Mythic Journeys by Paula Guran

Author:Paula Guran [Guran, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mythic Journeys
ISBN: 9781597809580
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2019-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

“MERLIN DREAMS IN THE MONDREAM WOOD”

CHARLES DE LINT

MONDREAM—an Anglo-Saxon word which means the dream of life among men.

I am Merlin

Who follow the Gleam

—Tennyson, from “Merlin and the Gleam”

(“gleam” = inspiration/muse)

In the heart of the house lay a garden.

In the heart of the garden stood a tree. In the heart of the tree lived an old man who wore the shape of a red-haired boy with crackernut eyes that seemed as bright as salmon tails glinting up the water.

His was a riddling wisdom, older by far than the ancient oak that housed his body. The green sap was his blood and leaves grew in his hair. In the winter, he slept. In the spring, the moon harped a wind-song against his antler tines as the oak’s boughs stretched its green buds awake. In the summer, the air was thick with the droning of bees and the scent of the wildflowers that grew in stormy profusion where the fat brown bole became root.

And in the autumn, when the tree loosed its bounty to the ground below, there were hazelnuts lying in among the acorns.

The secrets of a Green Man.

“When I was a kid, I thought it was a forest,” Sara said. She was sitting on the end of her bed, looking out the window over the garden, her guitar on her lap, the quilt bunched up under her knees. Up by the headboard, Julie Simms leaned forward from its carved wood to look over Sara’s shoulder at what could be seen of the garden from their vantage point.

“It sure looks big enough,” she said.

Sara nodded. Her eyes had taken on a dreamy look.

In was 1969 and they had decided to form a folk band—Sara on guitar, Julie playing recorder, both of them singing. They wanted to change the world with music because that was what was happening. In San Francisco. In London. In Vancouver. So why not in Ottawa?

With their faded bell-bottomed jeans and tie-dyed shirts, they looked just like any of the other seventeen-year-olds who hung around the War Memorial downtown, or could be found crowded into coffeehouses like Le Hibou and Le Monde on the weekends. Their hair was long—Sara’s a cascade of brown ringlets, Julie’s a waterfall spill the color of a raven’s wing; they wore beads and feather earrings and both eschewed makeup.

“I used to think it spoke to me,” Sara said.

“What? The garden?”

“Um-hmm.”

“What did it say?”

The dreaminess in Sara’s eyes became wistful and she gave Julie a rueful smile.

“I can’t remember,” she said.

It was three years after her parents had died—when she was nine years old—that Sara Kendell came to live with her Uncle Jamie in his strange rambling house. To an adult perspective, Tamson House was huge: an enormous, sprawling affair of corridors and rooms and towers that took up the whole of a city block; to a child of nine, it simply went on forever.

She could wander down corridor after corridor, poking about in the clutter of rooms that lay spread like a maze from

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.