The guardian

History with a smidgeon of speculation.

Photo ©Andreas Husch

The Guardian

They came, the invaders, as the blind seer had said they would. They sailed up the estuary and hauled their ship onto the bank. Our sentinels watched as the first man waded ashore bearing their standard, a bare, perpendicular piece of wood that made a cross. Behind the standard-bearer, the rest of the men followed, buckling on swords, each with a shield slung over his back. They spread out, a line of black, creeping things, making for the plumes of smoke that rose from our hearths. They crept, cautious and silent. Were they afraid? Were they expecting resistance? The seer had said they would come, and it would not be in peace.

‘They have no respect for life and beauty,’ he had said. ‘They worship only greed, gain and conquest. They live for bloody death, and they think that is the ultimate glory.’

He predicted their coming, but we could scarcely believe in such beings, not even when we saw them advancing like so many black beetles, armed and silent. Instead, our first thoughts were to speak to them, explain. But they never heard nor listened. They had no ears, only mouths and tongues and the ringing of their foul voices. They didn’t listen, but they saw, a group of men and women, empty-handed. Feeble. Weak. And their lips curled in relief and excitement.

The black wave poured into the settlement, and the first thing the invaders did was to rip down the garlands of flowers and fruit, the gifts left on the Guardian tree, screaming ‘blasphemy’ or some such word. Then they planted their standard in the soft earth by the source, and they set light to the great oak, the Guardian that had watched over our settlement since the beginning, the tree that had always been, and always would be. They trampled their filthy feet through the basin where the source bubbled up, the life source that nurtured the crops and gave us fresh water to drink. and they took the blind seer who tended it. He had been our memory, lightening the long winter evenings with stories, teaching us about the roots of things, trees, mountains, ourselves. They took him and they threw him into the inferno they had made of the Guardian tree, screaming even louder about demons and devils.

We could do nothing for him. Our hands were empty, our weapons oiled and wrapped in chests in the long houses, awaiting the next hunt. He had warned us that they would come, and they would be merciless, but even the seer had believed he would be able to speak to them and warn them to leave us well alone. Even seers can be wrong.

We slipped away to our hiding places on the mountain and in the forest, following paths the invaders couldn’t see, and we waited. We watched them from our safe places as they pulled down our homes and tossed their wooden frames into the fire, the opening and closing of their mouths as they roared in a frenzy. The invaders seemed to know a lot about the demons and wicked things that live in their imaginations, but little about peace and friendship. We suspected that paying so much attention to what these demons said and demanded had made them cruel and heartless.

The Guardian burned angrily all night, the flames raging at the senseless murder and mourning with us the loss of the voice the blind bard had given to the waves, the wind and the birds. As the hours of darkness wore on, we saw, in the undiminished flame-light, the expression on the invaders’ smooth faces turn from hatred, to suspicion, then to fear. Though the great Guardian tree was reduced to ash, still the fire burned, and so did their standard. The fiery cross tore a ragged gap in the night, but it was not consumed, nor could the fire be quenched with water, though the black invaders tried.

From our hiding places, we heard them murmuring that the fire was as cursed as the tree. What could be fuelling the fire, they muttered, if not evil and devils’ black magic? Could they not feel the Guardian’s anger, that the flames were their work and the murder of the seer was their evil? Why had the invaders seen wickedness and devilry in the offerings of flowers and songs that we had prepared for the Guardian? We would have pitied them for their ignorance, had we not seen their cruelty, how they revelled in destruction.

Day breaks in a grey dawn. The invaders are silent now, and anxiety is etched into their features. They do not look at the sky. They do not see the moon set and the morning star shine out bravely. They do not even see the sun rise. All they see are the flames, leaping and stretching into the sky though there is nothing of the Guardian tree left to burn. The flames have taken a form that we know to be the Guardian’s, and that fills them with terror.

The sun has risen over the rim of the ocean and pours fiery rays to join the flames that swell higher and wider. As the Guardian spreads boughs that look like arms, that look like fiery wings, the invaders cringe and back away. We hear their voices rise in a terrified plea to the ‘Avenging Angel’ and we look at one another in surprise. Angel? Could they not see the spirit of the Guardian in the veils of flame? What else would they expect to find at the heart of a tree but a bird?

The Guardian’s wings spread and spread, hovering about their ship, dropping veils of flame to envelope the sails and the rigging. The invaders see the danger, but too late. With their ship, their easy escape, become an inferno, they look what they are, pale, maggoty cowards crawled out of a rotting fruit somewhere beyond the ocean’s rim. The Guardian has found her voice in the crackling of dry canvas and rope, and she calls to us. The invaders surely hear too, for they fall to their knees and join their hands in supplication. They weep too, so we imagine that they expect no mercy. The spirits they worship must be as implacable as the Guardian.

She calls to us in her fiery eagle-voice, and the sacred source hears too. Swollen with sadness for the loss of the blind seer, it leaps from the earth in coils, silver as serpents, strong as steel bands, leaps in a serpentine course to the river bank. The invaders stop their ears and run through the dripping rain of fire to fling themselves into the estuary. But there is no escape for them in the water that boils with the source’s anger, and one by one, the invaders are bound up by its unbreakable cords and dragged down into the depths.

We wait on the banks of the river where it runs into the sea, beneath the fiery cloud that still glows bright as the sun. We watch the green surface of the water swirl silver, spiralling in whirlpools, glassy and smooth. Soon the water-mouths will suck the bones clean, like so many birch branches, and spit them out for us to gather them up. We will take them to the place where the Guardian tree grows and pile them on the charred earth above her roots. The source will nurture the bones as tenderly as if they were shoots of new barley, and when the fiery Guardian spirit spreads her wings again, it will be to draw up a tree, tall, broad and eternal. And the holy ground will be cleansed.