bracchia by fifteen,
the lesser house,
Twenty braccia by fifteen, the larger
and an orchard
thirty one by twenty.
Piero di Giunta bought the land
on the corner of Via del Fabbri.
to this was added
a flower-garden, a warehouse,
a cistern, cellars underground
and above ground, a narrow passage.
The same day in Avignon,
Richo di Buonomo,
to Monna Piera; his mother-in-law
“Tell me if you would send me
a slave or another girl...
But if you say
‘I’ll send you an old woman,’
then I like not their cooking
and they cannot bear heavy toil.
Moreover, I would not remain
dry mouthed.
Send me a fair young slave
skilled in everything.'
Birch-Bark Letters
On the Novgarod lakeside,
Fevronya's father
delivered the birch-bark message.
'Mysl's orphans have agreed
to give rent in kind
to Trofalya and his brothers.
Six koraby’a of rye,
and one of wheat,
three of malt.
The gift is three martens
and a pud of honey.
The children;
each, three squirrels
and three bundles of flax
a sheep and canvas.
By the lakeside,
they already knew
they had to move on
when the second birch bark
was sent.
“Greetings to Yuri and Maksim.'
from all Mysl's orphans
Trofalya, the one you gave us
does not take our part.
He sells us
and we are robbed by him
and does not let us leave.
If he continues here
then we have no strength
to be settled with him.”
So no more of Trofalya.
“Give us a mild man
for that we beg you.”
Mysl and his orphans
followed the Msta river
to Torzhok
then carried bales
of flax to Tver
Mysl found a new land
with Mikhail
in the village of Medna
with the hamlets
and wastes of old
relating to the village and forest.
With the meadow
beyond the river Tvertsa
near the Istar hayfields
and the bound and limit
of that meadow
is by its old gully
from the river Tvertsa
upstream
and from the old gully
by the hollow to the rock
opposite three graves
along Vyshny grave
and straight
to the river Tvertsa
and down by the Starsky arable
passing the Medna meadow
on the Tvertsa.
Trofalya's children
could not end their movements
and left the posad of Tver
on the river Tvertsa.
They disappeared in the environs
of Moscow,
took the rivers to Volokolamsk.
The good Nikon, chronicler,
probably did not see them,
as they fled into the city.
Fevonya, older now, more travelled
and strong and the others
huddled in a cart,
with baggage and wares.
Grand duke, Dmitri, fled
the city, so satisfied that
Tokhtamysh would not force
his citadel's stone walls
that he left Eudoxia, his wife,
with the boyars.
But the wealthy desired to follow him.
Fevronya had never known
such violence. The common people.
peasants, such as Trofalya,
held a veche assembly,.
to forbid the boyars to leave
on pain of death
and confiscation of property,
except Eudoxia,
who hastered to
Kastrana in the North
without her treasure,
in this they were true to their word.
The Veche elected Ostei,
grandson of Olgerd
who ordered the city
and prepared its defence,
as more refugees came in from the land
August Twenty Third, Thirteen Eighty Two,
Tokhtomysh's army
appeared before the walls of Moscow.
Nikon censured the wicked people,
even though brave defenders,
who looted the cellars of the boyars
for sparse drink,
while the good prayed to God.
The city held three days and nights
and Tokhtamysh, Bozhi batog,
the cudgel of God,
proposed a deceit.
Flanked by two Suzdal princes,
he approached Ostei
asking only 'small gifts' for
his retreat on August twentieth.
Ostei, generous, opened the city gates
and led the people out to greet Dmitri.
“Then the Mongols fell,
delivered death and others
entered the city
and put swords, pikes
and scimatar to Russian flesh.
Then fell to looting
and carried off the contents
of the ducal treasury
crosses, chalices, jewel-bedecked fabrics.”
On Nikon's word,
“Tokhtamysh,(enemy of God,
enemy of pity, and enemy of mercy)
entered the citadel and stone pasad
of Moscow, six sazhers high
one hundred and fifty sazhers long
behind which the people
of the district were hiding.
He burnt it to the ground
and when the prince returned,
left only corpses and ashes
he paid his soldiers one rouble
for eighty corpses buried
in the dead land.”
Nikon grieved, for his churches,
lectionaries and books
brought by the villagers
from scattered settlements around the town.
All were buried
when the city was fired.
"Until then the city of Moscow
had been large and wonderful
to look at, crowded as she was
with , filled with wealth
and glory
and now all at once
all her beauty perished
and her glory disappeared.
Nothing could be seen
but smoking ruins
and bare earth and heaps of corpses.”
Dmitri gave five hundred roubles,
and eightieth of one for Mysl.
The
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