Finding the Sun

The Cult of the Raven King, interlude 1

Note: This shorter piece is an interlude in this series. These can each be read separately, but they’ll make much more sense in order. Also, most of the series is paywalled (but I’ve left this one unlocked). There’s still time to get a yearly subscription for 25% off by using this button below.

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The night before I left, the full moon was in my bedroom. I don’t just mean the light, but the moon itself, hugely looming past my closed eyes, tugging the buried sea of me upward. I opened my eyes and it was really there, so I closed them and went back to sleep.

But I saw the moon anyway, and remembered what it had seen.

The man’s eyes had reflected its light as he sawed through my neck. I had thanked him, the night I lost my head. His blade had shone with its light, and then darkened with my blood. I thanked him, and stood up, meeting his kiss with my own. I don’t know how I kissed him, carrying my head in my hands that way, but this is a truth only for the moon.

The morning before I left, Apollo laughed at the prayer I didn’t know I’d prayed. I’d buried my head, and needed it again, and could only find it by the sun. But I’d lost the sun, I’d said, and forgotten how to find it, because it was where I’d last had my head.

And then I left.

A parting after a ride through driving rain with my husband to a wasteland of asphalt. Fitful sleep broken by armed border guards who oversee a bus loaded into a boxcar pulled beneath the sea.

Woken again, stumbling into damp London morning, a half hour on a street corner just to find my bearings. Then, an old man at a cafe tells me of his sold farm, and smiles sadly to hear I couldn’t later meet him for dinner.

Though still unsure of the direction of the sun, I find the train to the town whose river filled Virginia Woolf’s lungs full of water. I am there to meet an occultist, to plan — in a long afternoon in a herb shed — a publishing coup.

Covered happily in dog drool, I slip, laughing, in the mud on the way back to London. I walk, and then I walk. I walk through parks stripped of their benches, along the Thames where you may only run and walk fast but never sit. The others run and walk fast, but I stroll, stop to stare, to dream, to think. I walk, I wander, shift and heft the weight of my bag from one strong shoulder to the other.

I walk, and I’m caught off guard and lose my thoughts twice by running beasts. The first, a beast of muscles and sweat too rare in form not to be noticed. I smile as he runs past me and then runs past me again. But it’s the next beast running past where the smile seems to catch, not to a man but a squirrel. I smile at its notice of me, then lift my eyes to see a woman watching it too. We both smile at it, and then to each other, and I start to sense the direction of the sun.

I walk, and walk, and am now in Brixton where, over the second best kefta of my life, an old woman (but you wouldn’t know it) invites me to her home in Gambia. Over a strong coffee given free by the waiter because “cigarettes taste best that way,” a Lebanese refugee tells me of his dream to see New England in autumn. “I’ve seen it,” I say, “I’ve lived it.” I remember the reds and golds in words for him. I remember I am a writer. I remember I have known the sun.

A woman once hunted by the Italian secret police during the Years of Lead laughs at a street preacher, takes me to her home, a Thatcher-era squat she refused ever to give up. Over dinner I listen to what London once was and what the woke will never know. The next morning I barely even need my coffee, but I drink a second cup anyway, not wanting the conversations to cease.

In Soho, after a private club and incredible news, I’m convinced by a friend we’re told we must hate that I really must take up yoga. We read words of the dead together, laugh at a bus that just gave up, take another, and we part.

That night, I am alone, still trying to find the sun.

Morning again, a bus to Manchester, the man next to me drinks from my water and blesses me with his gods. I smile, stumble out upon streets I vaguely remember towards the gate I once used with a friend. I walk, thinking of her, thinking of that gate, and thinking especially of the night I lost my head.

I think, ‘I miss the mad Dionysian,’ and drag on a cigarette, then laugh at the message arriving on my phone. A lifeline from a distant shore anchors the haunting back to the earth and what came before.

I read of headless rites along iron paths towards the clearing where two rivers meet.

I alight, and still do not understand what came after. Fortunate disclosures resolve unfortunate concealments, like a reflection on a mist-shrouded lake, except I am what is shown beneath the mirrored surface. From here, all is magic, the actual sort we only talk about and rarely do. It is Strange and also Norrell, Perceval and also the Fisher King, each both for both and each both for ourselves.

We climb a mountain over the village of lesbians who make really great food. “They should call this tea shop The Oven Door,” my friend says, and we laugh on our walk from Sylvia Plath’s grave.

Time stops, dreams bleed into waking. Tea and unasked questions answered anyway, a ride back to Manchester to meet a long lost friend. I am the old me and the new, both again despite forgetting one for the other and thus both.

A morning of fog, a hasty parting from a home already mostly parted and packed. Back to the gate, and another bus, and to a calamity that cannot bother me and a place better anyway to sleep.

The last day, I wake. The High Street to the coach station, and I stand at the place I arrived. I remember, I laugh, and I face the sun.

And now I’m here.

Here.

Here, where I started from, and much more than me has returned.

I’d found the sun, hidden where my head had been.

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