AIX 

Prologue

Porth Wen, Wales—1981

Breathing at the edge of night. The smell of the sea, of salt, decay and something more—a musty smell of fresh-turned earth. The motive air is filled with voices. Birds settle on the window ledge. Horizontal rain blows for hours on end, the black sea torn by a wind that lashes everything at once. Spindrift, clouds whirling, turning like leaves, like spheres in the void. Viridian lights boil in the upper atmosphere—in distant cloud breaks over land, over water.

“Crow is here.” she says without inflection, as if all in this synoptic world is evident—the molten core, the heavens, the serpent, winged messengers. Seren turns to the open space in the stone floored ruin in the old brickworks. “Come sit. Let’s have a smoke. Let’s drink something.” 

They have cleared the room of furniture, of rugs, stripped away most every telltale of human life. One stool—a perch for the muse—a legless settee dragged across the wet grass to the compound of abandoned buildings high on the cliff. On the floor, a huge canvas is stretched like an animal skin pegged out to dry. The door to the sea is open wide, inviting the storm, inviting the choir of voices like wind on a hundred wires. Inside, the iron stove glows. A smell of heated metal haunts the air.

Bent double on his knees, the man ignores her. He is cerulean and cobalt, lapis and indigo. He is lake and madder, cadmium and chrome. She can hear him wheezing like a bagpipe, a harmonium, keening to the rhythm that invades his being, the rhythm of the storm, the rhythm of blood—”you’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me.” Coated with pigment, his hands move deliberately over the canvas, oil spills from a jar and turns the dust to a paste. He scrapes, scours, scribes the surface with a long-bladed knife, grinding a slurry of brilliant color into the cloth, chafing the viscous mixture into the fabric’s weave—warp and weft—blocking in the image of a huge pair of horns. The Great Bull.

 Catching the flash of a match, the smoke of a cigarette, he glances up at her—seated on a high stool in the corner. Head cocked to the side. Watching him, watching it all. Her face softened— gray eyes now a shade of green. 

“I’m fucked, Cece. I can’t get it. Nothing is right. Fucked again,” he says.

“Stop thinking, Moss. Just paint.” The old, familiar edge in her voice is gone. She smiles at him—the eyes of a child in the face of a Madonna—a martyr. Not the Magdalene he knows so well. Crow is here. Maybe she can give him the one thing he needs. 

Absolution? No, that would be asking far too much.