TWICE-TOLD TALES
“Filthy
Marshlander,” someone yelled, as a chunk of pavement flew through the air.
Bethany was relieved to see the soldiers close around her.
“Wait until they get their hot knives
into you,” shouted a woman with stumps for hands who was nearly naked in her
rags.
The
beggars fell back. Had the plan failed? Stumbling
uphill, Bethany felt terrified.
Then a larger mob surged around them.
They poured from the side streets and alleysand wove in and out of the march.
Some of them had no legs and scooted along, swinging torsos between their
hands, biting at the soldiers’ trousers. Bethany remained untouched, but
clawing hands and pummeling stumps disconcerted her guards, who were suddenly
tangled up in a whole flock of sheep. They flailed away with their swords but
made little headway among frantically bleating sheep and fresh attacks from the
beggars.
Ram, Bethany worried, where is the ram?
Was
she going to miss her only chance of escape?
These sheep were all ewes, none big enough to bear her weight. Her guards had their backs to her. She crumpled to the ground and rolled herself
into the middle of the melee. Someone grabbed her from behind. She turned to
fight, but it was s person on all fours wrapped in a sheep’s pelt.
“It’s me, Opal. Follow quickly. And
stay crouched.”
Opal butted sideways between sheep and
beggars.
“Here’s our ram — grab on!”
Bethany
confronted the broad shoulders and tossing horns of a very angry sheep indeed.
She moved to his side, threw herself on her back, wriggled underneath and with a
heave dug her fingers into his fleece and wrapped her legs around him. Much perturbed, he bucked and flailed,
heaving and shuddering to get this wolf dog off him before it could sink its
teeth into his belly. Then a familiar
voice commanded him and he thought it best to obey. Surely his shepherd
wouldn’t let a wolf devour him from underneath, would he?
Her mouth was full of stinking fur. The
rank smell of sodden pelt and old sheep urine made her want to retch, but she
had to hold on. The ram moved purposively forward. His shepherd must be leading
him; this was part of her rescue. When the ram’s hoofs pounded on wood, she was
jerked upward and fell flat on her back into a wagon bed..”
This story just “came into my head”
one morning as I was wondering how to get my eleven year old hero of The
Road to Beaver Mill rescued from her tormenters. The idea about the flock of sheep provided headlong
action and breathless detail — just what I was looking for. It wasn’t until I
was proofreading it some weeks later that I realized rescue by sheep hadn’t
sprung straight from my own imagination; It derived from my long-ago reading of the
Odyssey, where Odysseus uses it to rescue himself and his band from the Cyclops' caves.
Was
I plagiarizing? Only if you want to accuse Homer and writers through the
ages who pass down stories long current in the oral tradition. That’s the way stories have always been told
—memorized from what you hear, with the same essential plot line but
variations in detail. Did you know that
until the seventeenth century almost everybody in Europe received stories
orally that way, and that literacy wasn’t valued as a necessary accomplishment? Even the New Testament, including Paul’s letters, was written
down by small groups of scribes for the purpose of being read out
loud (I have learned all this from my
friend Joanna Dewey, who has just published a book on The Oral Ethos of
the Early Church)
I
have written a couple of books myself on how stories are told and retold
through the ages. These are “archetypal
narratives,” with “archetypal” defined as recurrent over a long period of time.
The Odyssey, for example, is an archetypal quest narrative where the hero goes
on a long journey encountering perils and adventures before he finally
reaches home. It is one of many just like that: recurrent, hence archetypal. Going in the other
direction, the “coming of age” story, about a young person leaving home to seek maturation
through adventure, also an archetypal quest narrative.
In my young adult novel, The
Road to Beaver Mill Bethany develops from a stubborn and
disobedient child, so self-centered that nobody trusts her with their
community’s secrets, to a young person with a sense of responsibility to her
people (readers of my Marshlander Series will remember her as Clare's daughter).
Some archetypal figures derive from a
world even earlier than the Achaean Greeks. Artemis, for example, can be traced
back to Ishtar, Goddess
of Heaven and Earth, worshipped in Babylonia as The Light of the World,
Righteous Judge, Lawgiver, Goddess of Goddesses, Bestower of Strength – aka,
the Almighty MOI.
We know her as Miss
Piggy.
Miss WHO? She’s a WHAT?
Archetypes retain traces of their original
power which we still recognize. I took this photo after a child arranged a marriage between Miss Piggy and my (stuffed) wart hog, who became the parents of
Piglet.
Well
well. How could she know that the Syrian Goddess Astarte, a variation of Ishtar, mated with a Boar God?
Was it some kind of archetypal memory was welling up in the little girl's head?
When we encounter a Goddess figure, women
often feel her psychological power within ourselves. At the University of Wisconsin
I assigned Judith Wright’s poem about a powerful Ishtar figure completely
at home with all of the aspects of womanhood – menstruation, childbirth, aging, the whole nine yards. Here’s how my students responded:.
“I can relate to the poet’s experience
with Ishtar simply through identifying with the poet’s feelings. As a young
girl, I dreaded developing a woman’s body. I wished for small breasts and hoped
I would menstruate as late as possible. But the time I did menstruate I relented
to nature and came to feel comfortable in my changing/new body.”
“However, when Wright witnesses her
power of birth, Ishtar feels calm and satisfied being a woman. I anticipate
having children with fear, excitement and other emotions that are difficult to
identify. Following the event I can
imagine myself as winking at Ishtar.”
As
for piglet, I’ll have to conduct further (archetypal) research, but in the second volume of the Infinite Games Series, The Battle of the
Black Fen. watch out for a ferocious boar.
