Hmm, now that this place is running again, I guess I should tend to the beds a little.
I've long wanted to write something set in the Borders of England and Scotland at the time of the Reivers. Or, rather, a fictionalised version of that setting. Reading Gifts by Ursula le Guin recently, I was struck by how much her setting there mirrored my feelings about the Reivers. And how much of the story revolved around very human things. I loved it. It sparked my memories and made me want to write again.
Whilst trying to do a write-in, it's been since 2016 so I struggled, with a dear friend and proper writer (seriously, her novel carries so much power and journey just her telling me about it makes my head want to burst with the power of it) I ended up having an idea sleet and this was what popped forth - based loosely on an old exhibition in Carlisle's Tullie House on the Reivers, now long gone and forgotten. And, as ever, I barely stayed on the course I set for myself.
Once again, I use the amazing 750words.com to get some attempts at insight, they may help you decide whether or not to read on, I don't know.
Rating: PG (violence[?])
Feeling mostly anxious, and concerned mostly about family - this is nice, sort of what I was shooting for
Mindset: Extrovert - Negative - Certain - Feeling
Time: The Past; Primary Sense: Touch; Us and Them: Them
24 minutes at 44 words per minute
Cold, wet, dark.
Loneliness was kept at bay by the black of night, cocooned
by the stone skin of Stantwr from the wind beyond the window: a black portal
into the night of a moon obscured by low cloud. Water fell, barely droplets,
barely falling, buffeted by wind to hit the woollen shawl and then not, slowly
soaking through but keeping the cold away from the room once lit by the roaring
fire, now glowing embers lest the light attract attention.
They slept, three and young, one only just weaned, one old
enough to take care but young enough to be left when the band had set out the
day before. Their best horse, a stout grey mare, had been readied, along with
the battered and sad looking pony from three seasons ago and their work horse,
barely the match of those that came from the south sometimes on their winding
way through the bog and the becks, beyond into the burns and ghylls, the fells
and the moors. Out in the courtyard the two sheilings were empty, below on the
entrance floor were the two families of farmers. Lizzie, the young wife of
Wullie, herself from across the glen and always a newcomer; Elaine, older,
wiser, prouder, mother to four bairns, one of whom was out tonight. Other families
were further afield, down the burn and into the stand of woodland - twisted
trees growing through the sedge and into the sky, bent and huddled like old men
before a storm, cowards in the rain.
Alone. Wrapped in wool, mindful of her charges, mindful of her
position, but anxious all the same. To pull back the shawl in the gap, to scry
the distant and unseen horizon both foolish and an admission of weakness, but
she was not weak, she was a woman of reknown, she was proud, she was a
protector. Long had she lived at Stantwr, long had she known its workings,
learned from her mother and father as a child. Groomed to be the keeper.
Knowing the number of steps to the roof and down to the kitchens. Knowing the
extent of the fields growing their crop of wheat for bread, enough to last a
good winter, and the pasture to keep the coos and the sow. Just one, replaced
with one from the litter, the rest for sale or slaughter for salting in the pit
by the stairs that led from the rocky earth beneath the Too'er and for adding
to the pot on longer nights of gloom.
Johnstone. Proud name, powerful among the fiefs held in
these parts, accursed by the men of the city to the south and to the north.
Accursed for their power, for their renown and pull. Authority came not from
leading, her father had said at the table, but from the reputation, from the
implicit awareness that one knew one's worth. Authority gave the right to gain
power, to spread and to raid, to gain payment and maintain position, it did not
come from those things. Ill-Drooned Broon provided the lesson of that, always
worrying and harrying, always wavering and havering in the night, never clear
and perpetually plotting. His charges, those he should have protected, grew
restless and scared under his confusion and fear, until they realised that he
would not protect them when the time came. When the Johnstones came. Her father
often spoke of that night, how they had taken the two coo from the bastle, how
they had ridden into the night fearing a hot trod, for Broon was known to the
Scroope, but nothing followed. Taking the stones from the walls and then
replacing them as they returned.
Auld Meg, who had lived under Broon's protection, who had
looked after the coo, had dared to let them go. She had smiled, he said, when
she told the story later: how she had gone to Broon's rooms and reported the
raid. "Reivers!" She had shouted him awake, Broon had raised his
sons, gathered his jerkin and plate, helmet and lances. Ten men in all. But he
had feared, no one knew the number, and so did not launch the hot trod, the
turf having been lit but burned cold before he had decided which way to set
forth. So it was that her father had denied all wrong doing, had denied the coo
were those of Broon, and Broon, in shame, had turned and left. Again, taking
too long, failing to plan their route properly and thus falling into the beck
near the great Tor at the fording point, flooding from the higher ground coming
all at once, and drowned in the wash with one of his sons. Two others had
abandoned him on the ride already, so that Broon's bastle was no more, his
property divided between his charges and his sons left with no inheritance. One
of them married a Johnstone charge and lived quietly out in the pasture,
looking after the herd grown from those two coos, but in the name of Johnstone.
Broon was his wife's name, his son a Johnstone.
So she knew not to lift the shawl, not to scan uselessly, but to feign the untroubled sleep of the powerful and authoritative.
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