Stained Cloth
Many peat bog bodies found from the Iron Age are thought to be victims of human sacrifice. These include bodies of members of the Suebi tribes found in southern Germany. Suebi priests would tour with a cart draped in cloth, dedicated to the fertility goddess Nerthus. The cart blessed those it visited, and is said would prevent war, but when its journey was over the slaves used to clean it were sacrificially drowned in lakes, which became bogs.
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The earth is pregnant. The lumps and bumps of ancient peat bogs are fertile, fresh with moss and hard grasses, and far away from where civilisation has carved at the peat for fuel. There are no men here with trucks and bags. There are no fatty parcels of mud stacked up, or clean-cut canals in the ground. Plants have been allowed to take root and spatter over the plains: heather, grasses, and even the suggestions of forests. There’s a forest just south of nowhere, where the evergreens are so old their roots are as thick as my thighs. These roots rummage down the slope of the earth, into the wet foul stink of a pool. A small lake, technically, but nobody expects lakes to smell so sour.
This is where I live. This is where I was buried.
I lost my thumbnail digging myself out the earth. This was years ago. My cuticles are loose; so is my hair, my teeth, my deflated skin. Still, often I kneel and bury my hands in the muck to remember what it felt like — cold slick under your fingers, dead roots tied around your knuckles, and the primal urge to stretch and burrow that lasts long after your muscles have atrophied. Every time I unearth my hands I have to count my nails again.
My hands are now thin, like the rest of me. My calluses are gone, lost under the folds of my leathered skin. The last thing I ever did was scrub cloth with these hands; now it’s my skin that creases beneath my knuckles. These fingertips have long forgotten the cut of the reeds we used to cleanse Nerthus’ cart. When I first scrambled out of my grave, grasses pierced my leg and cut away at what precious skin I had left. When I think back, I hope dying didn’t hurt like that. Even after all this time I have to think the goddess wouldn’t want that for me. It’s hard enough she wanted me dead.
I’ve overheard people speaking, recalling what I presume are stories. It doesn’t happen often — there’s no safe path to walk. The peat is unsteady and the mounds slough apart; rabbits burrow deep pits and traps. I feel the earth’s unrest beneath my feet and in my bones and I wonder if it’s what woke me. When I do hear their stories, they’re in strange, bastardised tongues. I’ve stopped trying to listen. Instead, I sit in my lake and tell my own story to the frogs and the worms.
I always start with the feel of wood. This is something all of us in the bog know, sheltered as we are by our family of trees. I explain to the dragon flies that carved wood has been skinned off the bark they slot their needle legs in. It is stripped away by sharpened flint, chopped into pieces, and slotted together. Then I usually have to explain what flint is, and what anyone would want to make out of wood when trees are so helpful as they are. We usually get side-tracked. Eventually, I get to talk about Nerthus’ cart.
The cart is often in my dreams. Its wooden skeleton was just a host for magnificent wheels, round and fertile with spires and offshoots. Then, tied in knots and weaved amongst the spindles, was the fabric I cared for. The priests had complied the wool of fifteen, maybe twenty sheep — my father was a shepherd, but I never learnt to count. There were banners of sickly red, so strong I worried the yellow and the blue strips would be embarrassed. I recall running my nails (strong, back then) over the knitted divots and following the zigzags of colour. The people didn’t get to touch the cart when it visited the farms; only the privileged and the dead had that right. From our master’s land we watched it arrive — my brother and I, with our backs bent, spying the haughty necks of the priests as we tilled the earth.
This earth was barren. Empty, over farmed — the people blamed us, of course, and our lowly hands. My brother cursed the cows that grazed there. Our cows were not like the ones that pulled the cart. Nerthus’ heifers shone — ours were scraggly, half-starved things with dull coats and gnarled horns. He swore at them, spat at them, and watched in pointed silence as they pummelled the crops with their oblivious hooves. I turned to Nerthus. While he was beaten for his smart mouth, I curled myself up in the hay and I prayed. I prayed so hard my joints would crack, the force of it so strong that it felt like roots had sprouted from my body. Behind my eyelids, stars grew into the robust figure of a woman. The indents of my hands over my eyes became blooming thighs the shape of ears of wheat; the little rags that hid my body became motherly swathes. The pods of the trodden grains became teeth to me. The curved stalks became proud smiles. When the priests came to the family to ask for slaves to wash Her cart, I felt the seedlings move beneath my feet.
(At this point of my story I’ll have bored off the dragonflies, but the toads will have stayed. Last spring a family of tadpoles moved into the pool in the dip of my clavicle so they could feel my throat move.)
They walked us to the lake in silence. My brother and a woman from the next farm over were tasked with untethering the heifers from the cart — he eyed their hooves and rubbed his scars. The priests then brought the rest of us over to the water and had us undress the wood. Together we stroked at the fabric, picking at knots, lingering at the oak to feel it dampen as it began to rain. Raindrops blossomed on my neck, dripped down the grooves of my fleshy cheek and past my lips. We breathed the fresh scent of rainfall and clean water on reeds. When droplets slapped the surface of the lake, the water rebounded and gave off a cloud of white watery spores. The air was alive with it — I was alive with it. The sting of water in my eyes meant nothing when I was inhaling the breath of Nerthus.
I basked in the connection. She’d heard me — of course she had. Now the rain would replenish our soil and my brother would not be beaten. I was blind to the waterlogged fields and suffocating crops; when the hurried priests ordered us to wash the cloth I scrubbed the hardest. I remember the black peat stains, the brown smears, the hoof shaped tears. I remember my fingers bleeding but not the feeling of having blood. I remember the hands on my head, knuckles digging at my back, the familiar screamed swears of my brother. I remember being pushed underwater, but not what it felt like to drown.
The frogs don’t understand what drowning is. I slip into the bog to make bubbles with my nose to show them. These bubbles are playful; they float on the water’s skin lazily until popped by an anxious pond-skater. My final bubbles in life were lazy too, in a way. The struggle didn’t last long; the little grain in my stomach only made for a few kicks’ worth of energy. It’s hard to know who to fight when caught in a net of darkness — it’s hard to move your feet when reeds and lily stalks have cuffed them. The taste was foul, brackish and obscenely salty, so I shut my mouth in the first few seconds. People like me had learnt not to bother screaming, anyway.
I’d never been afraid of the dark. My brother was — though he wouldn’t admit it. He clung to torchlight, but I would always be left to watch our cattle at night. This wasn’t the same darkness. My body was entrenched in flat brown. The shapes lost definition, becoming smears that radiated a kind of sickness; patches of queasy green swam an indeterminate distance from my eyes. The blackness began at the edges of my vision and narrowed, squeezed alongside my lungs. Trampled, even. The last thing I saw was Nerthus’ cloth floating towards me like a cascade of long hair, beautiful and potent and stained with my blood.
The creatures of the bog want to know about my brother; if he made it, or if he’s here beneath us. They ask about the heifers and how soft their eyes were, if they were bathed and scrubbed and taken care of. Still, I can only regale what I know. I know the long climb of my consciousness out of the earth and the first jolt of my waking muscles. My diaphragm, flattened by decades of packing of mud, blossomed and inflated. My expansion cracked the pond bed. My hands sprouted through its crust like wheat stalks. Then my head, carefully eased through the wet. My brain had long since dried to lavender sticks and now my head drifts in the wind too easily, too fragile. I took one long, chattering death cough, and vomited the black ooze and frogspawn out of my lungs. And then I sat and waited for the oats to grow.