“Hope was dashed and Dread was restored,

When came a lion against me,

Slathering, of a meal assured.”

-Canto 1, JH

…

‘I was a woman true, resigned to be a good wife despite my alienist mind.’ [1]

‘Now I am the woman that flew, for brute mend to offer no respite and find.’

In the dark, Lynn climbed, rampant in her mind, hearing now the men below stumbling a league behind by the foot’s winding wend, but seeming but a call or stone throw away below by the bird’s path.

‘And now Church and State declare me a hunted thing!’

The moon rose near to full, the great harvest light of autumn night, cresting Mount Tioga’s eastern flank. Hunter’s Slide loomed up above her, the great chute of boulders and rocks up this side canyon off of Shingle Mill Creek, down which tinkled Hunter’s Seep. Father had told her that once above this rock slide, which looked like some pagan god’s giant chimney had collapsed by the side of his mountain of a slant-roofed house, that one could cross the mountain crest northeastward into the Deep Utesh Range and then by way of the creeks and lakes make for Wyoming. The glint of the harvest moon showed the way, the hand of Mother Mary, or one of her lesser sisters, showing clearly her path.

‘Stop, you sweat.’

‘Rig a backpack.’

Listening to the slight and occasional clamor below, a rock clacking here, a hawthorn branch snapping there, Lynn busied herself with strapping her bundle over shoulders and with her dress chord, not behind her as was her impulse, but before her, under her inconvenient organs.

Out from the leather pouch at the front of her apron, she pulled her thin, flat skinning knife, more hilt than blade, once her father’s boyhood hunting blade, and placed that in her mouth, edge out, still in its soft leather sheath, something to busy her chattering teeth. Her feet were a little bruised, not too badly scuffed, and she wondered not at how lords kept their ladies. For if she were not a stout peasant girl who went barefoot, she would surely already be lame.

‘Now, up the rock slide like a monkey. If you break a leg just dash your brains out on the rock below—just that would be, make these bastards haul my cold corpse back to him that wants it warm.’

‘Lynn, like the alienist divined, you are of odd mind.’ [1]

Lynn monkey-climbed hand and foot up the cold rock slide, her feet and hands soon numb but not dumb, going careful straight up the same mountain that the asses of men pursuing her would take by switch back way, for she heard a pony down there.

‘Yes, that Great Lady in the tower of the cathedral in my mind, that vision was true, a breed on a horse follows. I will believe you evermore, Lady.’

‘Bears den in this slide. Lions hunt these slides. Wolves won’t chance it.’

Before the moon was high Lynn was above the rock slide, the grinning slabs of rock shelf above her, just below the crest. She knew where she fared. Below her was that chimney of tumbled rock, above her the shelves, before her the entire Vale of Bernie in toy proportion.

Straight across the valley to the west was Keep Bernie and Little Calvary, the keep and surrounding buildings lit by cressets and lanterns.

To the south one could see under the moon the outline of Tipanogas. The grand mountain was said by the Indians to be the prone body of a giant maiden who laid down in sorrow when her young husband died.

Below, at the mouth of the Hollow, what seemed like a mere footstep for some grander being, Shingle Mill Hamlet was all lantern lit, torches playing here and there as men searched idiot-like for she who was known to be up here—or were they plague-finding, witch-finding, slave-binding?

Lynn’s cast of mind had grown dark and she towered within, her great physical elevation seeming to catch a hatred in her like a spark finding pitch pine tinder.

‘Human filth! You will not possess me!’

‘I am spun in Eve’s image, not root bound, will not suffer the fate of a stolid tree.’

Then, the lighter side of her recalled, ‘The chickens and feed and coop are gone and scattered—look at it smolder there, already burnt to cinders!’

The coop looked from high afar like a square bank of smoldering coals.

‘Mamma, I am so sorry! Darla, Darla has a mouth, and speaks up to men.’

Lynn whispered, “Mother Mary, please, do look over her so that she is not punished for my offense before men.”

‘You are sweating, strip, mop off with your hair, get fully dressed and put on your wooden shoes. Who cares if they hear you clomp along on the upper shelf—they will soon receive your plummeting self.’

She did so, as her inner pilot commanded, taking her time, half hoping a lion would take her, another part of her hoping that the fools below would chance upon a grizzly bear.

‘I hope I woke the Daddy of Grizzary with my passage!’

Yet below she heard no grizzly fright, but the slow, steady workings of a competent scout herding a pack of human hounds on her path, skirting the rock slide on both sides, a slow, arduous process by day, a heck of a thing by night. The witness in sound and torchlight glimpses from below, to the tenacity of these men, struck a cold chord in her soul.

‘These men will not quit; they wax evil, with a killing grit.’

Lynn made it up above, in perhaps an hour’s climb to the rock shelf, specifically to the shelf that over hung the bend in the switchback game trail where animal sense ordained that four legged critters, whether pawed, clawed or hooved, wound around below a white rock buttress, with a cave in it, probably a lion or bobcat den. This she judged as she wound around the game trail in the moonlight, and confirmed as she stood above the candlelit valley of her birth, would place her above a ledge a good fifty yards below that upper shelf, a grand place for her to dive.

Here, above the prickly pear, above the hawthorn, above the choke cherry, among oak brush and maple, at even altitude with the aspen a league over from this first saddle on the mountain, Lynn turned her back on mountains uncounted and lakes unknown, caring not at all if Tom Cougar was stalking up behind, knowing that those below were not just a threat to her mortal body, but to her immortal soul.

‘It is so fey faerie grand that up here, from this hard aerie, that I will wing down to Hell to be accounted as damned among The Suicide Stand.

‘I once dreamed of a journey to Bliss. Yet now I am preened for infernal Diss.’ [2]

Suffused in her own weird fatalism, Lynn squatted there on her haunches and nodded off, half hoping she’d tumble in a dream down the way and not have to explain to visiting Virgil what made her stray.

…

“Bawdy bitch! Randysack of ϲunt!” echoed the rude rooster of a man below.

Thus heralded, by Trent Runnagate, Dawn, no doubt a fine lady, if a pagan, decided to stay her rosy hand.

Lynn stood, looked down and about, and saw that the spry wicked Trent, an ugly broad-faced cock of no proper walk, was below her, where she had meant to land. The others, the wary, sly breed upon his paint pony, the hooded man with the ax, two earless, shave-headed buggers with lassos, and a man as if out of dream with a mangled slit face, carrying her night shift as a snot rag and blowing his hideous nose into it, lagged below one level on the switchback upper trail, having just cleared either side of the rock slide.

The Grand Lady in the tower watched with a blue tear pooling in her many-windowed inner eye.

The Lady’s Grand Song was silence.

Dawn had not come, but only the murk of a sunless sky, clouds hanging just above her head.

Lynn spread her arms to fly, stepping to the very edge of the rocky shelf and the turd of humanity below, crowed, “Oh Me oh my, says I! I were gonna take yer bum! Now, when da devil ‘ere ye come, I gedz ye mamma spot, as massa gonna ‘ave no need ta in a dead ϲunt drip ‘is seed!”

The man was egging her on, mocking her, lusting for her fresh corpse, even grabbing at his groin!

‘Filthy beast!’ she raged within, as she picked up a rock, a bit larger than a hen, no lady’s chore to be sure, and heaved it up and out in spite.

“Cain’t hit squat, ya ‘ore! Ye tro—” screamed the capering Trent, and as if her aim had from heaven been sent, the spinning, jagged, black stone, struck the brute in the shoulder, sheering the arm nearly off, to dangle in shredded ruin. The wretch moaned in fiendish inarticulation, staggered, and fell off that lower ledge and tumbled like a rag mouse down the rock slide.

His mates did not seem to care, as his body plunged twisting and broken and gushing past them.

The breed seemed by his gait upon the horse to make of this a miscalculation by her in his favor, and he went high to the left, making for the misty ledge above her, having predicted, that she would cowardly do what she now did, instead of jumping like a winged beauty, having no longer the taste for the fate she had just visited upon Trent.

Lynn ran in her clogs, shuffle wise, up the last rise of scrub oak and maple, making for the dark fir timber, recalling what Father had always said about how thick it was down the other side, and that you needed to cross over to Lake Tioga and the greater Lake Country, at the head of the draw a good league up the high divide, in dark timber, itself now hidden like spikes by a tent under a cloak of white mist, hung from slate gray skies that she believed with a renewed heart, had been by an angel, or better, down sent.

…

Notes

-1. An alienist is a lay exorcist of a kind, sometimes a demon finder for an exorcism priest, or even a devil warder when no exorcist is at hand. Lynn had once met an alienist up from Bliss when she was ten. That man, handsome, clean to a fault and far away of eye, but with words keen and close, had taken her little hand in his white gloved one, [this her Granny Darla would attest at inquest, Way Hayward attending as saddle factor]. The alienist, one Carl Anson, since lost to Voodoory, [where he was said to have been lured to his doom by Poppa Dock Block O’ Roy on a mission of mercy] declared her odd of mind, too direct for a girl, a natural advocate of animal kind, and on this account, thought to be under the protection of Francine, orphan pilgrim prophetess to Saint Francis, who received the blessings of Divine Unction at Montreal, when put to the question by the Anti-Pope in 1921. Francine is said to have ascended in her torments [like Christ, her body absent from the dour Jesuit tomb on the third day] and thought by some exorcists and alienists of Awes North and Awes West, to by a protector of egg maids, milkmaids and goat nurses.

-2. The City of the Damned toured by Dante with Demi-Saint Virgil as his guide.