Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen
Grief left me longing for familiar touch and fragrances of once love– the precious belonging. All the years I shared with Ana leave me grieving in a way that isn’t resolved simply by replacing the closeness of loved ones with new people. The hardest thing to accept are the good times. I’m really not ready yet to find a new love or even to nurture dreams.
At the slightest offering of a woman’s touch, I simply left. I left Sjókona alone with no closure, or even the things she would need for her own well-being. I looked for a reason to blame her, but really there was none. I looked for a way to release myself from the responsibility for leaving her as I did. And I found a boatload of Norsemen heading to the sea. I suggested they stop for her just to easy my own conscience.
Now I find myself with so many ships and men gathering for a journey, waiting for orders, marking the wait with stories and songs. A storyteller steps up this night to tell us a tale of the mother of sea monsters known to wait at that house with no door.
He describes something I don’t want to hear. It is a tale of an old woman in death, laid on the rocks just where I had left Sjókona. I know death devours the physical person, but he seems to be describing someone completely different from Sjókona. This woman was older, and dressed in red silks – Sjókona’s dress was tattered, gray linen. Only her straight silver hair was the same, but in this tale Sjókona’s jade pendant was clutched in the hands of the corpse.
As the storyteller unwinds the tale, the lusty shouts from this audience go from hoots and hollers to quiet contemplation. He continues.
“But that old woman was not the goddess of the sea, mother of monsters, mermaid, harpy or the seer of storms and death. The sailors waited to meet woman immortal and that they did. While they were gathered around the corpse, there, emerging from the vacant house came the sea mother, bold and angry, winds shifting her gowns of cloud like a luffing sheet on a sturdy mast.
“She shouted for the sailors to leave her mother be. She walked toward them with her terrifying presence, as fleshy as any human woman, but cold, riled in wrath, cursing and pointing and demanding a god among men to father her spawn!”
(Continues Tuesday, May 6)
Lazarus Ink 