“The green talons grasp the land…

When I was numbered among the dead, came Saint Francis for me… Has any from this depth returned upward?”

-Canto 27

…

Lynn ate porridge on Darla’s orders, as her Granny insisted that she was yet a little thin to be the wife of some learned traveling scholar, be he deacon [a type which Darla favored], a didact, a poet [Lynn hoped so over her porridge, and Darla did plead for it not to be so before The Almighty] or a doctor, all of which could be expected—except the strapping lantern jawed deacon, of course—to be wanting some weight for the coming winter of her wedding. For, by Christmas Time at the latest she would be wed or scandal would be their shrunken clan’s portion in Shinglemill Hollow, and word might go out to the Lord’s rough men.

“Lynn, unlike we who grow less pleasing to the eye with age, a man, if he has been cured like a fine country ham by wind, sun and rain, grows more handsome with years. The exception would be those ‘bookers’: poets, scholars, priests, counting house factors and the like. Such men who have not been scoured by wind, bitten by frost or burned by the sun, lack something upon old age, as handsome as they may be as young men. So, a saddle factor, a stone deacon, these are the men to favor for a bookish girl such as yourself. Though for my taste, give me a Ranger, a hunter, rougher and tougher even then a knight.”

As Lynn forced down a second mug of porridge—tasty enough chock full of dried June berries and fresh currents—fearing a further monstrous expansion of her hips and such, she mused, ‘God, the men will be starring at my ever expanding breasts as well,’

Darla continued, “Now a deacon would be a fine husband. Many work as masons and smiths as well. Some even serve the Knights as a man at arms: big men, to make big sons, to see you well into further years. They can read and write, deacons can, and know some history of the mortal kind as well, what with inscribing gravestones and mortuary doors. My Dear Girl, I have been scheming for a deacon for you, held off poor Kyle this long, but I fear no more. Let us hope for a deacon come up from Bliss [1] to face the eves of Virgil’s Church with gargoyles!”

Stuffed like a goblinoid pig, Lynn departed before second egg time, at what would be ten on the clock at Virgil’s Church, with Granny’s words ringing in her ears, “It is Wakesummers Eve, the sky clear, My Girl. Hear the Cranes departing for New Spain? The cranes marry for life, you know—its an omen, My Dear!”

Kyle might be dull, but he worked, every day from sun up to sun down. The milk shed was in fact a grand barn, holding eight cows. And the chicken coop, well, it was a mansion of squawk, a grand avian haven, a home for one hundred and twenty laying hens and two nasty roosters, Grandpa, and Red Top. They got along well enough, each having a wing of the coop to themselves. The nastiest of the lot, Old Pot, Lynn had killed him with her wing clipping shears when she made to save Gimp Girl from his depredations and he had tried to beak out her eyes. He was sure enough bound for the pot.

The imaginative and ever singing milkmaid had composed The Ballad of Old Pot, which she sang most often from the extensive hymnal in her brain, when among the hens, assuring them that she, goddess-like to them, would intervene from humanity’s high estate when roosters behaved like bad men.

The pen was unroofed, a good thirty paces wide and 20 deep, supplied with roosting logs and even a patch of holly grape [4] Lynn had transplanted there, which the birds worried for its fruit and nested within when the inner roosts were too crowded at morning time while the hens competed for the same boxes, all ignoring other boxes, for reasons Lynn and Kyle had been unable to divine. A lantern hung within the great hen hall, at the center, beginning this night, to be lit. At Wakesummers Eve, the days had been reduced in length enough that the hens would stop laying unless more light was given.

‘That makes we humans to chickens, as like God arranging the sun, moon and stars in the sky,’ mused Lynn, and thereupon began singing of such, soothing her hens.

There were of all of these hens, two weird ones, Gimp Girl and Crazy Girl.

Gimp Girl grew so few feathers she need not have her wings clipped. She was thin and shunned by the rest, hiding behind the tin water bottle near the sunset door. She should have been killed and potted. But Lynn saw in her something of herself and hid her from Kyle and fed her special apple pieces while the general herd of hens fought and fussed over the table scraps.

Then there was Crazy Girl, who had her wings clipped—black wings just like Gimp Girl, the blacks laying less well as the browns but surviving as chicks more easily, which vexed Kyle to no end. Not only did the blacks lay smaller eggs then the browns, but they were bossy and rude to the more productive browns, making of themselves little squawking parodies of the Lords and Ladies of humanity ruling their peasants and serfs.

Crazy Girl compounded her breed’s bad reputation with insisting upon hopping to the window sill of the coop by the sunrise door, at sunrise, as soon as Lynn pulled up the sunrise shoot from within the coop and Red Top’s hens issued out into the pen. From there, she would hop the fence and go off into the holly grape above Shinglemill Creek, where she would nest and lay her egg. She would then come back to the pen and strut and squawk and boast of her adventures to the fenced in flock. Crazy Girl was not only a leader of hens, but of hen maids, for Lynn had gotten from her the idea of planting holly grape within the coop, so that the lesser black hens could nest there in imitation of their errant queen.

As Lynn gathered the eggs and treated Gimp Girl with her apple slice she spoke to her muse, spoke her thoughts out loud that of the usual rattled so secret behind her closed lips among humanity.

“Gimp Girl, I feel so like you. I’m about to be set under an unknown rooster. I’d like me more of a Red Top then a Grandpa. But I fear I’ll be married off to an Old Pot. What would you have done if not for this hen maid and her clipping shears?”

Gimp Girl peeped her pathetic cluck and looked at Lynn before taking the apple slice. Then, as Lynn lifted her and held her in her arms, Crazy Girl returned with a fanfare of feather and squawk and burst into the coop through the chute door and stood their arrogant as a queen imperious, then strutting over to the sunrise door and bobbing back in forth in front of it, as if demanding Lynn open it for her, that door that was to serve higher human kind and not her feathered breed.

Lynn petted Gimp Girl and spoke to the bolder of the weird chickens, “You are the very scandal of this house, Crazy Girl. Gimp Girl and I, being the other two weird hens of this house, we salute you.”

Crazy Girl squawked and strutted, glaring pointedly at Red Top, who backed away and Lynn laughed, “If only I had your crazy way!”

…

Notes

-1. Bliss is the Plantation of merchants, slaves, serfs, peasants and men at arms charged with guarding and supplying and expanding the Cavernous Cathedral of the Demi-Angel Virgil, where dwell, copy, inscribe, teach and eventually are entombed The Disciples of Dante, also known as The Latter Saints. This plantation musters 100 spears [serfs and peasants], 10 bows [breed scouts], 25 guns [merchant adventurer trappers, like to a ranger but free] and 5 wheeled culverns manned by the smiths and masons. 12 lances, of a knight, squire and paige each, of Dante, mounted on pale horses and attired in white guilt breast plates, guard the Disciples directly. [2] Bliss is well defended by this force, and its merchants and artisans prefer to draw servant class folk from purchase with the Czarist Dasts or the Spanish Dons then from New England. Freer folk migrate infrequently, once every two summers by way of Denver Station, or are drawn from the population of high Vale Bernie. Slaves are generally employed as miners and not trusted with bearing arms as part of the muster.

-2. The Disciples of Dante are raised from among the acolytes who attend them in their studies and mysteries, one with the passing of every Latter Saint, taking the lowest rank of The Twelve. These acolytes are drawn from heretical, disenchanted, converted or defrocked members of the traditional Easter New England clergy, whose pilgrimage to Bliss on the New Dead Sea is but one of many sacrifices. Some acolytes have been raised from counting house factors and other literate types. There number is a mystery and is said to be in the hundreds but may be merely a few score, as rumors speak of costume parades in which passing acolytes in one habit, are seen to enter a crypt as an attendant of that treasure, and then be noted by gait or manner emerging from another crypt in another habit. [3]

-3. Crypts are for the holding of the four treasures: saintly bones, relics, silver in recompense for Judas, and of saintly tomes. The Crypt of Bones is attended by acolytes in black habit, The Crypt of Relics by Acolytes in golden habit, The Crypt of Silver by acolytes in purple, and the Crypt of Tomes by acolytes in white.

-4. Known in a lesser world as Oregon grape.