Post 1: Loomings

When I was born, I opened my eyes. It was like I was truly seeing for the first time.

Two figures stood in front of me. My mother and my father. My mother, with her blonde hair and army pants, was a seal dealer from Newport Beach, California. My father, grey and bespectacled, was a curator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. From an early age I was surrounded by the sea.

Whales in particular fascinated me. I read Moby Dick for the first time when I was three. Every birthday I ate whale steak. But more than anything I was obsessed by their sounds: their high pitched calls and whistles, their droning moans that seemed to make the whole sea vibrate.

I wanted, I wanted desperately, to learn their language. I wanted to be one of them: floating around on my back, yelling into the waves, being symbolic for a variety of things I didn’t know about. But my school didn’t offer any courses, and people I met were unreceptive to my attempts at socializing in whale. I realized, at about the age of 12, that I was going to have to take things into my own hands.

I turned to the internet. “Language of Wales,” I wrote. (Spelling had never been a strong suit of mine.)

The result was unexpected, but promising. It appeared the whales spoke a language called Welsh, which was also spoken by about eight hundred thousand people. They were mainly concentrated on a small island many miles away, which I presumed was the whaling capital of the world. With excitement in my eyes, and whale steak in my stomach, I poured my energies into learning this delightful language.

It took a couple months, but eventually I became fluent. I could do it all—pronounce the double ll sound, mutate verbs, curse out a group of people named ‘The English.’ Whatever doubts I might have had about the language’s similarity to the whale songs of my youth, I put aside. I contributed them to my inexperience, or to the fact that my vocal cords had been seriously damaged after I tried to become a sword-swallower (more on that later).

But eventually, I could not outrun reality. Or more accurately, I could not outswim it. Day after day I would lay in Monterey Harbor, letting the waves roll over me, shouting Welsh pointlessly into the surf. I had to accept it: the whales didn’t want to talk to me.

I wasn’t popular enough.

I gave up my Welsh—I burned my study books—I destroyed my limited edition Cymru: From Dawn to Dysgu DVD. I vowed to forget all that I had learned, for my failure was too painful to remember. This was aided by the concussion I got two years later while playing tackle hopscotch with NFL Pro-Bowl linebacker Bobby Wagner, my best friend turned worst enemy.

But despite the excitement my rivalry with Wagner brought me, I wasn’t truly happy without Welsh. I didn’t remember any of it, sure, but sometimes—sometimes, when people talked about rugby, or leeks, or sheep, I felt something stirring deep inside of me. Something I had once known and lost, never to be found again.

Or so I thought.

It was only last year that I was sitting with my cousin, CIA translator Lydia Montgomery, on a beach near Seattle, staring at a blank, whale-less sea. She was explaining to me her theory (so far unproven by science) that all words are derivatives of Basque, the little-spoken and bizarrely unique language of north-central Spain and south-western France. Take ‘doctor,’ she said. Doctor is made up of the linguistic elements do, ok, to, and or, which in their full forms are odo, oke, eto and ora. These are clearly short of the Basque words odoldun (‘bloody’), okerkeria (‘injury’), etorri (‘come!’) and orain (right now). Therefore ‘doctor’ comes from the Basque sentence ‘a bloody injury, come right now!’ You can find the same trends, she continued, in Welsh.

“Welsh?” I said. “What do you know of the whales’ tongue?”

What she explained shook me to my core. It turned out that Welsh was not, as I had so naively assumed, the language of whales; and the Welsh-speaking region of the world was not, as I still sometimes dream, a land of whaling ships and wild harpooners. It was part of the United Kingdom, a magical land of castles, farmers, and closed-up mines. It was poorer than England, smaller than Scotland, and less bloody than Northern Ireland. It was, more than anything, a land of sheep.

“And you’ve been there?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“I was there during a strange time. It was in 2008—the housing market had just fallen. In Wales it was a bit more literal—a ton of houses literally fell. My boss at the time, Carl Spackler, wanted me to find out what was going on there. He was worried about gophers. He was crazy about gophers, Carl was—he was a former greenskeeper turned CIA director, you know. A real Cinderella story. Master of pyrotechnics. Anyway, Carl sent a team of us out there and positioned us around the country. I was in Anglesey, in North Wales. My colleague John Coctostan was in Snowdonia. We were supposed to wait for further instructions.

“What happened?”

“Well, nothing, really. The mission was called off after a few days. But John… John never came back with us. It was all rather strange. He was investigating a mountain there, or some people on a mountain—we never really got the story straight. One day he was in contact with us, and the next—nothing. But the boss was never worried, so we figured he must have been alright. He was Scotch-Romanian, you know, so maybe he went to stay with family. It’s a beautiful country though, Wales. I loved my time there.”

She paused, staring out at the sea. I waited a moment before asking a question.

“Lydia, what did you say the name of the mountain was?”

She told me.

Practically speaking, that was the moment my quest began—quest is, after all, only three letters away from question. But when I recall the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the task I undertake today, and cajoled me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgement.

For John Coctostan was not a name unknown to me; and John Coctostan was not, in fact, doing alright. Almost ten years ago now my good friend Gail Stanwyk called me in tears and told me that the love of her life, a man named John Coctostan, had been killed in a bungled burglary in the UK. I had been there at his funeral: we watched his finely-dimpled chin be lowered into the ground, and saluted him by eating a steak sandwich, and a steak sandwich.

Since I heard my cousin’s story, I have been pondering what to do. Clearly, John found something on that snow-capped Welsh mountain; clearly, that something led to his death. And someone—the CIA?—was trying to hide that fact.

Now, at long last, I have decided to take matters into my own hands. I owe it to Gail; I owe it to Lydia; I owe it to John. I owe it to myself, and to the lost whale-language of my youth.

This blog will be the record of my quest: my quest to learn Welsh, explore Welsh history, and find whatever secret thing dwells on that mountain. It will take hard work; it will take dedication; it will take approximately 40 hours over the next five weeks, which is what the Gould Center requires for these projects. But I’m confident that by the end I will have plumbed the depths of that mountain, and scaled its lofty heights.

For now, writing this, it’s the mountain that haunts me most. Wild and strange, vast and inscrutable, in floats in my inmost soul like some grand hooded phantom, a literal snow hill in the air.

Y Lliwedd: the mountain of sleeping old men.

[For sources, resources, and more historical notes go to the "Resources" page]

Post 2: The Spouter-Inn

Y Lliwedd is a mountain in Snowdonia National Park, connected to Snowdon, the park’s highest peak. Snowdonia as a whole has long been connected with Arthurian legend, and these two mountains are no exception. On Snowdon, a giant named Rhitta Gawr lived who was one of the world’s greatest barbers. He had a passion for beards, and would hunt down Welsh kings and princes for the sole purpose of shearing them. Upon destroying the armies of twenty-six British kings he seized their beards and sewed them together into a warm winter cloak. One is presented with the amusing image of a giant sitting on top of a desolate mountain, busily sewing together bushy beards in a state of domestic bliss.

Unfortunately, a giant’s life is a nasty and brutish one, and it appears the beards were no match for the daily wear and tear of Gwar's schedule. Needing a beard to repair his cloak, Rhitta Gawr sent what was presumably a very polite message to King Arthur asking him for his beard (we modern men get this kind of message daily). Arthur, however, no doubt possessing a magnificent beard that was very time-consuming to grow, took offense at the letter and set off to murder Rhitta Gawr, which he did with relative ease. Legend has it that he instructed his men to cover the giant’s body with stone and earth, and that grave-mound is now the peak of Snowdon and the highest place in Wales.

Arthur himself, according to some legends, also died near Snowdon, on a ridge between Snowdon and Y Lliwedd (Bwlch y Saethau). After his death, his loyal knights sealed themselves in a cave on Y Lliwedd, where they still wait, in full battle-armour, for the day that Arthur rises and they are needed again. That was almost one and a half thousand years ago: imagine how long their beards have grown, and how many warm winter cloaks you could sew from them.

This, of course, I learned from only a little internet research, and brought me no closer to solving the mystery of John Coctostan's death. Still, I was undaunted: as a young white male, I have always found it best to approach problems with a full stomach, an empty bladder, and a completely unwarranted degree of confidence.

Through the internet I also completed my first Welsh lessons, through SaySomethingInWelsh.com and the official Wales.gov course (links in the ‘Resources’ tab). I truly felt like I could do it all: tell people I’m learning Welsh, telling people I’m trying to learn Welsh, tell people I’m trying to learn to speak Welsh. I felt so accomplished, in fact, I decided to take a field trip to a place with real Welsh speakers: Orcas, the Welsh neighbourhood of Monterey (Orcas are Little Whales—it appears Monterery suffers from similar spelling deficiencies as me). Armed with my new Welsh phrases, and a Swiss-army knife in case things got dicey, I set off in my faithful car Samantha.

To those unfamiliar with the place, the fact that Monterey Bay has a Welsh neighbourhood might be somewhat surprising. Indeed, I have met people who have lived here their entire lives without hearing about it. But Orcas, tucked in between the boroughs of Littely (Little Italy) and Bittely (Big Italy), is one of the hottest shopping spots in the city. This is mainly due to a small high-class restaurant that opened there, specializing in carrots and other vegetables. The restaurant was called Carrot Kitchen, but, in keeping with Orcas rules and regulations, the name is written in Welsh: cegin moron. With a Welsh accent, it sounds almost identical to ‘kicking morons.’

Kicking Morons, as it is therefore colloquially known, attracts a huge crowd by appealing to two groups at the same time: for one, it gets actual restaurant-goers who are looking to try their famous carrot stew and prized Welsh-cakes (“The Best West of West Wales!”). But it also gets groups of young people who would stand under the sign and film themselves kicking each other. It is not an uncommon sight to see a group of suit-clad professionals dodging blows and high kicks as they try to navigate their way to the door.

Both these groups of customers also bring their business to the rest of Orcas, and by the time I arrived there the place was packed. I myself was interested in one of the smaller shops, an off-the-road bookstore bizarrely named The Spouter Inn. It was one of the first shops that opened when Welsh settlers landed here in 1890, searching for India. I was hoping to get some books about Welsh history, and maybe make some local contacts: the official language of Orcas was technically Welsh.

The building itself was a dilapidated old thing, seeming in some strange way to lean both ways at once. Its gabled roof was grubby and holed, and cracking in places; and round it swept a strange wind, so it seemed the building was always engaged in its own private vortex. Outside the sidewalk seemed darker, and the swinging sign had, as one old writer wrote (of whose works I possess the only copy extant), “a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it.”

I entered the wooden door into a dim space, where low beams threatened my head and the light was all hidden 'round corners. On one side was a long oil painting, smudged and smoked and in every way blackened. I puzzled at it for a second—it almost looked, at first glance, like a whale jumping over some condemned sinking ship, and impaling itself on the three mast-heads.

“Ah, I know what yer thinking,” said a man in the corner, before breaking down into a fit of low coughs. “Aye, that’s no whale being impaled; no, that’s a piece of shrimp on someone’s fork. We bought it cheap from that seafood place that burned down on Second Avenue. Was a promotional poster for their shrimp dinners, it was.”

Once again he broke down into coughs. Concerned for him, I asked if he needed any help.

“No, not me, no. My name’s Peter, I own this place; but due to my coughs they call me Peter Coughin’. Anyway, what are you lookin’ for here, heads or books?”

He must have been able to tell from the confused expression on my face that the answer was books.

“Aye, it’s a pity, the head market being overstocked as it is. Down that door to the right there you’ll find yer books, and anything else about Wales that you could possibly want.”

I thanked him and headed down the hallway to the bookstore. It was a much brighter space, and well stocked at that; I had no trouble picking out the books I wanted, and I left feeling much more prepared for my quest (selection of books listed in the ‘Resources’ tab). The only trouble came when I had to pay; not only did I forget to bring any pounds (the currency of Orcas), but the strict ‘Welsh Only’ speaking policy in the bookstore left me completely unable to express this lack of money. Only though an extremely laborious process of me saying “I am learning Welsh” and “I want to learn Welsh” with different inflections of my voice was I finally able to negotiate the sale.

I returned home exhausted and very much in need of a nap. Still, I had plenty of Welsh history reading to do: I lit a tallow candle, put on a CD of whale calls, and got to work.

[For sources, resources, and more historical notes go to the "Resources" page]

Post 3: The Counterpane

I started with A History of Wales by John Davies, not to be confused with The Welsh Language: A History by Janet Davies, or the Mabinogion translation by Sioned Davies, or Wales 1063-1450: Age of Conquest by R. R. Davies—the Davies family, whoever they may be, seem to have a monopoly over Welsh history books. John Davies starts his history by noting that for a long time the Welsh knew a very different kind of history. It came from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote about Brutus of Troy, the fabled grandson of Ascanius who was banished from Italy after killing both his parents with an arrow. After various travels and general tomfoolery, Brutus came to the land known as Albion, killed all the giants there (except their leader, who he saved to wrestle with) and settled down. When Brutus had three sons, he divided the kingdom among them: Locrinus got England, Albanactus Scotland, and Kamber Wales (that's where the name Cambria comes from, according to Geoffrey).

This account is, obviously, not completely accurate. There is evidence of people living in Britain as far back as 500,000 BCE, and the oldest evidence of Neanderthal culture in Wales is about 225,000 years old (some teeth found in a Pontnewydd cave). This was a period of ice ages and warm spells, where Britain was only sometimes an island and roaming groups of hunters and gathers traversed huge parts of Europe. Artifacts become more prevalent around 35,000 BCE, with evidence of human culture being found in about ten places in Wales. The most famous of these artifacts is the so-called Red Lady of Paviland, which was found by William Buckland, a professor of Geology at Oxford University, in 1823. Buckley was a strict creationist who believed humanity was only as old as the Genesis flood (look up ‘flood geology’ for some fun stuff on this) and therefore vastly underestimated the age of the skeleton: he guessed it was a woman from the Roman period. The red dye that covered the skeleton and the carved mammoth jewelry that was found alongside it made him further speculate that the woman was a Roman prostitute or witch.

As it turns out, the Red Lady of Paviland is not a lady at all, but a young man. And he is not 2,000 years old but around 33,000 years old, making him one of the oldest skeletal finds in Britain. Bone protein analysis of the Red Lady found that he had a diet of reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, and fish, the latter making up about 15-20 percent of his diet (according to Wikipedia). The fish statistic is surprising given the cave (‘Goat’s Hole’) would have been about 70 miles inland in the Red Lady’s day—this implies that they were either nomadic or that the tribe moved the body for some type of special burial.

The most recent ice age ended around 10,000 BCE and resulted in Britain separating from Ireland. Davies posits that stories in the Mabinogi and in Irish legends about the strait once being shallower and narrower might be ancient memories of this event. The change in climate also brought new types of game to the island, like deer, and eliminated some of old ice age classics, like mammoths. By 8,500 BCE, the start of the Mesolithic Age in Britain, society was extremely changed from the ice age days: people were building nets and arrows, using fire to clear new forests, and training dogs. There is also evidence that the people would protect the plants and trees that were helpful to them. An example of these societies can be seen at Starr Car in Yorkshire: there, about 250 people lived in a 25 square kilometer area and ate mainly red deer.

There is some debate about how the Mesolithic Age ended in Britain. People used to view it in terms of conquering and invasion: the more advanced Neolithic age swept in and destroyed the more primitive societies that previously existed. Now the trend is to think of it more as a general progression, where integration between the two ages was a long and complicated process. The Neolithic age, however, which started in about 4,000 BCE, certainly brought about large changes. The first evidence of sustained farming in Wales is found—although they were “hoers of small plots rather than cultivators of large fields'' due to their lack of husbandry skills—and large cultural structures are visible in the cromlechi. Cromlechi are stone structures, sometimes sort of like Stonehenge, that acted as the center of community life for the tribes. The tribes would live around the cromlechi in a semi-nomadic way, moving whenever the soil became unusable and meeting at the structure for ceremonies and meetings.

There are around 150 comlechi in Wales, mostly towards the west where there was more trade and intersection with other cultures. They were primarily the work of wealthier clans, or sometimes multiple clans working together, and point to the existence of large communities in Wales at the time: the Tinkinswood cromlech in the Vale of Glamorgan, for example, would have needed 200 men just to lift its capstone piece. They’re also further proof of the stone quarrying going on in Wales at this time: stones were also used to make axes that were traded over great distances.

The Bronze Age was slow to conquer Britain: for a while, they were stuck with rock in a hard place. When it came, however, it brought significant improvements to the native Briton’s quality of life. Tools got better, they began to weave cloth, the wheel was used more often, and oxen were harnessed. They also mastered the “principles of manuring,” which allowed them to settle and rely more heavily on farming. Some of the best evidence of the early Bronze Age comes from graves, as people began to be buried individually and with sometimes very extravagant vessels. The graves of the Beaker Folk in particular, warlike people from Germany and Ukraine who integrated with British society (and taught them how to brew beer!), are impressive.

This period is also when Stonehenge and other large monuments were built. Most of this happened in the wealthy region of Wessex, but Stonehenge does have a connection to Wales. It is generally thought that the stones that make up Stonehenge were quarried from the Preseli Mountains in west Wales, for reasons that have been subject to much speculation. One theory is that since Preseli was “the most prominent landmark for those sailing from Ireland to the Severn Sea,” it would have been seen as a “holy mountain.” “If so,” says Davis, “there was magic on the hills of Dyfed from very early times.”

Unfortunately, these weren’t the only changes during the Bronze age. In around 1,400 BCE the climate changed and temperatures dropped dramatically across Wales. The Highland zones, which had been prosperous farming communities, became unusable. Their culture changed, they became less sedentary, and the amount of pottery they produced (which Davies calls the archaeologist's “favourite artifact”) declined dramatically. Wales as a whole became increasingly violent during this “Later Bronze Age.” This is seen both in the increased number of hill-forts built across Wales, ranging from individual fortified farms to large cliff-castles, and in the stashes of bronze and gold tools found in bogs and marshes. These stashes were the hiding spots of travelling salesmen who never made it back to claim their goods, the prequels to Arthur Miller’s play.

That seemed like a good stopping point. I am always quick to avoid violence, or any unpleasant thing, by simply turning my eyes away and pretending it doesn’t exist. That is why I am happy to live in such a compassionate, racism-free society.

Putting the book away, I realized it was quite late at night. I switched off my light and got into bed, my mind still on Wales, my hands fiddling with the antique Middle-Ages sword I keep next to my bed. Absentmindedly I practiced swallowing the sword and pulling it back up again, leaning against my pillows and watching my neighbour’s light dance across my bed-sheet.

No—not dance. Flash. In a pattern.

Short. Long. Short short long.

My God. It’s Morse Code.

I almost choked on the sword I was swallowing. Morse code! I hadn’t heard those words in years. When I was young I was a master of what they called ‘The Code’—I even believed the conspiracy theory that all good drummers drum in Morse Code, a drum beat representing a dot and a cymbal smash representing a dash. But I was older now, and could barely remember the letters.

Still, I knew I had to try. I concentrated on the light.

Short long long long. J. Short. E. Short short short. S. Short short long. U. Short short short. S. Jesus?

It was still going, however. Letter by letter, this mysterious flasher spelled out ‘lame.’ Jesus lame? Surely they meant Jesus Lane, the street in Monterey where every single church was built (city regulation). Even so, what were they trying to say about it? Were they signalling this to me?

Before I could really think about it I saw a light go on in a different house. Another Morse Code message! After a minute the light turned off. That was definitely a dash—T. Then a different light turned on, just for a few seconds—E. After that all was quiet.

What were they trying to tell me? What was Te? Were they saying ‘tea’ in Welsh? Or the start of ‘I love you’ in Spanish? Was it an acronym for Total Exoneration, or Traitor Executed? Was it the last cry of some monolingual Welsh speaker, trapped in their house with no ability to spell English words?

I waited all night, but saw nothing. I decided to investigate the next day. I was going to be a detective.

Post 5: The Sermon

I woke up and found I had grown two fantastic moustaches. I looked around the room with a surprisingly satisfied gaze: my desk, which was normally messy enough to convince me that I was working on something, was perfectly clean and orderly. Not a speck of dust was left on the mantle of the fireplace—indeed, I seemed to remember a peculiar murder case that was solved due to my habit of keeping such places obsessively clean.

On the whole, I was struck with a strong dissatisfaction for all things asymmetrical (which included, in my mind, the word asymmetrical). I was also struck by a cold winter breeze coming in through the window, which made me shiver in my silk pajamas. I longed to be in front of the fire with a hot tisane or cup of chocolate, relaxing in the modern and geometric living room of my London apartment.

I knew, however, that I had some work to attend to. Things were not va bien in the Case of the Flashing Light, and my dearest friend Captain Hastings was quite worried about it. I knew, of course, that was success was assured—speaking humbly, there was not a mind in Europe equal to mine. These things were just a matter of time, of letting the little grey cells stir and be active.

As I sat contemplating these things the aforementioned Hastings burst into the room. He was, as the English are fond of saying, in quite a state. I had barely wished him good morning when he burst into a sort of tirade.

“Poirot,” he began, “I can’t begin to figure you out. Some person flashed some coded message into your window during the middle of an investigation, and you just sit here doing nothing!”

“Well, my dear Hastings, what would you like me to do?”

“Why, what do you mean? Search the house, Poirot, or go and ask questions there. Get Japp involved, or me! I feel so useless sitting here while you enjoy your breakfast, knowing there’s so much to do.”

“Ah, Hastings, you would always have me be like the dog, sniffing down the lead, sticking the head where it does not belong. But no, Hercule Poirot is like the lion and the giraffe: he sees all from his head, and he pounces only when he is sure of the prey.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I am going to sit here. And, eh bien, if the case comes to mind, I will think of it.”

"Poirot, you are impossible!"

Resolutely I planted myself in a comfortable chair across the room. Hastings, however, still looked worried, even angry. Taking pity on my young eager friend, I decided to throw him a bone.

“There is one thing, Hastings, that you would be kind to assist me with. I would like you to look at the background of all the preachers on Jesus Lane: the road with all the churches down Marshall. See if any of them have military backgrounds, or served in your good Navy.”

Hastings thanked me energetically and headed off. I was alone again, and decided to contemplate the case. It would be good to take the burden off my good friend, and, I admit, I always relished his shocked admiration when I solved a case. He had not the imagination, Hastings, but he was always appreciative of a good show.

I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and let the little grey cells get to work.

I fell asleep. This wasn’t working.

I woke up groggily and looked at the empty bottle of Glenfiddich next to me. The Wagner I turned on was still playing at full volume, and I closed my eyes and soaked it in for a second before forcing myself to get up. The room was a mess: piles of books in the corner (my Kipling and A. E. Housman on top) and take-out food and empty bottles on the table. I vowed, as I did the week before, that I would give up alcohol and smoking: today was a new day, and I was a new man.

I walked down to the newsstand and grabbed News of the World and The Times, a combination of crassness and culture not unlike myself and my town of Oxford. The Times I mainly took for the crossword puzzle, which I solved in just under ten minutes. Only one clue gave me trouble: the name of the first Hercule Poirot novel, in which the Belgian discovers an essential clue due to his habits of keeping mantlepieces tidy.

When I had delayed long enough I put on my wrinkled shirt and got ready for work. Still a little hungover, I called Sergent Lewis to pick me up.

“Of course, sir,” he said. “I’ve also finished with that job you gave me, the one about the preachers on Jesus Lane. And you were right: one preacher, a Father Mapple at the end of the lane, was in the Navy about ten years ago.”

“Great. I want to go down there today.”

“If I may say something, sir—didn’t the Morse code message say “Jesus Lame,” not Jesus Lane? And why do we care if they were in the Navy?”

“Lew-is, pay attention! It’s Morse code! The letter ‘m’ and the letter ‘n’ are very close to each other. And where do they teach Morse code nowadays? The Navy is practically the only place.”

“But shouldn’t we look at what they actually said? It doesn’t seem likely that they’d plan out this whole message and then make a typo on a pretty common letter.”

“Unlikely things happen, Lewis. Bring the car around.”

Deep down, of course, I didn’t believe in coincidences. But I did believe I was on the right track by interpreting the message as Jesus Lane. Already thoughts and ideas were swirling around in my head, forming wild patterns and connections. If I just had a drink I could sort it all out… maybe Lewis could check whether the pubs were open yet.

I changed again and went to wait for the car.

Bunter brought Mrs. Merdle around, the magnificent Daimler double-six engine that I took particular pride in. Ms. Harriet Vane was waiting in the backseat for me as I climbed into the polished upholstery, and I greeted her with a lordly kiss on the cheek. We turned left on Marshall Street and headed towards Jesus Lane, looking for the last church on the right.

The church at the end of Jesus Lane did not look like a church. In fact, it wasn’t a building at all. The only indication that it was something other than a large open field was the huge sign that faced the road, which read:

Father Mapple’s Boot-Stompin’, Syrup-Lovin’, Jesus-Worshippin' House of God

Breakfast Served Every Day After Service*

*for a reasonable price

Already there was a large group of people milling around at the bottom of the field. Every segment of the Monterey Bay population seemed to be present: cowboys, Indian Jones stunt doubles, and BDSM activists with their whips; fishermen and whalers still covered in fish blood and smelling like death; ladies of the highest class dressed in 18th-century dresses and holding small umbrellas; mole-people. There was an air of expectancy around the crowd, a nervous excitement: focused, I thought, on one maple tree towards the end of the lawn.

On closer inspection, I saw that the tree could be more accurately termed a tree-house. There was a small platform in the middle of the branches, framed by branches in an arching way so that it looked like green flames were rearing up around it. A rope ladder swung down against the trunk and swayed softly in the breeze. This, I thought, must be the pulpit.

On a whim, I tapped the shoulder of a nearby gentleman and inquired where the preacher was. He pointed me to a solitary man standing to the left of the tree, a strange looking fellow with hair sticking at least two feet into the air. He was staring at the tree and stroking his long goatee, a contemplative look on his face.

I walked over and said hello.

“I’m Lord Peter—no. I’m Adam Dal—no. I’m… call me Basil. Are you Father Mapple?” I asked awkwardly, shaking his hand the entire time.

“Maple, actually. Like the syrup company.”

“Don’t you mean like the syrup?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. Maple is a brand name; the Maple family goes back to the earliest Canadian settlers, who came all the way from Nicaragua.”

I was a little taken aback by his manner, and from the absurd accent he used to say ‘Nicaragua.’ Still, I was curious—something about his frankness, and his incredible hair, intrigued me.

“Isn’t the syrup just named after the tree? The maple tree?”

“Ah, I’m afraid you're wrong there too, my average-looking young friend. In Canada we believe in the holy religious principle of finders keepers. And my family was the first in the modern era to find the secret to extracting the syrup from what previously known as ‘The Other Green Tree.’' They named the syrup, and the tree, after us.”

“Are all trees named after people?”

“Well, I know only a few other tree-families: we’re in a semi-secret organization called the Treemasons. There are the Willows, the Spruces, the Elms. There are also the Pines, of course, but they’re not limited to just trees. One of them, a man named Pork Usher Pine, was the first to find a certain prickly animal back in 1640: that’s why it’s called a porcupine.”

“That’s amazing.”

“I know it is.”

Father Maple was grinning now, and giving me a friendly look. I wanted to hear more about our founding tree families, and about Pork U. Pine, but I knew I had to get down to business. I needed to find out if he was the one who sent me the Morse Code messages last night.

“Father… I don’t know how to say this. I guess I should just come out and ask it. Where were you last night around 11 p.m.?”

He looked around to see if anybody was near us before answering.

“Son, if you must know, I was at The Fire Station, the club that’s a fire station by day and a strip club (featuring the firefighters) at night. They already have the poles there, you see. It’s the hottest show in town.”

“What if there’s a fire at night?”

“Ha! My boy, fires can’t spread at night! That’s why we light all the candles in the tree at night—it’s completely safe.”

“So you weren’t flashing Morse Code signals at my window?”

“I most certainly was not. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go preach now. I do hope you will stay and listen to the sermon. It’s on a topic of peculiar importance to this town. And if you ever need some syrup, you know who to come to—all the big syrup brands pay a royalty to my family in order to use the ‘Maple’ name, and some of them pay us in the form of Maple syrup barrels.”

He shook my hand again and began to skip towards the pulpit.

“Wait!” I cried. “ One more question. How do you get your hair to stand up so straight?”

He shook his head slowly and smiled.

“What’s the name, boy, what’s the name?”

As soon as he said that, a gust of wind blew from the direction of the pulpit, and the air suddenly smelt strongly of Maple syrup. I understood. But he was already gone.

I watched the crazy-haired preacher climb nimbly up into the pulpit and light a few candles before bowing his head in prayer. Immediately the crowd gathered beneath him, looking up at him with fervent eyes and chanting something that sounded like ‘Maple, Maple, Maple.’ He was still for a few seconds more before standing up dramatically, sweeping his priestly cloak around him like a magician.

“Children! Children of God—and some of you children of me: [aside] Hi Stacey, hey Gavin. Dad will be home tonight, I promise.

“Children, the Lord has sent you a great message. The Lord has sent you a great warning! He has sent you it in the form of the whale, in the story of Jonah and his escape from God: the same whale that you see spouting in the wind-broken waves of your ocean, and the same escape many of you attempt daily. The escape from your duties, from God’s wants! The fear, the fear that drives you away from his holy name! Did Jonah not wander the docks, his face twisted, a God-driven fugitive, the most guilty of sinners—did he not try to ship to the most distant corners of the earth, paying the fare as given, sleeping in that coffin-room with its swinging lamp? And did the sailors not come to him and see the evil written in his brow, and the scars of sin marked across his face, and say to him ‘Haha Jonah, you ugly loser, you suck?’

“And did they not, when the time came, when every other option left them, cast that fugitive into the hurling waves and the shrieking wind, and sink him to the bottom of the sea, where his whirling heart did scarcely recognize the red bloodiness that surrounded him and the grey vessel that ferried him through the now-calm seas? Oh Jonah, praying in the stomach of that whale, pressing himself against those thick shapeless walls, sounding echoes around that living chamber, what humility possessed you? What perfect prayers you offered up, what perfect holiness you found in the belly of the beast!

“So Children, what can we learn from Jonah, from his fleeing from God, from his descent into the whale, and from his humbling escape? One thing, and one thing only: stickiness! Why did Jonah flee? He could not stick to his work, he could not do his job! What, then does God value? Stick-withitness! Stickiness! Stickiness, I tell you, is next to godliness!

“So make yourself sticky! Coat yourself in Maple syrup so that your clothes drip, and your feet stick to the floor, and a pillow full of feathers is your greatest nightmare! Buy Mrs. Butterworth’s Maple syrup! Buy Aunt Jemima’s, once it gets renamed! Buy Trader Joe’s brand, and Costco brand, and Whole Foods brand. Buy, buy Maple syrup!”

He fell to his knees and raised his arms, his chest heaving, his eyes insane. The crowd was going crazy, stomping their feet and yelling and chanting “Breakfast Breakfast Breakfast.” The branches were arching up around him like green tongues of fire, and his hair was sticking above us all like a flaming sword.

I was struck by the unreality of the situation, like it was something that was designed by a bored teenager who needed something to blog about that day. The whole thing was absurd: the sermon, the maple syrup being squirted around in what had rapidly become a mosh pit, the preachers' hair on fire.

The preacher’s hair on fire.

I pulled out my phone and called 911. It appeared that in his excitement, Father Maple had walked a little too close to one of the candles. The flames had traveled up his back and had reached his hair, which, because of the maple syrup that he used to style it, was abnormally flammable. He looked like a living candle as he remained kneeling in the tree-house, his mouth agape, his head on fire. It was exactly the point Annie Dillard was trying to make in her famous moth essay.

The fire department came quickly and dragged him down from the tree, dousing his body and rubbing fire retardant on his now-bald head. Sobbing, shaking from the scare, Father Maple whispered to the firemen: “I liked you guys better without the uniforms.”

The tree, however, could not be saved. By the time the firefighters got to it the whole top was consumed by flames, and their hoses reduced the rest of the tree to a pile of soggy wood chips. Thus, the pulpit became pulp.

There was nothing left for me there. I had failed. I grabbed a bottle of Maple syrup and went home.

Post 6: Biographical

Happy Christmas Eve! To celebrate the holiday season, I decided to do something a bit different: I asked you, my wonderful readers, to submit questions! I got dozens of submissions from multiple social media sites; I hope to answer the most popular ones here:

This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read in my life. You’re diseased. I hate everything you’ve written on this, I find you revolting, and when I finally find you in person, you're going to regret you ever did this.

Hey, so this isn’t actually a question! I can’t answer a question unless it’s clear and specific and ends in a question mark. However, I’d love for you to submit another question, or, if it’s really urgent, you can find my address in the Resources tab! Thanks for reading!

I’m going to kill you, you Welsh-loving toad. Scumbag.

So, again, this is more of a comment than a question. Don’t worry, we all get confused! If you submit a question I’ll get back to you in no time: I’m always happy to hear from my readers!

Didn't you kill your brother? Or weren’t you the main suspect in that police investigation? I feel like I remember watching the trial.

Finally, someone gets the question format right! Thanks for submitting 😀

How big an impact did the Romans have on ancient Wales?

They certainly had a massive impact during the centuries of Roman occupation in Wales, but it’s hard to tell how long-lasting and significant that impact was, especially in parts of northern and middle Wales where Rome was almost exclusively a military presence. But I think I should go back and given a broader history of the Roman occupation of Wales, starting with where I left off in my other blog post (feel free to skip this answer if you’re not here for the extremely broad and incomplete history summaries).

Immediately before the Romans rolled into Wales, Wales and Britain as a whole was part of a much larger Celtic society that stretched across much of Europe. Some historians (according to Davies) have criticized the notion of Celticity as a “tired” concept that flattens the great variety of societies in Iron Age Europe, but for the purposes of this blog I will use the term ‘Celtic’ as it is more universally recognized. While the Celtic tribes were similar in many cultural aspects and traded with each other, it’s important to note that they had no central organized state and no real cities; essentially, they were always splintered and warring in a way that made it relatively simple for the Romans to conquer them.

There is also the question of how Celtic culture came to dominate Britain, since historians now think there were no large migrations before or during the Iron Age. Some people think the Beaker Folk brought Celtic culture to Britain much earlier than previously supposed, which would explain the differences between P-Celtic (British) and Q-Celtic (Irish); others think that migrants came who were culturally dominant but not genetically, meaning they were able to change the culture of the island without significantly affecting its population. The most favored theory, however, is one termed “‘Cumulative Celticity,” which says that because Celtic culture and language was dominant in trade and in the region at large, it gradually spread and became accepted across Britain. However, because we don’t know exactly what society was like in Britain before the Celts, we don’t know how many of the traits we think of as Celtic are really native Briton; likewise, we don’t know what elements of the early Brythonic language come from native British language. Davies suggests that some elements of Celtic culture, such as their respect for women and some of their religious rituals, could have originated in Britain.

These Celtic societies were relatively advanced and very interesting. They had extensive knowledge of astronomy and complicated calendars, and had “many discussions as touching the stars and their movement, the size of the universe and of the earth, [and] the order of nature” according to Caesar. They also, interestingly, counted time by the number of nights and not the number of days, and in their minds the days followed the nights. The leaders of the societies were the Druids and the warriors, both of which were exempt from taxes and received other benefits. To be a Druid took intense training and often travel: Caesar talks about them studying for twenty years to memorize all the teaching and rituals, none of which could be written down (The time is not surprising: over 400 Celtic gods have been found, although most of them are presumed to be local variants of a few main ones). The center of the Druidic religion was actually in Wales, on Anglesey Island, according to the Romans and other ancient writers. The variety and quantity of La Tene art found on Anglesey confirms this.

The Celts also gave me one of my most confusing classroom experiences. We were translating Book VI of Caesar's Gallic Wars (the best book for sure) and got to the part where he says “The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside, they hold to be the greatest incentive to valour.” The Latin word for souls in this sentence is animas, which I took to mean animals, given how similar it looks to that word (this is usually a very successful translating technique in Latin). I spent fifteen minutes puzzling over the Celts’ apparent belief that animals did not die, and wondering why that made them more brave.

Caesar was, of course, the first Roman to “invade” Britain in 55 BCE and 54 BCE, but his visits were neither long nor successful. Like later Roman invasions, he concentrated on south-east Britain, where the Belgae had created a considerable kingdom. The Belgae had wheel pottery, agriculture and trade, and signs of blossoming literacy, attributes that were diluted but present in the other English tribes of the time. The Welsh tribes—the Silures, the Demetae, the Ordovices and the Deceangli—were not as impacted by the Belgae as the English tribes, but they were certainly threatened by them: Davies points out that they fortified their forts more and more as the Belgae rose to power.

Conflicts in the hereditary line of the Belgae and complaints by the tribes crowded out by the Belgae gave the Romans an “excuse” to invade Britain in 43 AD, although their real aim was probably the fertile lowlands. They also viewed Britain as the end of the world, so ruling there was a matter of pride for them: pride, perhaps, that pushed them to stay in Britain even when it was economically wasteful. For centuries, Rome stationed one-tenth of her legions in Rome, despite the fact that it made up less than one-thirtieth of her territory.

Wales in particular was an unprofitable addition. While the south-east of Britain fell easily to the Romans and the surrounding tribes were often eager to cooperate with them, the Silures of south-east Wales put up a massive resistance. Led by Caratacus (Caradog in Welsh tradition), one of the sons of the former king of the Belgae, they forced the Romans to build fortresses in every east-facing valley and move massive armies into Wales. Caratacus wasn’t defeated until 51 AD, when he was captured and taken to Rome. There, they gave him one chance to speak for himself before they executed him, and the speech he gave has since become extremely famous.

Without Caratacus, the Silures continued to resist the Romans, defeating a Roman legion around AD 52. Roman attacks stepped up, however, in AD 57, when Nero gave an order to conquer the entire island, and by AD 62 the Druidic capital of Anglesey was completely destroyed. Their campaign was luckily halted before they fully controlled Wales due to the famous uprising of Boudicca, and the Roman conquest of Wales was pushed back another decade.

It was also inherited by a new set of monatches, the Flavians, in AD 69. The first Flavian, Vespasian, had served in Britain in the army, and destroying the Silures and the neighboring Ordovices became his chief priority. During the governorship of Julius Frontinus in Britain “the headquarters of three of the four legions campaigning in Britain were located in the borderlands of Wales,” and after numerous campaigns the Silures were finally subjugated. The tribes of north Wales, however, were not. Their guerrilla warfare techniques, used in the northern mountains, were unfamiliar to the Romans and very effective. Although Rome eventually set up some temporary camps there, it is unlikely that Roman culture spread significantly in the area.

In the south of Wales, however, relatively significant cities were built up around military garrisons (mosty for economic reasons). Chief among them were Caerwent, Carmarthen, and Viroconium, although dozens of Roman army camps have been found around Wales. The cities became home to amphitheatres, baths, and all the other trappings of Roman comfort, as well as to some Roman villas (although villas were far more sparse in Wales than in England and France). The cities also created a religious divide between the urban and rural populations: Christianity, which had become the religion of the empire by 337, reigned supreme in the cities, while paganism was still dominant in the countryside.

Latin did not, however, “replace Brythonic as the mother tongue of the broad mass of the population.” It is now thought that it would have taken an effort to learn Latin, and although Latin was popular in the cities and in Christian rituals it never really “penetrated the very marrow of the population.” Most of the borrowings Brythonic made from Latin were for things they had no words for before, which makes it an interesting study. Davies lists many: deddyf (sword) and gwayyw (javelin) are native, but the words for fort and ditch are Latin in origin. Bard, poet, and harp are native, but book, essay and author are borrowed. Likewise, house, door, and hearth are native, while window, partition, and room are from the Romans. Interestingly, the Welsh borrowed hardly any legal terms and barely any names.

The centuries of Roman occupation themselves are full of threats from the north, west, and south, and show an empire slowly collapsing under the weight of its borders. It’s possible to go into all of this history, and into the many generals who tried to become emperor from Britain, and all the sites and armies that decamped there, but I personally think this part of the history is less interesting. And this answer to this reader question is already far too long! So I will skip to the ending, muddled and uncertain as it is.

The most basic ending point to Roman rule in Britain is the message of Honorius in 410. Honorius was the son of Emperor Theodosius and in 395 was proclaimed independent Emperor in the West (at this point the Roman empire was split into two parts). He made one last attempt to take over all of Britain, which in recent years had been increasingly unstable (mostly due to the fact that seemingly every army leader in Britain tried to march on Rome and become emperor), but his army had to turn around to defend Italy. The remaining troops in Britain all left in one of three successive attempts to raise an army general to Emperor, leaving the Romano-British to seize control of Roman stations and cities. In 410, Honorious “recognized their action and advised them to make arrangements for defending themselves.” Rome was out of Britain.

Although the Romans swept through England and Wales, neither their architecture, nor their military, nor their language long survived. They set up towns, they established harbors, but they failed to seriously change the Britons—they failed to truly make the population Roman. They did, however, have many devotees in the ruling classes, and they established the map of Britain that we still see the form of today. And in Wales, their most significant impact was perhaps in the religion they brought. Although worship of the old gods probably continued in the countryside for centuries after the Romans left, Wales was well on the path to becoming a Christian nation.

What’s your favorite type of pie?

Probably apple.

Do you have any cookware that you recommend?

I’m so glad you asked! I’ve actually been loving the Kirkland Signature 12-piece Hard Anodized Cookware Set. It has cast stainless steel handles, tempered glass lids with stainless steel rims, and heavy gauge hard anodized aluminum. They’re designed for cooks who demand performance, durability, and style, and they’ve been a great addition to my kitchen. You can purchase them here; make sure you use code WalesTheBlog to get 15% off!

Have you solved the mystery of the Morse code yet?

The what?

Post 7: Ahab

Post 7: AHAB

Back to the story.

I had returned from Father Maple’s syrup lovin’ church in quite a state. Drenched in syrup, smelling like smoke, and cut and bruised from the kickers I ran into outside Kicking Morons as I was making my way home, I looked like John McClane if Die Hard had been set in a Waffle House.

Unlike John McClane, however, I was in no way a Christ-like figure, walking barefoot through shards of glass and seeking redemption in a land where I had no earthly authority. In fact, I was a little disappointed with religion as a whole; visions of Father Maple doing obscene dance moves over a frothing crowd of devout followers followed me everywhere. I decided from then on to be a practicing atheist, although I was a little unsure about how to practice such a thing.

Then it hit me.

Jesus lame. Who thought Jesus was lame? Atheists, the slowest growing major religion! Lewis was right after all.

I quickly pulled up a list of local atheist groups and started going through them. Some of them I crossed off right away—the Lamarckian Gamer Brigade, for example, a group of devout Lamarckians who did hand exercises all day then bred with each other in hopes of creating a gaming dynasty. There was also U.D.D.E.R. (Ultra-handsome Dudes Destroying Evil Religions), B.B.I.F (Big Believers In Karma (pronounced ‘buh-biff’)), and Old People Who Hate Jesus, a group that exclusively attacked Jesus in weirdly personal ways.

In the end, I decided that only one group could have written the Morse code message: American Hussies Against Bibles, or AHAB for short. The leader of the group looked just fierce and intimidating enough to know Morse code, and her name, Llisbeth, was definitely Welsh. They were located on the 30 story of the Coin building, nicknamed that because of how they classified their viewing decks. Deck 30 was the quarter-deck: if you threw a quarter off of it it could kill someone walking below. Deck 40 was the nickel-deck, Deck 50 was the penny-deck, and so on.

Because the building was also the headquarters of several major Protestant churches, there were always protesters outside of it. These protesters of the Protestants were probably some of the bravest protesters around, for tourists were known to throw large amounts of change off the viewing decks in attempts to test the accuracy of the decks' names. The sidewalk in front of the protestors often looked on fire as coin after coin sparked against it, leaving small indentations that made the surface of the sidewalk look like that of a golf ball. Occasionally some poor soul would dash out to collect some of the change, only to get his skull cracked by a penny falling like a dead star.

When I arrived at the Coin building it was no different: coins were raining down in heavy sheets, making a horrendous noise as they clattered to the earth. Still, a large band of Old People Who Hate Jesus were there protesting, holding signs that read “Jesus your goatee is out of fashion and does nothing to suit your face,” and “Jesus your feet are ugly and everyone was grossed out when they had to wash them.” I popped my steel umbrella (a must-have for anyone hoping to enter the building safely) and went inside, pressing the elevator button that would take me to the quarter-deck.

The view from the quarter-deck was amazing, interrupted as it was by coins falling from the higher layers. All of Monterey stretched before me, sparkling and blue; I sighed and breathed in the fresh air, feeling the distant ocean breeze ruffle my hair. I could even smell the ocean: dark and salty and even, dare I say it, manly?

I suddenly turned around. I knew that scent. It was Bed Bath, and Beyond's 'Ocean For Men' hand sanitizer, the preferred hand sanitizer scent of only one person I knew: my cousin Lydia Montgomery.

She stepped out of the shadows and walked toward me. "Well done, Basil, well done. You've found us."

"Your scent gives you away, Lydia. Why do you use such a disgusting flavor?"

"Because, Basil, there's nothing sexier than a manly ocean. I used to walk through crowds wearing 'Ocean for Women,' and people would say, 'How remarkable, she smells like the ocean would if it was wearing a dress and high heels.' But no one wants to chase some fish-girl, no matter how much seaweed is draped over her hair. I realized that early on. Now I walk by and they say 'Wow, she smells like fish covered in deodorant.' And I say that's right: what's it mean to you?"

"That's powerful."

"I know. Come inside, I'll get you sorted."

Still confused by the whole situation, I followed her into a nondescript building to the left side of the deck. It was dark inside, and stuffed with boxes; charts criss-crossed with red yarn were pinned up all over the walls, and a single table sat under a single light in the centre of the room. The place had a hush-hush atmosphere, and a grey secretness; even my footsteps seemed obscenely loud on the old carpet.

I took a seat on one of the boxes and looked up at my cousin, who was rearranging some papers at the table. "So, Lydia, what is this place? Why did you send me that Morse code message?"

"Well, I figured if we were both going to work on the same project we should work together. We just needed to make sure you were capable of working at this level, and could be relied upon even when things aren't clear and the next step isn't obvious. I'm happy to say you passed with flying colors."

"Working on the same project? What are you talking about?"

Smiling a grim smile, she pointed to the wall behind me. There, hung in a place of honor, set in an ornate gold frame, was a picture of a man I never thought I'd see again: John Coctostan.

"You see, John wasn't just a coworker, he was one of my best friends. We used to watch the Lakers games together, and smoke spinach leaves. So when he disappeared in Wales I knew something wasn't right: he would never just leave like that, especially with the spinach market producing record amounts of FDA-certified healthy greens. I checked in with his doctors, with his club, with his old flight school pals, but no one had heard from him. When the bosses at the CIA weren't interested, I realized I was going to have to take things into my own hands. I put together the best crew I could, and I've been working here on his case ever since, whenever I have free time.

"When I mentioned him to you at the beach that day I knew you were interested; it didn't take long to find the connection between you and Gail Stanwyk. I then had someone tail you lightly to see what you were going to do, and to see what Christmas present you were going to buy me. When you began getting books on Welsh history, and when you got me a new giant bag of spinach (why do they always come in such large containers?), I knew it was time to get in touch--in our own unique way, of course.

"Basically, I want you on this team. We've put significant time and research into this project and we think we're getting close to an answer. We're prepared to actually leave and go to Wales soon, and we think your knowledge of Wales and whales could be invaluable. There's something else: There's someone involved in this that you know better than anyone. You have a history together."

My mouth dropped open.

"Not... not..."

Lydia nodded.

"It's Bobby Wagner. Number 54 linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, picked in the second round of the 2012 NFL Draft. Everyone knows you were friends with him, Basil; everyone knows that friendship ended with him almost slaying you in ritual swordfight. But in the information we've collected his name keeps showing up. We don't know what side he's on, but we know he's a key player: and we know we need your help to uncover the truth. Are you in?

I paused for a second, taking it all in. On one hand, this would fundamentally change the nature of my quest, and would possibly necessitate the changing of my blog header, something I had no idea how to do. On the other hand, Lydia promised access to resources I couldn't even dream off. And she would be wonderful to work with, ocean smell notwithstanding.

And Bobby? I thought about it for a second. I was ready to take on Bobby again.

"Okay," I said, "Let's do this."

"Great." She smiled and shook my hand. "Let me introduce you to the team."

John Coctostan

Post 8: Knights and Squires

As soon as she said those words, three figures materialized from the shadowy corners. They turned their back from me and stood facing the wall, swaying on their feet a little like singers about to start a show, or models about to walk the runway (a combination of terms that I’ve always found dissatisfying. Either make the models sprint, or change the name).

Lydia sat down a desk and pulled out a small microphone. As she was getting set up for whatever was about to happen, I looked at each of the three people a little more closely. In the middle was a short girl wearing tall black boots and ripped jeans. Her shirt was ripped too, and though it I could see a massive tattoo branching across her back. A red dragon, just like the one in the flag of Wales, was opening its wings and roaring, its claws extended, its head thrown back over its shoulder. Her hair was spiky and black and I saw tendrils of other tattoos reaching around her neck and arms, but stopping short of the dragon, which roared alone in its halo of skin.

I shook my head. Spooky. That must be Llisbeth Salander, the Girl with the Red Dragon Tattoo. She was the registered leader of AHAB.

To her left was a tall man wearing a suit. Everything about him screamed (or rather said firmly, for this man would clearly never scream) discreet. The neat cut of his suit, the quietly parted light grey hair, the casual yet professional posture; yes, every bit of the man was discreet, save the enthusiastic hip movements that he was affecting in some ill-thought out attempt at dancing. I wondered about him; I wondered very much.

Finally on the right was one of the shortest people I had ever seen. His body was as tall as the other man’s legs, and as skinny as Salander’s head. He looked like a popsicle stick come to life, or a giraffe’s neck separated from its body and granted limbs. He was hopping up and down and seemed to be giggling.

My observations, contemplations, and inadvertant imitations were interrupted by Lydia coughing into the microphone.

“Alright ladies and gentleman, could you please take your seats. The show will be starting any minute now, any minute now. I repeat, please take your seats.”

Looking around and finding no one but myself, I shrugged and took a seat on a nearby box. Something inside it clanged as I sat down, and Lydia glared at me.

“I would remind the spectators to please stay quiet, lest silencing them becomes necessary. We try to be flexible here, but we do have some rules. You can eat or drink, as long as you’re not consuming any food or drink on the premises; you can talk or cheer, as long as you’re not making any noise; and you can walk around wherever you like, as long as you stay seated. All clear? Let the show begin!

As soon as she said those words streamers blared out and a banner dropped down from the ceiling, reading “AHAB’s Winter Passion: Project Runway”

“First up, born and bred in the abandoned torture chamber at Bamburgh Castle, it’s Earl Lee Bird, a certified Earl of the Northumbrian court! A devout Northumbrian nationalist, Bird is their silent man on the inside of the British government: sounding out potential support among MPs, getting donors from major corporations, and generally getting the worm. Earl Lee Bird came here after signing a secret deal with cigarette company British-American: they will print the Northumbrian flag on all their boxes in return for the wig of King Henry VIII, which was stolen from him Frenchman’s-Creek style as he invaded the castle. Show us your moves, Bird!”

The discreet gentleman in the suit walked neatly up the makeshift runway and stood for a second with a contemplative frown. Then in one sudden movement he dropped to the ground and started doing an insane hip-hop dance, spinning himself around on his pinky finger while kicking both feet into the air. He was grooving out there, flip-floppin’ around like a beached whale, for over three minutes in perfect silence. Finally Lydia tapped him on the shoulder and he retreated to the back of the room, once again and proper and discreet as ever.

I thought about what I knew of Northumbria. It was one of the several kingdoms started by Saxon invaders between 400 and 800—in this case it was likely the combination of two small kingdoms, Deira and Bernicia (Ida being the first ruler). It expanded to take over most of the Scottish tribes in the area, leaving Wales as the last piece of real Brythonic resistance in Britain (and taking out some of the early poets: see Taliesin and Aneirin’s Y Gododdin). Northumbria then set its sights on Wales, with early king Aethelfrith leading multiple campaigns into the area. In 616 Aethelfrith won a major victory in the Battle of Chester, where he killed Selyf king of Powys and twelve hundred monks that were accused of praying against him as they watched the battle (clearly religiously insecure).

Aethelfrith’s successor, the extremely powerful Edwin of Northumbria, continued his campaigns and got as far as Anglesey, where he besieged Cadwallon king of Gwynedd on a tiny island. It was Cadwallon, however, who would get the last laugh, as he not only killed Edwin in the Battle of Meigen but also (with Mercian cooperation) killed Edwin’s successors, Osric and Eanfrith. The irate Bede wrote that it was Cadwallon’s intention to destroy the entire English race—something, needless to say, he and his ancestors failed to do. Even Northumbria, after a small setback with the Norse and some internal conflict, would expand and eventually be integrated with England and Scotland after the turn of the millenia.

Running this sequence of events over in my mind I almost missed Lydia’s next announcement: that of the small tattooed girl I had stared at earlier.

I almost gasped as the girl turned around and looked at me. There was a venom in her eyes, a hatred. It looked like she could take out two members of a Swedish biker gang with her own two hands, or lodge an axe in her father’s head after being shot in the head and buried alive. This was no one to be messed with; she was, I thought to myself serenely while nodding my head, not like other girls.

“This,” said Lydia, using Welsh pronunciation, “is Llisbeth Salander, from Aberystwyth. Her father was Alexander Zalachenko, an ex-Soviet operations officer who sought refugee status in Wales after a botched job. He chose Wales because he always rooted for the underdog, and because they'd never look for him there (he had a notorious hatred of sheep). A secret wing in the Welsh secret service was used to protect him, called the Section for Special Analysis (or The Section for short). They operated outside Welsh law and covered up Zalachenko’s numerous sheep murderers, including the notorious sheep massacre of '87. They even tried to get Llisbeth committed to a mental hospital. Luckily, this was all exposed by one enterprising journalist who worked for a very short magazine called Century.”

“Wow,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. “Why were they trying to get Llisbeth committed? Did she know something? Did she see something? Is she a hacker with a photographic memory who tried to kill her father after she was inadvertently set up for the murders of a young couple by her giant-sized half-brother who can’t feel pain?”

“No, actually kind of the opposite. She has severe short-term memory loss.”

“That actually does sound like something she should get care for.”

“Who are you, Dr. Peter Teleborian?”

“Who?”

“Nevermind. You’ll learn to love her. Over and over again. Talking to her is like one of those movies where you have to repeat the same day over and over, but sometimes you do something different just for the fun of it, and some days you get a little farther than before, and some days you just curse her out because she KEEPS GETTING TATTOOS and then doesn’t remember getting them and gets them removed and then she gets them tattooed again and God, imagine what that must be doing to her skin?”

“Can she hear any of this?” I glanced over at Llisbeth, who was still standing stock still.

“Yes, but she won’t remember any of it. [to Llisbeth] You can go now, dear!”

Llisbeth smiled, looking relieved, and walked back to the wall. One last figure of mystery stood there: the tiny man, looking, the more I stared at him, like that talking peanut in those commercials. Who was he? What did he believe? Why does he keep selling his brothers and sisters in T.V. commercials?

Lydia got a drumroll going.

“Ladies and gentleman, the final model, the final member of our team, Pip! Pip almost drowned in a swimming pool when he was young, and while it did stunt his growth, it was a pretty cool learning experience. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that the pool ‘had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.’”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s totally epic. Really original way to describe it! Glad we got him here to keep us sane. Or, you know, insane. His visions, the tattoo’s over Llisbeth’s body: we really got the mysteries of the world mapped out for us!”

“Not so fast, Basil. There is a catch.”

“There always is.”

“He only speaks Welsh.”

“Welsh? Does he?”

I felt excited. So far on this blog, I’ve done some general Welsh history summaries, but I’ve neglected a specific update on my Welsh learning. I am happy to say, however, that it’s coming along quite nicely. I can say many sentences in the first person and a good amount of basic ones in second and third person. I can hold conversations on the weather, where I’m from, my Welsh learning, and narrate basic actions and thoughts. I also have a decent vocabulary base, mostly drawn from the Quizlet cards I made (available on Resources tab).

I am not, however, in a position to hold any sort of substantial and complex conversation with a Welsh speaker, especially not a purebred like Pip. Pip is in fact a rarity: it is generally thought that the last monolingual Welsh speaker died in the late 1960s, although there are some modern reports on the internet about rural farmers who are unable to speak English and many towns use Welsh as a first language.

I thought it interesting the way the two ends of the Welsh timeline were represented in the room. On one hand, Pip represented the end of something, the impossibility of modern monolingualism reduced to absurdity. On the other hand, there was the Earl from Northumbria, a nation that itself contributed to the birth of Welsh. Despite Cadwallon’s English-killing rampage, in 634 he was killed by Oswald, the brother of Eanfrith, and with him died any hope of a Brythonic comeback. The Welsh were shut out by Northumbria and in the north and increasingly by Mercia in the east, even as king Penda of Mercia (an ally of Cadwallon) waged war against the Northumbrians.

Mercia was one of the other Saxon/English kingdoms that had risen up since the fall of the Roman Empire, Wessex being the other major one not hitherto mentioned (started by Cerdic, whose ancestors would play a major role in Welsh and English history). The Saxons had gotten a strong hold on the southeast corner of Britain and expanded from there: by 490 they had large developments underway, significantly in the Thames valley, which would become the center of the Wessex kingdom. Despite a setback at Mons Badonicus, a battle allegedly won by the semi-mythical (perhaps entirely mythical) Arthur, the years 550-650 saw the English take over almost all of south Britain and reach the Severn coast. It was only the heroics of the Gwent in 630 that saved Wales from being conquered at that time as well.

Mercia was at the height of its power and influence around the years 640-800, years in which they lay the foundations for a united England. In doing so, they also laid the foundations for a united Wales, occasionally quite literally. After expanding into the valleys of Dee, Wye, and Severn, they moved to define the border between them and the Welsh, using two dykes: Wat’s dyke and the later, and much more impressive, Offa’s dyke. Offa’s dyke, named after the Mercian king Offa who is traditionally said to have ordered the building of the dyke (the timing is disputed by some), runs longer than Hadrian’s wall and is mostly an earthen structure. There is some evidence, based on the position of the dyke around Gwent and some small parts of Powys, that the Welsh kingdoms either cooperated with the building or at least coordinated with Offa: there are concessions are made to the Welsh kingdoms of rivers, habors, and the like. It was also not a strict barrier: there were likely Welsh living on the English side for quite some time (and vice versa), and in later decades the Welsh would temporarily take some of the English land back (and vice versa).

Still, this was not exactly a welcome development for the Welsh. It was especially tragic to the kingdom of Powys, which was, of course, one of the main Welsh kingdoms (tracing their lineage to Vortigern). Powys lost significant land to Mercia, even having to move their capital to Pengwen (yes, it’s basically pronounced like penguin with a Welsh accent), and later generations, in the middle of their own crisis, would write about the anguish of Princess Heledd at the loss of her kingdom. They are, all sources assure, some of the great early Welsh works of literature, but far less fun then the Mabinogion.

But there were other, more positive changes at the time. Without going into religious developments (for more details on all this stuff and about the years before this, look at reading notes of the resource page--I really cannot emphasis enough how interesting these centuries, and espicially the ones directly after, are in Welsh history), the most noticeable change was the birth of the Welsh language. Sometime between 400 and 700, for mostly unknown (but heavily speculated about) reasons, the endings-based syntax of Brythonic was dropped and Early Welsh emerged. While almost none of the manuscripts survive (paper was practically extinct and parchment expensive, making most Welsh for the time period marginalia), we know that it was written perhaps as early as 600, putting it well ahead of the languages that would one day become French, Italian, and Spanish.

It was also at this time that the word Cymry was adopted, referring (at that time) to both the country and the countrymen. The word evolves from the Brythonic combrogi, meaning fellow-countrymen. At this point, however, Wales was still divided among the major kingdoms, with no kingdom at a clear advantage. They were also relatively isolationist: with all the other major Brythonic kingdoms falling (despite resistance by Cornwall and Strathclyde), they became less connected with the non-Welsh world, and less dedicated to art, pottery, and scholarship. Wales at the founding of Northumbria was not at its peak; better times, however, and a lot more bloodshed, were around the corner.

And so I looked at Pip and the Northumbrian Earl. An odd combination, I thought again. Something strange is going on here. Something involving that handsome pilot and CIA agent, John Coctostan, and his fetching—fletching—face.

I was interrupted by Lydia. “Stand up, Basil,” she said. “I need what’s in that box. And come with us out to the quarter-deck: we need to explain what’s going on.”

Post 9: The Quarter-Deck

When we got out on the deck Lydia was already standing at the edge, illuminated by light flashing off the falling coins. A curtain of sparkling metal was surrounding her, coins of all shapes and colours falling at unimaginable speeds. “Miss Montgomery,” the Earl started, but Lydia put up her hand. She was silent for a second, before violently bursting out—

“What do you do when you see Bobby Wagner?”

“Shout his name!” was the impulsive rejoinder from the three figures beside me.

“Good!” cried Lydia, with a wild approval in her tones; observing the hearty animation into which her unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.

“And what do you do if he approaches you?”

“Neutralize him, by any means possible!”

“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”

“Dead or dusted, dried or drowned, we will hunt him to the ground!”

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of my strange companions at every shout; while they began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they themselves had become so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions. This was, their gaze seemed to say, the most basic part of their training; but their fierce calls and cries seemed to have lighted something in them, or pulled some fuse. I was suddenly a little scared, and a little worried about the extent of Bobby Wagner's involvement in all this.

But we were soon all eagerness again, as Lydia, now turning to face the wall of dropping coins behind her, reached out her hand. Surely, those coins must be dropping fast enough to punch a hole in any hand—surely, the sheer volume would batter and bruise any exposed limb in a second, surely—

She plucked a single coin from the air with the grace of a heron. She held it aloft, and it sparked like mad in the sunlight.

“See this, my friends? See this here coin? Not just a penny, no; a wheat penny! Worth twenty-six cents in 1913 dollars. A small fortune, that may seem to you.”

To my surprise, my companions were nodding their heads greadily, their tongues hanging out of their mouths and wagging like a dog’s. Their eyes were sparkling and their hands were reaching out almost involuntarily.

“This can be yours! This could be yours! Whoever solves me this riddle—yes, I say, whoever solves me this deviled riddle poem—all the way from Wales—will have this coin. [She pulls out a piece of paper dramatically from behind her back.] Yes, this is the key to the mystery. It was sent to me from Wales anonymously, at great personal cost: it contains a location where we will find assistance in our quest. We will be led, they promise, to the mountain and to John; we will find secrets that could take down the Welsh government; and we will finally, finally understand the role of Bobby Wagner in all this, who’s now in his ninth season in the National Football League and has recorded over one hundred tackles in every year of his career. I know you all want this. Earl, you want to take that Welsh land for Northumbria. Llisbeth, you have no idea what you want, but I’m telling you that you want this to further expose the country that wronged you. Pip, you want this because you’re insane. And Basil—you’re just here for blog content, really.”

We all nodded.

With that she dramatically marched over to the AHAB door and took out a hammer and some nails, the things she had grabbed from the box I was sitting on. With a fierce look in her eyes she nailed the paper and the coin together to the door. My head was whirling—was this Martin Luther? Was this Captain Ahab? If so, was there any symbolism in it, or was it just a random reference contained in a funny acronym? I kind of thought the latter.

Lydia must have seen the confusion in my face and read it as skepticism. “What is it, Basil? Are you not game for the riddle? Do you doubt it?”

“No, no,” I replied hesitantly. “I just feel like a lot of stuff hasn’t been explained yet and we’re going pretty quickly. Also the Moby Dick stuff is getting kind of mixed up. I’m guessing we’ll get to it eventually, maybe in like five blog posts, but I’m kind of worried.``

“Your time estimates are accurate, Basil. But I promise you that once we get through this riddle, things will get back on track. We just need to take a small dive into Welsh mythology, and briefly explore its strange, wonderful, surprisingly hilarious world. From the first line I think you’ll see what I mean: the riddle is pretty clearly about the branches of the Mabinogi. It also might be a fun thing for the readers of your blog, because I don’t think it’s a very hard riddle at al—”

Lydia was cut off by a scream coming from near the AHAB entrance. We rushed over to see what was wrong.

Llisbeth Salander was wide eyed and looked furious. “What is this?” she asked. “Is it a ransom note? A hostage situation? Has someone killed and mutilated another cat and left it on my doorstep, just like I seem to remember they did on a strange island where I was staying with an older journalist investigating whether a Swedish industrial heir turned Australian sheep farmer had been murdered by a religious lunatic forty years prior?”

We saw what she was pointing at. It was the riddle nailed to the door. I had forgotten about her short-term memory loss (as had she).

I took a closer look and read the riddle for the first time. It read:

The leader is key, the first in four

Last added on past giant’s door

A leader leads, when he is least

Doomed leader dies, to protect the beast.

Just after the dead man’s wicked stare

Holy grain pushed up the air

An older wound, inflicted then

Preserved through time again:

An injured man’s excuse for not fighting

A poet’s excuse for not writing.

I shook my head slowly, then frowned. Then I grinned and nodded; then I scatched my ear and bit my lip. Then I cursed myself for my overreliance on head motions to break up dialogue and events in these scenes. Shaking my arms, I returned home to get to work on the riddle; I had just gotten a copy of the book it was based on, the Mabinogion.

Post 10: The Sphynx (1)

Post 10: The Sphynx

The Mabinogi are the oldest prose stories in Britain, found in the White Book of Rhydderch (~1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (~1400) but containing oral traditions that go back millennia. They are wonderful, full of magic, talking animals, giants, and general strange happenings; they are also an supreme literary achievement, especially in their original Welsh (so I’m told). With their unfinished Triads, god and goddess-like characters, and magical pre-Christian society, they give a taste of a literary tradition since lost and of a culture since destroyed.

The copies that we have today were written after a particularly tumultuous, yet particularly important, part of Welsh history. It’s the part of Welsh history where Wales comes closest to gaining independence, but also the part where hope for independence is lost; it’s dominated by rebellions, Normans, laws, and grand fights between kingdoms at the height of their power. It’s really the most interesting part of Welsh history in my opinion, and while I won’t endeavour to even recap it here like I did with other parts of Welsh history (although I might go back later when I have time and do so), I highly encourage anyone interested to read about it either online, in a book, or in the Reading Notes section of this website (these years take up pages 10-25 of the document).

There are more important matters at hand, however. The riddle likely rests on the Fourth Branches of the Mabinogi, the four connected stories that start the modern Mabinogion, a larger collection of stories with an incorrect title. Each of these next four posts will go through one of the branches, in the interests of sharing these wonderful stories and solving that strange riddle. Branch one begins here.

Branch one of the Mabinogi begins with a classic ‘you take someone’s stag while hunting, you have to switch places with them for a year to get your honor back’ type situation. In this case, however, Pwyll, prince of Dafydd, has to switch places with Arawn, king of Annwfn, the Celtic Otherworld. Annwfn interestingly comes from the words an (‘in, inside’) and dwfn (‘world’), and was normally portrayed as an island or someplace under the earth, although in these stories it’s presented as an actual location inside Wales.

Pwyll, under a magical disguise given to him by Arawn, has to live and hunt in Arawn’s court for a year before killing a rival king. This king, Hafgan, always comes back to fight Arawn no matter how many blows he gives him; for this reason, inexplicably, Pwyll must only give him one blow, which is guaranteed to kill him. Arawn also adds that Pwyll should sleep with his wife every night, who is the most beautiful woman in the world.

So Pwyll goes to one of Arawn’s courts, and despite enjoying everything else about the place refuses to even look at Arawn’s wife at night (which really confuses her because he’s still magically disguised as Arawn). The fight with the king is scheduled for one year from the day Pwyll and Arawn met, which is a very typical thing in the four branches: they’re always scheduling things for one year in advance, when they could just do it the next day, or week, or month. You’d think with their shorter lifespans they’d want to be as efficient with their time as possible, especially in matters like marriage (which we shall see later in this branch). But no.

When the time comes to fight the king, the two kings square off in the middle of a ford. Pwyll-disguised-as-Arawn strikes the center of Hafgan’s shield, and the shield, as well as all of Hafgan’s armour, shatters. Hafgan is thrown head-over-heels off his horse and dies. So Pwyll, successful, goes to the meeting-place he had arranged with Arawn, and they switch bodies back, the insult of letting his dogs eat the stag someone else killed avenged.

When Pwyll returns home to his kingdom in Dyfed he finds all is well; more than well, his noblemen tell him that in the past year he was more kind, generous, and wise than ever before. He also finds out the Arawn did not sleep with his wife either, making her very confused at his sudden change in attitude.

Buoyed by the respect and kindness Arawn showed him, he seeks him out again and they become best friends. They hunt together, they give each other expensive gifts, they talk about how they didn’t sleep with each other’s wifes; typical best friend stuff. Eventually they decide to combine their kingdoms, and Pwyll is no longer called Pwyll, prince of Dyfed, but rather Pwyll Pen Annwfn (Pwyll head of Annwfn).

The second part of the story takes place in one of Annwfn’s courts, Arberth. Pwyll is having a feast there and decides to take a walk. He heads up towards a mound Gorsedd Arberth, but is stopped by some of his court. They tell him that any nobleman who sits there alone will either be injured and wounded or see something wonderful. This type of thing is actually not unique among the hills and mountains of Wales; there is a huge boulder on Snowdon, for example, called Maen Du'r Arddu, and it is said that if two people spend the night on it, one will awake a great poet, and the other will become insane. I’d take my chances.

Pwyll takes his chances as well, and heads to the top of the mound. From there he sees a woman wearing a “shining golden garment of brocaded silk on a big, tall, pale-white horse” riding down the road. It seems like she is going rather slowly, and Pwyll yells at his men to chase after her; but they cannot catch her. He orders them to bring a fast horse; but still they cannot catch her. The next day they go to the mound again, and Pwyll orders they bring the fastest horse they have with them. They do, but once again the rider cannot catch the lady: no matter how fast they ride, and no matter how slowly she appears to ride, she is always a little bit ahead. The potential for symbolism is rich.

The next day Pwyll decides to take things into his own hands and orders that they prepare his horse for him. But he, too, cannot catch up with her. In desperation he calls out to her, asking her to please wait for him. She stops and says of course; it would have been better for the horse if he had asked that much earlier. As they talk, and have a little bit of a flirty exchange, Pwyll realizes that she is the most beautiful woman he has even seen, and falls in love with her. Luckily, she reveals that she is also in love with him, and only rode that route to see him, but her father, Hyfaidd Hen, is making her marry someone else against her will.

Pwyll says no worries; we will still get married. Let’s do it as soon as possible. She agrees. And they set the date for the wedding: a year from that night! This raises many questions. Why so far out in advance? What are they doing in the meantime? How did she know who he was, and, if she only rode that route to get close to him, why didn’t she stop before? And what happened to Pwyll’s wife from earlier in the story?

None of these things get in the way of their true love, however. And they are reunited a year from that day in the court of Hyfaidd, where Pwyll and his ninety-nine horsemen throw a wonderful party full of good food and good stories. Pwyll is in such a generous mood that when a young auburn-haired lad enters to ask him a question, Pwyll says “Whatever you ask of me, as long as I can get it, it shall be yours.”

Okay, says the man. I want to sleep with your wife, marry her, and take everything in this court. At this point Pwyll is in a bit of a pickle; he told the guy that he could have anything he asked for, and surely it would be bad form to go back on that promise. He consults his soon-to-be wife, Rhiannon, and she calls him stupid and tells him that this was the unsuitable suitor her father wanted her to marry originally.

She also tells him that he has to agree, but not to worry; she has a plan. On the day of the new wedding with the new fellow, which will be one year from that day, Pwyll is to enter the court disguised as a beggar. He will ask the auburn-haired thief of love for some food—just enough to fill his small bag, something the auburn-haired fellow will easily agree with. The bag, however, will be an enchanted bag, and it will never fill up. So the auburn-haired fellow will ask when it will be full, and Pwyll will tell him that it can never be full until a nobleman puts both his feet in and says ‘Enough has been put in here.’ When he does that, Pwyll will pull the bag over his head, tie him up, and signal his men to raid the court. He will then get the court, and his wife, back.

Pwyll readily agrees to this and the plan works perfectly. Once they have the guy in the bag, Pwyll’s soldiers run in. Each one of them hits the bag and asks what is in it: Pwyll tells them it’s a badger. Thus the game Badger in the Bag is born, where people kick and hit someone who is in a bag. That’s literally a game that they would play with people (although it did probably come from a common badger hunting technique where one would put a bag over a badger’s hole and then beat it to death when it came out). This is one of several violent Welsh traditions: there used to be a thing called ‘holming’ on Boxing Day where men would go out with branches of holly and beat any young women they came across. This has, to put it lightly, fallen out of tradition.

After the man is eventually spared, Rhiannon and Pwyll get married in a glorious ceremony, during which Rhiannon tells Pwyll not to refuse any gifts asked of him, which seems like really bad advice after the last time. Nevertheless, the day goes off without a hitch, bringing the second part of the first branch to an end.

The third and final part is about the child of Rhiannon and Pwyll, who is born to them in their third year together. On the night of his birth six women are brought to look after the boy and his mother; unfortunately, they all fall asleep, and when they wake the baby is gone. Fearing punishment, they kill a pup and smear its blood over Rhiannon’s face, and drop its bones next to Rhiannon’s body, hoping to frame her for the murder and cannablistic consumption of her son (this is apparently a classic mythical motif called the Calumniated Wife—although the addition of the bones seems dangerously stupid. Surely it’s easy to tell the difference between the bones of a dog and a human, especially in the skull and parts like that).

When Rhiannon awakes, she apparently does not notice the blood smeared all over her nor the bones piled next to her bed (she must have been a heavy sleeper as well). She asks where her baby is, and the women tell her sadly that she overpowered all six of them and ate him. Rhiannon, of course, does not believe them, but consults with wise men and decides it is impossible to avoid punishment. Her punishment is to wait at a mounting block at the court for seven years and tell people her story as they pass, and to carry people on her back if they wish (the mounting block is a further thing that identifies her with horses, leading many scholars to associate her with the Celtic horse-goddess Epona).

Meanwhile, in Gwent Is Coed, there is a man named Terynon who has the most handsome mare in all the world. Unfortunately, although the mare would give birth every May Eve, the baby would always vanish without a trace. Terynon decides to take things into his own hands and starts an armed night’s vigil.

In the dead of night, as Terynon is tending to something on the foal, he hears a loud noise and suddenly a massive claw emerges from the window. It grabs the foal’s mane at the same time Terynon grabs his sword, and he cuts off the monstrous arm. Outside he hears a horrific screeching and screaming, and he quickly rushes out the door; and although he is unable to find the monster, when he returns to his stables he has another surprise waiting for him. A small boy is there, in a robe of brocaded silk.

Now, Terynon’s wife had been unable to have a baby for a number of years, so they fake a pregnancy and secretly adopt the child. He grows like a fleshy amaryllis, and by the time he is two he has the strength of a six year old. He is especially close to the foal that was saved alongside him, and they grow up together.

When he gets older, however, Terynon becomes distressed. Travellers to Pwyll’s court keep talking of the awful unfairness of Rhiannon’s punishment, and the boy found by Terynon starts to look more and more like Pwyll. Terynon and his wife realize that this must be the boy Rhiannon is accused of killing, and decide the only recourse is to return him to his real parents.

They bring him to the court of Pwyll and tell their story. Everyone agrees he is certainly Pwyll’s son, and they are thanked greatly and offered a vast number of riches, all of which they refuse. Upon hearing that her punishment is over and her child is saved, Rhiannon exclaims “What a relief from my anxiety if that is true!”; thus the boy is named Pryderi, from the word pryder (anxiety).

He grows to be a great warrior and king, and takes a wife, and so ends this branch of the Mabinogi.

Post 11: The Sphynx (2)

The Second Branch of the Mabinogi starts off with Bendigeidfran son of Llyr gazing out towards Ireland with his brother Manawydan and his brother-in-laws Nysien and Efnysien. Nysien is a kindly person who can make peace between anybody; Efnysien is basically straight up evil.

As they stare, thirteen ships emerge from the mist and make their way towards the Welsh land. Bendigeidfran sends a messenger to find out what they want, and it turns out the ships belong to Matholwch, king of Ireland. He wants to unite their families in marriage through marrying Branwen daughter of Llyr, Bendigeidfran’s sister.

Branwen is the most beautiful girl in the world, and one of the The Chief Maidens of the Island, so they have a large conference before deciding her fate. In the end they agree with Matholwch’s offer and sail off together to Aberffraw, where they have a big feast and Matholwch and Branwan sleep together. (The feast was outside, of course, for Bendigeidfran was so large that he was unable to fit in any house).

All was going to plan until Efnysien, the evil brother, came across the horses of Matholwch. Upon finding out who owned the horses, he “cuts their lips to the teeth, and their ears down to their heads, and their tails to their backs; and where he could get a grip on their eyelids, he cut them to the bone.” Given how brutal this maiming is, it does not take long for the news to reach Matholwch, who is confused at who could do so horrible a thing. He sadly decides he must leave Branwen and the island after such an insult, and boards the ship and begins to leave without permission.

When Bendigeidfran hears about this he is incensed, and vows not to let his guest leave angry. He sends a messenger offering new horses, rods of silver, and plates of gold, and tells Matholwch what kind of person did this evil act. Matholwch, although he accepts this gift, still seems downhearted and insulted; seeking to remedy this, Bendigeidfran offers a real treasure: a cauldron that will bring people back to life (although the person will be unable to speak).

He got the cauldron from an Irishman, Llasar Llaes Gyfnewid, who was fleeing from Ireland: Matholwch recognizes the name and tells their story. One day, Matholwch was hunting near a lake in Ireland when a huge ugly man with yellow-red hair stepped out of the lake, and a wife twice his size. This was Llasar. Matholwch, very polite, asked them how things were going, to which they replied “In a month and a fortnight this woman will conceive, and the boy who is then born of that pregnancy in a month and a fortnight will be a fully armed warrior.” Clearly they were not ones for small talk.

Matholwch took them in, but the people of Ireland began to hate them, and complained of them, and forced Matholwch to expel the couple; but they would not go peacefully. The Irish decided to build a house of iron around the couple, and then, when the iron house was complete, have all the smiths in Ireland congregate there with all their charcoal. They got the couple drunk and then the charcoal was lit, and the iron made white-hot. Unfortunately, the couple escaped after the man rammed through the white-hot wall, and went to Wales, where Bendigeidfran gave them a place to live and took their magic cauldron.

Once Matholwch gets this cauldron he is in a much better mood, and sails back to Ireland with Branwen. Soon he and Branwen have a son, named Gwern, and Gwern is sent to the best places in Ireland to be fostered. Closer to home, however, discontent is stirring among the Irish people over the insult suffered by Matholwch in Wales (the horses). People begin to taunt him about it and make his life miserable.

Eventually, he consents to punish his wife for the insult. She is forced to cook for the court and have her ear boxed by the butcher every day. Matholwch enforces an embargo on all trade and correspondence to and from Wales, so they will never hear about this punishment, and forces Branwen to stay in the kitchen.

In the kitchen, however, Branwen raises a starling bird and teaches it how to speak; the speaking ends up being kind of irrelevant, because she just attaches a letter to the bird’s leg, but it’s still cool. The bird and the letter reach Bendigeidfran and he is outraged; he raises an army from all of the island and sets off to attack Ireland.

In Ireland, they see a forest moving across the sea, and a mountain with it, Macbeth-like. At a loss for what is happening, the Irish soldiers turn to Branwen, who tells them that the forest is the masts of hundreds of ships, and the mountain is Bendigeidfran, who is so big he can walk across the sea. (They also talk about how the sea was narrower during this time, and how later the water flooded the land. John Davies suggests these could be ancient memories of a pre-ice age time, passed down through oral tradition.)

When Bendigeidfran and his troops get to Ireland, the Irish troops flee in fear and destroy every bridge that they retreat across. This leads to a famous Welsh proverb, “He who is a leader, let him be a bridge,” for Bendigeidfran stretches his bulk across the rivers and has his troops run over his back. Thwarted by his bulky back, the Irish realize they have no choice but to negotiate, and they strike a deal. Gwen, Branwen’s son, will be crowned king of Ireland in Bendigeidfran’s presence, and they will build a house that can fit Bendigeidfran, something he has never had before.

Bendigeidfran agrees. The Irish, however, have a sneaky plan. On the outside of each of the hundred columns of the house, they hang a soldier in a bag. The plan was for the soldiers to suddenly drop out and ambush the Weslh when they arrived for the crowning ceremony.

This plan, however, is stopped by Efnysien, the horse-maimer himself. He enters the house ahead of time to inspect it and asks what is in one of the bags. The Irish tell him it is flour. He reaches and feels the soldiers head, and squeezes it until his fingers are in his brain. He repeats this procedure with each of the hundred bags, although the Irish persist in insisting that the bags contain only flour. Having crushed the skulls of all one hundred men, he gives a funny little speech punning off the word flour: in Welsh, the word for flower and flour are the same, and to call someone a ‘flower’ was to call them a hero—“flower of knights,” for example, was a great compliment. How this flower/flour combination happened in Welsh and English has not been explained by anything I’ve read; our flower/flour words are French in origin, so I suppose it’s possible that the Norman French influenced Welsh in a similar direction and this part of the story was a late addition.

Following his speech the Welsh and Irish nobles meet. Everything is going to plan when Efnysien, for no reason whatsoever, takes the young boy that is going to be crowned king and hurls him head-first into the fire. Immediately both sides pull out their weapons and begin to fight. The Irish, however, have an advantage; they have the cauldron given to them by Bendigeidfran. They start chucking all their dead bodies into the cauldron, including, presumably, the bodies that are still hanging in the sacks.

Efnysien suddenly realizes that because of his actions all the Welsh royalty are going to die, and becomes remorseful. He decides to try to save them. He sneaks over to where the cauldron is and is grabbed by two Irishmen who think he is a dead body. They chuck him into the cauldron, and in the cauldron he stretches out his limbs so that the cauldron explodes. Unfortunately, in the process, his heart also explodes and he dies (there is a picture of him doing this on his Wikipedia page which is absolutely hilarious, highly recommend looking at it).

Bendigeidfran and seven of his men escape, including Manawydan and Pryderi from the first branch. Bendigeidfran, however, is wounded in the foot with a poisoned spear, causing some scholars to view him as a prototype for the Fisher King of later Arthurian literature. Bendigeidfran gives his men a very specific set of instructions: they are to cut off his head, then spend seven years feasting in Harlech listening to the birds of Rhiannon, then eighty years in Penfro. Once they open a certain door that faces towards Cornwall, however, they must go immediately to London and bury Bendigeidfran’s head. Throughout this whole journey, his head will remain “as good company as it ever was when it was on” him.

This they do, with a few interruptions. For one, Branwen, who they take back with them, dies of a broken heart as she sits on the shore of Wales contemplating the events of the previous years. For another, one of the men they had left in charge of Wales, Caswallon, kills all the others and takes control of the island. He does this by using an invisibility cloak, so it looked like a rogue and sentient sword slaughtering the warriors. The only leader he does not kill is his nephew Caradog: Caradog dies of a broken heart, and therefore becomes one of the Three People who Broke their Hearts from Sorrow.

When the seven men do bury Bendigeidfran’s heart in London, it becomes one of the Three Fortuate Concealments, protecting the island from invasion; eventually, however, its place is revealed, and it becomes one of the Three Unfortunate Disclosures.

Things were far more dire in Ireland, where for some reason only five pregnant women were left alive in a cave. They all gave birth to sons at the exact same time, and raised the sons together; and when the sons were of a certain age they all slept with each other's mothers in a reenactment of the classic 2011 ‘Motherlover’ Youtube video (although with an odd number of sons and mothers…). They then divided Ireland between themselves, and the five provinces of Ireland still reflect that division.

And so ends the Second Branch of the Mabinogi.

Post 12: The Sphynx (3)

Many of the characters from the first and second branches of the Mabinogi return for the third branch; indeed, the story picks up right where the second branch left off, with the seven men burying the head in London with its head facing towards France.

Once the head is buried, Manawydan son of Llyr is dismayed. For eighty seven years he has been partying with this group of men, and now he has no land and nowhere to go. He has not even asked for any land from Caswallon, making him one of the Three Undemanding Chieftains (although because they are undemanding, it is impossible to deny land from them, somewhat paradoxically).

In the meantime, however, Pryderi makes him an offer. He says that he can come to Dyfed and rule the seven cantrefs there, and marry his mother Rhiannon, who although older is still very attractive and a good conversationalist. Manawydan agrees, and they all have a marvelous time together hunting around Dyfed, which is the most pleasant and well-stocked place they have ever seen.

One day they (Manawydan, Rhiannon, Pryderi, and his wife Cigfa) settle down for a feast at Arberth, and at a break in the meal venture up onto Gorsedd Arberth, the same mound from the first branch. As they sit there a terrific noise splits their ears, and a blanket of mist falls around them so think that they cannot see anything, not even their own arms. Then suddenly it becomes bright, and where there were herds and houses, people and parties, there is nothing but blank landscape; no people, no animals, nothing of the court and its servants. Only they remain.

They are remarkably unalarmed by this, and go off to do some hunting. For two years they just wander around the wilderness of Dyfed, seeing only wild animals and each other, and they are very happy. After the second year, however, they decide they must earn their living in some other way, and exist among some society, so they set off for England. There they become saddlemakers, making all their saddles out a unique blue dye. Their saddles become so popular that all the other saddle makers try to kill them, and chase them from town.

They go to another town, and decide to make shields. The exact same thing happens: they are so good at making shields that all the rival shield makers try to kill them and run them out of town. They decide not to defend themselves with their shields, and instead run off on their saddles, and take up shoemaking in another town.

Unsurprisingly, the exact same thing happens in the other town. The only notable difference is that Manawydan’s shoe making becomes so distinguished he gets into another triad: he becomes one of the Three Golden Shoemakers. Eventually, of course, they are run out of town. Sick of this endless cycle, they retreat to Dyfed and once again become nomadic hunters.

One day when they are hunting, they come across a giant gleaming white boar, a massive creature which leads them to a huge fort that they had never seen before. The dogs chase the boar into the fort and disappear. Pryderi, acting against the advice of Manawydan, decides he must save his dogs from whatever strange thing dwells in the fort. He enters, and all he sees is a well in the middle of the floor with a golden bowl at the edge of it, sitting on a marble slab. The golden bowl is fastened to four chains that reach all the way into the sky. He reaches out to touch the bowl, and his hands are immediately glued to it. He cannot escape, nor utter a single word, nor even sit down.

Meanwhile, Manawydan despairs for his friend and returns home to the camp where Rhiannon and Cigfa were staying. He tells them what happened and Rhiannon goes to investigate the fort. Alone, she too grabs the bowl, and becomes stuck; and that night there was an awful noise, and a blanket of mist, and in the morning both the fort and the friends were gone.

Left alone, Manawydan vows to stay with Cigfa and protect her as long as he is alive. They go back to England, and repeat the whole cycle of getting chased out of towns before returning to Dyfed. There they set up a farm and grow wheat, and their fields are the most fertile and bountiful known to man. When it comes time to harvest the wheat, however, the wheat is always razed to the ground, with only bare stalks remaining. Manawydan decides to camp it out just like Terynon did in the first branch.

Right at midnight, a sound like a roaring wave, louder than anything he had ever heard before, pours over Manawydan. He sees a sea of mice descend on his field, a mouse on each ear of corn. He runs into the field but they consume his vision, and everywhere he looks is mice, and he cannot catch them any more than he can count them. Finally he spots one slow-moving one, an exceptionally obese mouse, and he catches it and stores it in his glove, intending to hang it the next day for stealing.

The next day, he climbs the mound where all their trouble started and starts setting up a place to hang the mouse from. When he is doing so, a

cleric rides by and Manawydan is shocking—he has not seen another person in Dyfed besides his party of four for seven years. He talks to the priest, who offers him money to not hang the mouse—touching the mouse, the cleric says, is below his class. Manawydan respectfully declines, and the cleric goes on his way. Next a priest comes, and the dialogue repeats. Finally, a bishop comes, who offers lots of money for the mouse to be freed.

Manawydan, however, refuses all money offers, even an offer of every house on the plain and seven loads of treasure of each horse. At a loss, the bishop asks what Manawydan could want: Manawydan says he wants the release of his friends, Pryferi and Rhiannon, and for the kingdom of Dyfed to be freed from the magic curse put on it. The bishop, surprisingly (to me at least, not to Manawydan), agrees. He reveals that he is really Llwyd son of Cil Coed, and he placed the enchantment on Dyfed to get revenge for the guy who got beat up in the Badger in the Bag game in the first branch. The mouse is really his wife in an enchanted form, and she is pregnant.

Manawdyan still refuses to free the mouse/wife: he says Llwyd must promise that no harm will come to any of them because of his actions. Llwyd agrees, and says that was a good move because he totally would have just cursed them again. Pryderi and Rhiannon suddenly appear, as do all the houses and dwelling-places in Dyfed, and Llwyd gets his mouse/wife back. It turns out that Pyderi was trapped in the gate-hammers of the court, and Rhiannon in the collars of donkeys; for that reason this branch of the Mabinogi is called the Mabinogi of the Collar and the Hammer.

Post 13: The Sphynx (4)

The fourth branch is possibly my favorite, and was the first I ever read. It’s simply wonderful and I adore it greatly. It’s about Math fab Mathonwy and his family, both good and evil. It’s also probably the weirdest of the myths, and the one with the most magic in it.

Math was lord of Gwynedd at the same time Pryderi was lord of Dyfed, Morgannwg, Ceredigion, and Ystrad Tywi. Unfortunately for Math, however, he could not circuit Gwynedd like lords and kings normally did, because he had to have his feet held by a virgin at all times. The only exception was when he went to war—no reason is given for this condition, or this exception, or where the boundary between war and peace is drawn.

At the time of this story, his virgin footholder was the fairest maiden of her generation, Goewin daughter of Pebin, and his land was being looked after by his two nieces, Gilfaethwy son of Don and Gwydion son of Don. The situation was complicated by the fact that Gilfaethwy was in love with Gowein, something known only to Gwydion. The situation is also complicated by the fact that all their names start with the letter ‘g’ and sound kind of similar, although none of them seem to struggle with that.

One day, Gwydion looks at Gilfaethwy and sees he is literally fading away due to his unrequited desire for Gowein. He takes pity on him and decides to help him. Since she is always busy holding Math’s feet (what happens when he sleeps? When she sleeps? How about eating, is the feet-holding a two-handed business?), Gwydion decides to start a war between Math and Pryderi, therefore allowing Math to hold his own on his own feet.

He tells Math about a wonderful, miraculous animal that has arrived in Wales, but that only Pryderi has. This animal is smaller than a cow but has better flesh; it is called by a variety of names, and comes from the Welsh Otherworld of Annwfyn. It is… the pig.

He convinces Math to send him and his brother to the court of Pryderi, disguised as poets, and promises he will bring back the pigs. In reality, of course, he is trying to start a war. He does this by tricking Pryderi into giving away the pigs; he presents him with twelve magic horses, fully equipped with magic saddles and bridles, and twelve magic hounds, and twelve golden shields (which were in fact conjured out of toadstools). They make the trade and the Don brothers run off, knowing that the magic will wear off in twenty-four hours and Pryderi will realize their deception.

They hastily travel through a number of towns, all of which are later named after the pigs they carry (it’s speculated that this part of the story was added to explain why there were so many small towns named after pigs in Wales. Unfortunately, not many of those towns exist today, and none of them were named the Bay of Pigs). They finally reach Gwynedd, where the cantrefs are readying for war, and build a nice pen for the pigs. Instead of going to fight in the war, however, they double back to the king’s chambers at Caer Dathyl, where the maiden Goewin stays alone. Using a gratuitous amount of violence, Goewin’s maidens are forced out of the room and Goewin is raped in the king’s bed.

The king, for a while, knows nothing of this. He is fighting to the south of them and does not notice that they join a day later than everyone else. After a particularly bloody battle the king agrees to Pyredri’s offer of one-on-one combat to settle the conflict. Using his magic and his superior strength, Math kills Pryderi, ending the life of the only character to appear in all four branches of the Mabinogi.

When the king returns home, Goewin tells him the story of what happens and tells him he needs to find a new virgin footholder. Math is outraged at the assault and marries Goewin on the spot, giving her authority over the kingdom and assuring her he will get revenge on his nephews.

For a while the nephews try to escape, but eventually they are forced to return to the court and face their fate. The king gives an angry speech then turns one of them into a hind, and one of them into a stag, and forces them to breed with each other. He then tells them that each year he will turn them into a new pair of animals, and force them to breed with each other, until he decides that it’s okay for them to return to human form.

Sure enough, the next year he turns them into wild boars, and the year after that he turns them into wolves. Each year they have a child together, something that brings them widespread disgrace, and the children are taken away from them and baptized in a fashion. After the third year, they are allowed to become humans again, and Math asks them who they think he should pick as his new virgin footholder (even more evidence that this footholding was not an urgent thing. Who was holding his feet this whole time? Was he at war? Was he perhaps technically at war with them? Who decides what is war?). They recommend Aranrhod, Math’s niece.

They summon Aranrhod to the palace, and she says she believes to be a virgin. To prove it, Math makes her walk across a magical line. As soon as she walks across the line a large, yellow-haired child drops out of her, and a ‘small something,’ which Gwydion immediately stows away in a chest. The yellow-haired child is named Dylan, and they go to baptize him.

As soon as he is baptized, however, he rushes into the sea, and takes on ‘the sea’s nature’ and swims as if a fish. Gwydion leaves him and goes back to the small thing he stored in the chest: upon closer inspection, it turns out it’s another child! Gwydion makes arrangements for him, and the boy grows up as if his son, and loves him very much. When he gets older, Gwydion takes him to his mother so he can be named.

The mother, however, is still extremely angry at having her promiscuity exposed, and refuses to name him. Gwydion is furious and devises a clever plan: he summons up a ship out of seaweed and makes it a ship of shoemakers. Disguised as peasant-folk, he and the child sail past the court, where they know Aranrhod will notice them. Sure enough, she comes down to the ship to get her shoes fitted, and while she is there the child throws a rock at a bird and hits it. Aranrhod mentions that the boy has a skillful hand, and in that instant the boy is named: Lleu Llaw Gyffes, meaning ‘The Fair-Haired One with the Skillful Hand.’ Gwydion, through this trick, is named one of the Three Golden Shoemakers.

A similar trick is repeated when Aranrhod forbids Lleu from being armed, but when she forbids him from having a wife they are in more of a pickle. Gwydion goes to Math, the more powerful magician, and asks for his help. Math conjures up a woman out of flowers of oak, broom, and meadowsweet, and she is the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen. She marries Lleu, who at this point is an exceptionally strong man, and they rule a small kingdom together.

One day, however, when Lleu is visiting Math, Blodeuedd, the woman of flowers, lets a man named Gronw Pebr take refuge at her court. They fall in love at first sight and sleep together that night; and for three days she refuses to give him symbolic permission to leave the court (sexy) and they spend all the days and nights together. They decide they must kill Lleu, and it falls to Blodeuedd to find out how that might be done.

The answer, it turns out, is a little complicated (and totally awesome). He can only be killed on a riverbank with an arched roof over his head, one of his feet on the edge of a bathtub and the other on the back of a billy-goat. And the only spear that can kill him is one forged over the course of a year only on Sundays, when everyone else is at church.

Blodeuedd immediately sends this information to Gronw, and for a whole year he labors over the spear. When it is done, Blodeuedd approaches Lleu and basically asks if she can see that really weird pose that it’s possible to kill him in. Not suspecting anything (somehow), he gets the billy-goat and the bathtub and the roof, and he stands in the vulnerable position. From the top of a hillside, Gronw launches his spear, which catches Lleu in the side; it does not instantly kill him, however, and Lleu turns into an eagle and flies away.

Gronw and Blodeuedd immediately go back to the court and sleep together, and as a result of this Gwydion hears the news quite quickly. He goes in search of Lleu, finding him at last after following a sow that was preying on the rot and maggots dripping from Lleu’s body. He coaxes Lleu down through a series of poems that are apparently extremely beautiful in the original Welsh, and nurses him back to health.

Once he is healthy again he goes to get revenge. Blodeuedd, hearing about this, takes her maidens and walks into the mountains. She is so scared, however, that she will only walk backwards, and everyone except her drowns after they walk backwards into a lake (must have been a very sudden lake). Gwydion catches her and turns her into an owl, and turns all the other birds against her so she can only come out at night. This is, they say, the origin of owls in Wales; indeed, the Welsh word for owl is Blodeuwedd.

Meanwhile, Lleu catches up with Gronw and refuses his offer of riches. He says the only acceptable thing is for him to throw a spear at Gronw in the same way Gronw threw a spear at him. And so they bring out the billy-goat, and the bathtub, and the spear, and Gronw stands on the riverbank and prepares to be killed. Right before Lleu throws, however, Gronw blames Blodeuedd and begs to have a large rock placed between him and Lleu. Lleu agrees, and the rock is rolled between them.

Lleu throws the spear right through the rock, killing Gronw. Lleu takes his lands back and later becomes king of Gwynedd. The rock that the spear was thrown through, named Llech Gronw, was apparently found in 1934 in a Cynfal river bed; it was also apparly found in 1990, near a place locally known as “Gronw’s Grave.” Needless to say, neither are proven to be the legitimate rock.

And so ends the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. Somewhat notably, although the first branch explicitly says that it is the first branch, the fourth branch does not say it is the last branch. There very well could have been other branches lost to time; if there were, it is a great tragedy.

Post 14: The Solution

A week after Lydia’s fiery speech on the quarter-deck, all of AHAB met together at my house. We had the riddle spread out in front of us, reading, as it always had,

The leader is key, the first in four

Last added on past giant’s door

A leader leads, when he is least

Doomed leader dies, to protect the beast.

Just after the dead man’s wicked stare

Holy grain pushed up the air

An older wound, inflicted then

Preserved through time again:

An injured man’s excuse for not fighting

A poet’s excuse for not writing.

We hadn’t met since the day of the speech, and the goal of the day was to pool our ideas and finally solve the confounded thing. But all of us were reluctant to begin, nervous to share our private musing. I decided to go first, although I really had no idea what it was about.

I cleared my throat.

“I confess I couldn’t make heads or tails out the thing. But I think there are some things that we can agree upon. The first four lines are certainly about Pryderi—he is the only one in all four branches, and he is certainly a leader. He also is the last added to the expedition to Bene’s door, and he dies in a battle over pig ownership. It all fits. The third line is a little mysterious; it obviously could be interpreted two ways. It could be talking about Pryderi, saying he leads when he is least, which is the solution implied by the next line. It could also be talking about a different ‘he,’ who leads when Pryderi is least—in this case that would probably be referring to Bendigeidfran in the second branch or Math in the fourth.”

This was met with nods all around.

“I’m inclined to think it’s talking about Pryderi himself, but Pryderi never seems to feature in any of the remaining lines of the poem. That’s why I think the purpose of the first four lines is to narrow down what branch we’re talking about. The giant’s door is clearly the second branch; protecting the beast is the fourth branch; and he is least in the first branch, when he is just a child. So that leaves the third branch for the rest of the riddle.

“This would fit with the lines. The dead man’s wicked stare would be the stare of Bendigeidfran’s chopped off head which they carry with them until the start of the third branch. The holy grain would be the wheat planted by Manawydan towards the end of the second branch. And the older wound would be the insult done to Gwawl, the auburn-haired lad who got kicked around in the first branch.

“The only thing I’m not sure of is the meaning of the final two lines. They seem important, but they also seem pointless: surely an injured man does not need any excuse for not fighting; he’s injured. And I’ve never met a poet who needed an excuse to stop writing. So I don’t know exactly where to go, although if I had to take a guess I’d say Gorsedd Arberth, because that’s where the third branch ends and the injury is avenged.”

Lydia wrote down ‘Gorsedd Arberth’ on a piece of paper. She looked up impatiently. “Who’s next?” she asked, scanning the room.

The earl of Northumberland shuffled some papers around in his hand and began to speak rather politely and circumspectly.

“In my experience as a diplomat for my kingdom, I have to say that I have significant experience with codes and riddles generally. We have a passion for them in the North; we volunteer to solve them for both sides in any conflict, just because it’s so much fun: the Americans, the fascists—but I repeat myself. Anyone who wants our help can get it. I myself am an expert in solving riddles and codes related to the Dr. Suess canon, a type of encoded message that becomes more popular by the year. So in this matter I think I can use my skills to get the cat out of the hat, so to say.

“That this message contained some sort of code was immediately clear to me. The first line quite literally says the leader is the key; this could be referring to Pryderi, who, as my colleague noted, is the subject of the lines, or it could be referring to the words ‘the leader’ themselves. Once one finds the key one needs the coded message; I believe a guide to how to find that coded message is contained in the first two lines themselves. The first in four could refer to Pryderi being the first character in all four branches, but it could also refer to the first letter in four words; it could also be the first letter in the next four lines.

“I preferred the latter option because of the awkward language at the beginning of several of the lines. ‘Doomed,’ for example, clearly doesn’t fit the sentence; it would work much better to simply use ‘the’ for both that sentence and the one above it. Even ‘a’ would have been much simpler and more effective. But for some reason the author chooses the obstructive ‘Doomed.’ The same thing exists with the ‘Just’ in ‘Just after;’ simply using ‘after’ would have made the sentence far better. And the second sentence is awkward in its entirety.

“From that I got the letters L, A, D, and J; but the second sentence made me think there was one more (the ‘last added on’). That would be an A. I now had five random letters and a keyword. I thought about a few different code options, but the use of a keyword and the distribution of the letters made me think a Vigenere Cipher was the most likely choice. The Vigenere cipher were invented by Giovan Battista Bellaso, of course, in the sixteenth century, but was tragically misattributed to Blaise de Veigenere, who was really an amatuer code creator at best. The Vignere is a kind of interwoven Caesar cypher: it’s most basically made by creating a square alphabet, which contains the alphabet written out twenty six times, each time shifted one letter over. On one side you use the keyword, and one the other side the message, and where the letters intersect you get the encoded message. It’s simple and easy to use, but also genius, for each letter is shifted a different, random amount. Without the keyword it’s extremely hard to break.

“The key to cracking this code was in the alphabet used. I tried it with our normal English alphabet, and it clearly didn’t work. When I tried it with the twenty-nine letter Welsh alphabet, however, it worked perfectly, and it gave me exactly the word we were looking for: Powys, the western county of Wales that was so maligned in the early middle ages. So there: the code is solved. We must go to Powys.”

Most of us were looking on with some astonishment and appreciation: Lydia, however, looked skeptical.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Seems like a lot of jumps to take. I bet you could find a code in any writing if you look hard enough, and I don’t know how they could expect us to figure that out. In my view this code is a series of extremely dumb puns that lead us to a very specific location.

“As far as the first four lines go, I’m in agreement with Basil. It’s after those that the idiotic, stupid things begin. Basil presumed that the dead man’s wicked stare was referring to Bendigeidfran’s stare, but that doesn’t make any sense: Bendigeidfran was a hero, so his stare wouldn’t have been wicked. He also presumed that holy grain referred to the wheat grown in the third branch: a solid guess, I will admit. But I think we have to look at this through a different lens. Does anyone remember what Bendigeidfran’s name means in Welsh?”

“Bendigeidfran? That would be ‘blessed bran,’ bran meaning raven or crow, correct?” said the earl.

“Correct. But think about that in English: bran not as crow but as pieces of grain. Holy grain is blessed bran. Therefore the holy grain is Bendigeidfran. And the dead man with the wicked stare who came before Bendigeidfran? Who else but his father Llyr, whose name sounds almost exactly like leer, a wicked stare?”

We nodded slowly, starting to understand.

“Then we have a wound inflected upon Bendigeidfran that is preserved through time. Now, in the third branch Bendigeidfran only suffers three real wounds: the wound to his pride that he suffers due to the actions of Nysien, the wound to his thigh from the poisoned spear, and the cutting off of his head. Which one of those is preserved through time? Only the loss of his head, as its buried in London for generations keeping the Britons safe from invasion.

“And that loss of a head, the riddle says, is an injured man’s excuse for not fighting, and a poet’s excuse for not writing. This is the central bad pun, for its the one that reveals the location we’re supposed to go to. Does anyone remember the Welsh word for head? It was mentioned when we were recapping the Mabinogi.”

“Pen.”

“Correct. And what’s the modern-day county of Dyfed called, the place where they went with Bendigeidfran’s head?”

“Pembrokeshire?”

“Exactly! Do you get it? What’s a man’s excuse for not fighting? Pen-broke, sure. Head broke! And what’s a poet’s excuse to not writing? Pen broke! The place we’re supposed to go is Pembrokeshire!”

Lydia’s eyes were bright and she had a huge smile on her face. We smiled too, enjoying her excitement. It certainly seemed to make sense, although it was so random and ridiculous we didn’t know how she came up with it. We now had three locations in front of us: my wild guess of Gorsedd Arberth, the earl’s code solution of Powys, and Lydia’s pun solution of Pembrokeshire. None of us expected Llisbeth or Pip to contribute their own solutions; but, as I opened my mouth to say something, Pip began to speak (his dialogue has been translated into English for the ease of the reader).

“You’re all idiots,” he began. “The solution is clear. If you replace each letter with its numerical value, then put together all the numbers in each line, adding consonants and multiplying vowels, then divide that sum by the number of syllables in each line, you get a number; if you take that number and divide it by the date of the White Book of Hergest, which the text clearly alludes to, you get 312251414.157612318, which, if properly divided into single digit and double digit numbers, gives you Clynnog Fawr, the small village in Caernarfonshire.”

We all stared at each other.

“That can’t be right,” said Lydia.

“That almost certainly is not right,” said the earl.

“That is right,” said Llisbeth, unexpectedly.

“Alright,” I said, trying to get control of the situation. “We have four locations, one rather dubious. We have one riddle that still seems very strange. And we have five of the most brilliant minds in the world. We can do this. Is there any other information we have? Did anything else come with the riddle?”

“No,” said Lydia. “It just came in this envelope, no explanation, no other letter.”

“Well,” said the earl, “that letter looks like it has a return address on it.”

“My God, it does!”

“What does it say?”

Lydia read the address to herself, her face suddenly turning dark. “This is ridiculous,” she said, and stood up from the table. The earl picked up the letter and frowned, shaking his head.

“Can I see it?”

He passed it to me. The letter was from Wales. It was from Gorsedd Arberth. Was I a secret genius?

“We leave on Sunday,” the earl growled.

Post 15: Welsh Cakes

Post 16: Going Aboard

My parents were reluctant to let me leave for Wales. My mother, fresh from the seal tank, implored me to think about the seals: who would put on the seal sealment when I was gone, the coating of plastic that kept the seals safe from all the dangerous chemicals in the aquarium water? I was the expert. I told her that in my opinion they no longer needed all the dangerous chemicals in the water, which were designed to make sure that any visitor that jumped into the tank would instantly be killed, their body dissolved alive in the powerful acid. That was, readers might remember, how former president Donald J. Trump died.

She was reluctant to agree to that as well. I knew she liked to dangle people over the enclosure when she was threatening them, or extorting them through blackmail. As she was gazing up at our seal-ing (our ceiling painting with an exact replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, except all the people are seals), trying to think of a better argument, I slowly left the room and went to pack. I knew the real reason she didn’t want me to leave: when she had been young and following her passions, she had gone to Newport Beach in order to get certified in seal dealing. There she had met, and accidentally married on a dare, a magician named G.O.B Bluth. Although they eventually divorced, there have always been rumors that G.O.B is my actual father; I was born, after all, exactly nine months after their first court date (which was, ironically, the most steamy of their dates).

The wedding with G.O.B

She didn’t want me to meet someone like G.O.B., didn’t want me to fall in love with my own failing magician with a father in prison for treason and nephew who aged like a deformed carrot. She was supported in this by my aunt, Rachel Montgomery, who can only be described as a titan of industry. She was a steel baron of the old school, the iron-handed controller of over forty small coal and iron mines in Monterey County. She would walk between the mineshifts, cigarette in hand, parting the seas of dirt-poor coal workers with her disdainful stares. “Boy,” she would say to me, “the steel industry is the only life worth living. If I’m not ripping tons of metal for the engorged earth like a rabid animal, I am nothing. Steel is poured into me as blood; it convulses me as pain; it lies under me like a bed, and envelopes me in dull melancholy days, or in days of endless labor; I did not guess its essence until after a long time.”

Sharing her bed of steel was a real man of steel. She called him Joshua Montgomery, but he was really just an elaborately carved steel statue that she hauled everywhere she went. His abs were literally sculpted; his hair was literally a steely grey. He was, Rachel often declared, the sexiest man not alive. While some found her obsession with him a little strange, and her tendency to dress him as if he were a doll and talk to him as if he were a person, we were all used his gigantic stature and treated him as if he were an uncle. He didn’t even realize, Rachel told us, that he wasn’t alive like we were!

It was Josh, the strong and silent man himself, who declared that me going to Wales was a thoroughly bad idea (according to Rachel). Rachel backed him up fiercely; she told me she would build a cage of iron nails, just like in the second branch of the Mabinogi, to keep me here. The only person who seemed to be on my side was my dad.

My parents were an unusual couple from the start. My dad had been a commercial crab fisherman; he had lost all his fingers, however, in a battle with a vicious albino crab named Moldy Dick. He spent a year chasing Moldy Dick around the seas, losing men, money, and mental health in the process; when he finally caught up with him, Moldy Dick chopped off all his toes too. My dad returned home to Monterey defeated, and got a job at the crab exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He eventually worked his way up to becoming one of its head curators.

In that capacity he went to a charity sea-animal auction, Porpoises for a Purpose. He met my mom there, who was selling one of her prized seals; they hit it off, and by the end of the day the seal was dealed, and the deal was sealed. They were getting married.

When I told me dad about my prospective trip to Wales, he was less worried about improper affairs and more worried about recent sightings of Moldy Dick in the area. He warned me to be careful, and gave me his best crab-hunting spear; he reminded me that if I slew the demon Moldy Dick, I was to save the claws (the fingers and toes of the crab) for him to feast on.

With his blessing, I snuck out of the house on the morning the boat was set to sail. The boat was called The Shortcut III, and was known to be the fastest cargo ship around: it could cross the Atlantic in two days, and get from Monterey to Wales in only three. As I looked up towards the deck, I could see two sets of figures waving to me. On one side I recognized my crew: Lydia, Llisbeth, the Earl and Pip. On the other side stood three children: one bald, one exceedingly average looking, and one absolutely tiny, holding a large bucket.

I frowned. This could get interesting.

Post 17: The Mysterious Benedict Society

I walked up the gangway just as the horn was blowing. The boat pulled out from the dock, turning awkwardly to face the sea and letting out a giant puff of smoke. All along the docks and the nearby streets, crowds of people were gathered, throwing flowers and cheering.

I looked back at Monterey, the city I grew up in, the city I loved. I saw its wharfs and its fisheries, its skyscrapers and its streets. I saw the Coin Tower, enmeshed in glittering coins like chainmail; I saw saw Orcas, the Welsh town, with the Spouter-Inn and Kicking Morons; I saw the long and looming drive of Jesus Lane, and at the end of it, a newly planted Maple tree. This was my Monteray: weird, wonderful, always smelling like fish. This was the clamp-hold on the Pacific that I loved so much, the city of Wales and whales.

I sighed and turned around. There was still so much to see, and yet every time I moved forward the space behind me grew. I felt empty, in a way; it felt like something was gnawing at my insides, rumbling deep inside me. It felt like a hunger. I was—I searched for the word—hungry. I hadn’t eaten in three days.

I went to the mess-hall on the second floor of the ship and saw my friends sitting with the mysterious group of three that I had seen earlier. They introduced me. There was Reynie, the average looking boy with an apparently above-average intelligence. He was the leader of the group, which was called, somewhat ridiciously, The Mysterious Benedict Society.

There was Sticky, called that because he made everyone around him sweat due to his insane sexiness. He was literally the hottest person I had every seen in my life. Everything he did radiated sexiness, like he was the sun and we were just the planets revolving around him; indeed, his bald head and glasses seemed to reflect the sun, making the world literally light up when he looked at you. He also had a photographic memory, but his overwhelming physical attractiveness made that seem like a side note.

Next to him was a bucket filled with what seemed to be ashes. “That,” Sticky said solemnly, “is the Late Great Kate Weather Machine. She was our best friend, before she took a pencil through each eye. We carry around her ashes in her favorite red bucket.”

They all nodded sadly. The smallest one, whose name was Constance, stood up as if to give a eulogy.

“It was Kate who made us a quadruple

Kind, brave, and with scruples

Until she was found lackin’

By the Ten-Man McCracken

Redefining the relationship between pencil and pupil”

She sat down, wearing, as she almost always did, a pout on her face. The others gave her pained looks and patted her on the back. “She’s really broken up about it,” they explained, “but she’s a poet at heart. You know how they are.”

Agreeing confidently that we did indeed know how poets were, we began talking about a whole variety of strange and wonderful topics. The hours flew by as we became the best of friends; I began to appreciate the children as really interesting and brilliant companions. I almost invited them to join us on our quest.

Our goodwill was broken up, however, only a few days into the journey. We were sitting around the table, chatting as we were now accustomed to do, when an overwhelmingly cubic man joined us. Every part of him was a cube: his boxy face; his square ears; his unbelievably rigid yet large stomach; even his hands, which seemed folded in and perfectly square-like. He suffered from a rare condition, Sticky said, called cancer. But that was unrelated.

The box-man stood above and immediately began barking out orders like a military general.

“Alright, you sick scurvy useless piles of flotsam! You pathetic excuses for seamen! You call this a diving team? My coach would have crucified the lot of you and then shot you with one of his eighteen semi-automatic rifles, or one of his three handguns, and then rolled your body up in a duffel bag and throw it off the high-dive, so you’d finally do a good dive! And I’d do the same, you better believe!

“You are nothing like Elise McDonald. Nothing! I coached her you know, I coached her straight to the gold metal. You lot aren’t fit to lick her shoes! Ye aren’t even fit to look at her, you pathetic piles of slumping stinking flesh! I hate the lot of you! I would tell you to jump off a cliff, but you’re such a sorry lot of divers you couldn’t even manage that! God! What would my old coach say? What would he say? What would… he say?”

These final two sentences were low and directed towards himself. He shook his square head fiercely, like a dog shaking off water, and got back to yelling.

We were thoroughly confused. None of us had dived a single day in our lives; half of us didn’t even know how to swim. We were soon being shepherded, however, by the box-man to the edge of the boat, where a duct-taped plank of wood made for a makeshift diving board.

“You’re not the diving team I wanted, no; but you’re the diving team I’m stuck with, and I’ve got to made do with I’ve got. Just like you've got to make do with what you’ve got! Sticky, you’ve got looks that would make a wallaby kick itself in the middle of breakfast; Constance, your glare could turn a snake into a jibble-bat. Basil, you’ve more toes than a monkey-breathing lion, and that’s just for starters. You can do this, if you only have faith. You can dive, if you only survive!”

With this he began to push us off the deck; he tried to, at least, but he was not especially agile or limber in his limbs, and we were all able to avoid him quite easily. He was rolling around the deck like a cubic cannonball, shouting at us wildly, until suddenly he came to a stop and started to cry. It was a depressing sight, this overage square man bawling, lying on the floor near the edge of the ship.

Reynie, after sharing a quick glance with me and Lydia, went over and comforted him.

“I’m all alone, I’m all alone,” he cried. “My dive team isn’t even with me. I know you guys aren’t really a dive team….” With that he started bawling even louder. “I just wanted to have a team again, to have a family. I miss my family so much…”

We all surrounded him and began to pat him on the pack. “We can be your dive team,” Lydia said, a statement met with public agreement but private grimaces. “We’ll let you train us.”

“Really?” The man was smiling again.

“Really.”

We all had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

For the next week we trained non-stop. Every morning at dawn we would gather at the edge of the boat, where the square man (Horace Rumplebottom, he was named) and his assistant (who as named Ella) would lecture us on proper diving techniques. We were soon masters of all the dives: the front-bottom top-flip, the fin-dangled mangled melon malone, the scootsy-McDooes, the triple spic and span grandstand, and the classic elastic helmet-to-helmet flip-tastic.

We would fling ourselves through the air, twisting our bodies in every way imaginable, puffing out our cheeks like pufferfish, and bracing ourselves for the freezing briny waters of the Pacific. Our every meal and activity was monitored by Ella, who carried a can of pepper spray and would spray anyone who disobeyed her. She also sprayed people just fun, for she was a little sadistic and would later turn out to the the infamous Seattle Streetlight Slayer, who killed eighteen people between the years of 2003 and 2005 using only a pair of toothpicks.

We all loved her, however, and we had enough pity for Horace to keep going along with his training rituals. Still, it was with pleasure that we heard the news of our imminent arrival in Wales. There was only one day left, the captain informed us; we were entering Welsh waters.

We thought this would be the end of the training; but that night Horace and Ella gathered us all up and took us to their rooms. There, we saw a massive arsenal of weaponry: spears, harpoons, jackhammers, crossbows, knifes, pistols, small bombs, packets of arsenic, medieval swords, chainsaws. They shut the door behind us.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Horace began. “I admit I have played you for fools. I have pretended to be the helpless, sad man in order to gain your trust: in order to get you to dive with me. Only young people like you would do it; only young people like you could master the dives at such short notice. And what for, you may ask? One thing, and one thing only: revenge.”

He help up his hand.

I gasped.

It looked exactly like my dad’s hand. All the fingers were gone. That’s why it had looked so square.

“Yes, Basil, I see you understand. That great evil crab, Moldy Dick, de-fingered me too. I can no longer hold a weapon, or my wife’s hand; I can no longer fire a machine gun, or go to the bathroom properly. But I knew that if I went in against him alone, I would be crushed; I would lose all my toes, just like your father, Basil. That’s why I recruited you.

“You all have learned to dive. You might have been wondering why I always made you practice holding a stick in one hand, or why my stomach looks like this. You now have an answer to one of those questions. Take a weapon, children. Let us go fight Moldy Dick! Dive down on him like a hawk upon its prey, and plunge your steel into his back! By the time this is over, you will be having crab for dinner; or the crab will be having you!”

With this he burst into a crazed smile, and we slowly, carefully, grabbed a weapon and left the room. Only Reyne dared to challenge him on his mission.

“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” he cried, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Horace Rumplebottom, seems blasphemous.”

“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer,” began Rumplebottom. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting though the wall? To me, the bad crab is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the bad crab agent, or be the bad crab principle, I will wreak that hate upon him!”

“God save us,” Reynie whispered.

When morning came we were all stationed at different parts of the ship. I was at the bow, watching the distant green of Wales roll over closer. Sticky was the closest to me, his bald head shining like a lighthouse. We were under orders to report any disturbances in the water, or any sightings of crab-like movement; and if we saw Moldy Dick, we were under orders to jump in and kill on sight.

For hours it was quiet; it was almost eerily, the quiet that descended on us. We all knew the monster was coming, that it was coming for us; and we all knew that at any moment we would have to dive overboard, risking our lives for the sake of a man we barely knew. Each person was engaged in their own private contemplations and calculations, but I doubt that anyone was thinking about abandoning their post. We had worked too long for this, had braved the cold waters too many times.

Then, at noon, a shriek and a crashing sound. Not from the water, no; from the deck behind us.

I turned around to see something that barely looked real rising from on of the cargo containers. Eight-legged, many-eyed, a hideous shade of barnacled white, Moldy Dick stretched out his massive claws before ripping the cargo container in two. He let out a hideous squeal, and a massive bubble, and skittered off towards some innocent person walking the deck, no doubt looking to chop off their fingers and toes.

I couldn’t believe it. Moldy Dick had hidden on our ship, at least overnight, possibly the whole time. He must have seen us diving, must have known our plans. And he had outsmarted us. I heard more screams from the deck as I readied my grenade launcher. I was reluctant to use it on board when people could be hurt, but I knew I had no other choice.

Just as I was about to fire, however, I saw a strange shape that seemed to fly across the sky. Squinting, I realized that it was not flying at all, but rather sliding down a long rope. Some members of the Mysterious Benedict Society (that was what the three kids we met called themselves) had stretched a rope from the massive coal burning platform on the back of the ship to the bow on the front, making a sort of zipline. And now, for some strange reason, they were sending their dead friend Kate’s bucket down the zipline, its handle skimming along the rope.

Just when the bucket was above the horrific shape of Moldy Dick, a small figure emerged from it. I gasped. Constance! The small girl jumped from the bucket with a perfect no-spinner wind-winner dive, and landed, spear down, on the bad crab’s back. The crab let out a little wheeze, and died.

We all rushed to Constance, developing her in hugs and praise. She had saved the day. Horace began to cry, for real this time, and Ella even let us eat some dessert treats. That night we pulled apart Moldy Dick and ate him for dinner, although I saved on of the six-foot legs for my father, as I had promised.

The night was celebratory, but bittersweet. We knew we were going to have to leave our new friends soon. They were going past Wales to Stonetown, where they lived with what seemed a wonderful group of people. We gave each other our addresses, promised to see each other again, and spent the night dancing to Sticky’s favourite song, “Payphone” by Maroon 5.

Just a few miles away, Wales, and our mountain, was waiting for us. The beginning of the end was beginning, and the end of the beginning was ending. Whether our end was a new beginning or whether this beginning of the end would end in the end of the end, was up to us.

Post 18: Return of the King

We arrived in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, and traveled northeast to Haverford West then west to Arberth (or Narberth), which is less than a mile from Camp Hill, the primary proposed location for Gorsedd Arberth. Camp Hill was the site of a circular Iron Age enclosure and the geographical details of the place match those found in the Mabinogi stories.

Lydia was quick to point out that she was technically right in her riddle solve: this was Pembrokeshire. We reminded her that just having the name Pembrokeshire was not terribly helpful, and that arranging to meet in Pembrokeshire would be like arranging to meet in New Jersey, or at least some smaller and more sparsely populated New Jersey. Like Rhode Island, maybe. I’ve never been east of Nevada.

Arguing about such things, and asking Pip questions like he was some type of magic eight ball (his answers were invariably some type of Carly Rae Jepsen lyric, but when questioned he would claim never to have heard of her), we climbed Gorsedd Arberth and sat waiting our meeting. It flashed across our mind that we should have perhaps organized a meeting time as well as a meeting location, but we trusted that to the magic of the hill. We knew that we would either see something amazing from it, or something terrible.

As the clouds rolled in and the afternoon drew on, we began to worry that we had solved the riddle wrong. The rest of the team got up and went to get some food from Narberth; I stayed alone on the hill. I had hardly been there five minutes when it happened: a beam of light shot down from a gap in the clouds, illuminating a patch of trees to the north. A figure stepped out of it, walking slowly, his massive shoulders and arms casting strange bumpy shadows on the ground. He was one of the most muscular men I had ever seen: indeed, he looked like someone who recorded an average of 138.8 tackles a season over nine seasons in the National Football League. Then he raised his head, and I saw who he was: Bobby Wagner, in the flesh.

I think it’s only fair that I give the reader some background information about the relationship between me and Bobby Wagner, so they understand the toxic, awful, indescribably tense situation that was developing. I had met Bobby when he was just a young kid in Ontario, California. He wasn’t called Bobby Wagner then, of course: he was Robert Wagner, Wagner pronounced like the name of the German composer.

Robert was a strange lad: his only want in the world was to be a historian. He spent every waking moment in the library, either reading massive volumes on every time period imaginable or scanning the newly-made internet for information. His arms got so big from carrying stacks of books around that he was recruited by the school football team. As history has proven, that was a fateful recruitment, but history itself was his first and only passion.

History was also his problem. For Bobby Wagner was a singularly undiscerning mind. He believed literally everything he read, no matter how unreliable the source or how strange the claim. He was even capable of holding direct contradictions in his mind at the same time: when confronted about this, he would simply quote back the Walt Whitman line about containing multitudes (a line he maintains was a joke).

He became obsessed with a certain conspiracy theory, a strange one he found on the internet, about the history of trees. It said that there were no real trees on earth: that what we call trees are actually tiny saplings, just starting to grow. The only real trees, Bobby would insist, were the mesa plateaus found in deserts and canyonlands across the world: those were the fossilized trunks of the real trees, now fallen. He also only ate oranges, but that was another matter.

Bobby truly believed that trees weren’t real: believed it so much, even, that he refused to even call them trees. When anyone around him called the “sticks topped with small amounts of typically green vegetation” trees, he would yell at them extremely aggressively that they were saplings. Whenever someone talked about a forest, he would remind them that it was not a forest but rather “a small growing-ground where the tiny roots and shoots of the true trees, the trees that reach the moon, are beginning their one hundred thousand year long growth cycle.”

I knew Bobby through another one of his history related interests: sword fighting. There was, back in that time, a sword fighting class that met every Wednesday in Neil McDonald Park, near downtown Monterey. Neil McDonald had been one of the founders of the city: a chronically bald man, he had poured large parts of his fortune into a factory that produced high-quality gentlemen’s wigs. Once he realized that he actually looked better bald, and could make more money producing a new sort of food called the hamburger, he dedicated his time and fortune to making beautiful parks across the city. He also started a ton of restaurants: that’s why Monterey has the highest McDonalds-per-capita ratio in the world, at 1:4.

Wagner was a marvel on the swordfighting field. He actually credits most of his football skills to moves he learned in our sword fighting class: the [dives]. There he also learned a sort of ruthlessness, and a bravery; he was never afraid to throw himself into a fight, no matter who was fighting or how sharp their fencing sword was. I was the opposite: cautious, slow to engage, I would observe my opponents for hours before I fought them, perched in one of the many trees surrounding the field.

We weren’t close friends necessarily, but we were the youngest in the club and often hung out together. We went to each other’s birthday parties, had lunch at school, and even sometimes threw the football around, although he was often intimidated by my prodigious skill. I never dreamed, I never could have imagined, how badly things would go wrong.

It all started during the annual Monterey County Swordfighters Union Charity Tournament for Kids with Cancer And Also People Who Have Gotten Stabbed With Swords, a tournament put on by our sword fighting club each year. It was the quarterfinal round: Bobby and I had both desworded our previous opponents with ease, and we were favorites to win the tournament. But then the draw came out: we were fighting each other, something we had never done seriously before. We were supposed to meet on the field at sundown.

I got there, as was my custom, about half an hour early. I sat in the tree waiting for my opponent, much like I sat at Gorsedd Arberth waiting for the meeting. Finally, Bobby Wagner arrived, his muscles as well-defined as they ever were, his sword in hand.

“Come down from that sapling, coward!” he cried.

“What sapling?” I yelled back. I was a strong believer in the existence of trees: it was the biggest argument between us.

“That tiny sapling you are sitting in, a hundred thousand years away from being an actual tree: it looks pathetic! Just as you are a sapling of a man, a weakling.” This was classic pre-sword fight banter.

“No, Robert!” I cried back. “I will not leave this tree until you acknowledge that it is a tree!”

“Then I guess I’ll have to bring you down against your will!”

Bobby began wacking the tree with his sword and shaking it with his hands, trying everything possible to bring the tree down. Finally he climbed up next to me and shoved me out of the tree, yelling, the entire time, “it’s not a tree it’s not a tree it’s not a tree!”

We then squared off on level ground, although I was a bit shaken from my fall.

“It is a tree,” I growled.

“No it’s not,” Bobby responded through gritted teeth.

I know, reader. You may have been expecting something more from our rivalry. You might have expected a different backstory, or a more funny one. But I am first and foremost a journalist in this blog: I refuse to even twist the truth, much less invent it. I must stay true to what really happened.

And what really happened was Bobby Wagner stabbing me in the stomach with his sword, running his blade through me and throwing me to the ground, where I gurgled and coughed up blood. He then started to do the same celebration dance moves he uses when he gets a sack in football, stomping around pounding his chest and yelling “Sapling sapling sapling.” It was only after a few minutes that he realized what he had done, and called 911. He bandaged me wounds and took me to the hospital, but by then it was too late. Our friendship was as badly damaged as my internal organs. It never recovered.

And now here he was, walking up to greet me, as if nothing at all had happened to my second liver and small intestinal lining.

“Basil…” he began, stopping about six feet away from me. “Basil, I’m so sorry. I know how this must look. I know you must be confused. But let me just say I’m so sorry for what happened all those years ago.

“I’ve never forgotten you. I think about you every time I use my intestines. And I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to your second kidney; I know being born with four was hard enough for you. I just got heated. And I thought the fencing swords weren’t sharp. I thought they had a little silver ball at the end, like a ball bearing. It’s all ball bearings these days.” He was tearing up at this point. “But maybe something a little bigger than a ball bearing, because those are tiny. Like a marble-sized ball bearing, I’m talking about. About this big:”

He held up two fingers about half a centimeter apart.

“Anyway, I didn’t know I was going to cause Class Two internal bleeding. I’m sorry I stabbed you. I’ve changed my ways; I’ve become a better person, and a better reader, through the middle school library literacy classes I’ve enrolled in. They’ve taught me how to tell whether things are real on the internet. I just use the C.R.A.A.P test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and… ah crap, what’s the last one?”

“Pasta.”

“Exactly. Anyway, I’m just wondering if you can maybe forgive me. If we can put everything aside and work together like the old pals we once were.”

“We were never really friends.”

“Well, then the old pals we could have been.”

I thought for a second. Bobby Wager, Robert Wagner, had been a demon hanging over my life for so long. Every time I turned on the T.V., he was there. Every time I closed my eyes at night, he was there, running at me, mocking me, telling me that trees weren’t real. I could never rest, could never hope to escape the nightmares, for there was always a little voice in my head telling me to get ready, to prepare for our next meeting. That’s why I learned to swallow swords; that’s why I had practiced my sword fighting every day for the last twelve years. That’s why I was Semi-Regional Champion of the Greater Monterey Area for Youth Sword Fighting.

When you are faced with someone you dislike, with someone you disagree with, there are always two paths open to you. That is one of the secrets of the ocean. There is the path of kindness, stretching dove-like to the west. And then there is challenging them to man-to-man combat with heavy medieval broadswords, the path of the cool kid. As my steel baroness aunt would always say, try to #stopthesteel.

At this point, however, forgiveness seemed like the right answer. If Bobby Wagner was truly on our side—a big if—there was no greater ally to have in a fight. With a sword in his hands, the man was unstoppable. Many football players had found that out the hard way. I reached out and shook his hand. I gasped. The enormity of the moment hit me: this thing was almost over, but this was a new beginning, a new coalition. We might have a second birth after all.

“Okay, Bobby,” I said. “Tell us what’s going on here.”

Bobby Wagner explained that he was the president, and the largest donor, of the organization YesCymru, a pro-Welsh independence organization that formed in 2014. He said it was his Super Bowl victory the previous year that inspired it: “I was just so psyched from winning that Super Bowl, and I thought, ‘Wow, I wish the people of Wales could be so psyched about something. That’s when it hit me: Welsh independence.’”

If you listen to its advocates, Welsh independence is having a bit of a heyday, at least for this modern era. YesCymru had only 2,500 members at the start of 2020, but over the course of a year filled with UK governmental incompetence that number has risen to over 15,000. According to polling commissioned by the organization, a third of Wales would support a Welsh independence vote, an increase of eleven percent from the previous year—although the full poll results are not available on the YesCymru website and I was unable to find concrete details on sample size, methodology, and how the poll treated people who were unlikely to vote or unsure of which way they would vote.

Still, Bobby believed that there was more energy behind the movement than any time since the Glyn Dwr uprising that ended around 1415 (once again, reading notes are on the Resources Page: I believe the fabulous Glyn Dwr uprising is around page 40). When Bobby closed his eyes, he imagined the empire of Rhodri Mawr, of Hywel Dda, of Llywelyn I and II, restored; a united Welsh nation, under Welsh law, speaking the Welsh language, and practicing the traditions and religion of their ancestors.

It was Llywelyn II that impacted him the most, but not in the way one would think. He was obsessed not with his life: his revolts, his battles, all the drama of his court. He was not interested in the final stand he made, that great last war that ended the Conquest, when Llywelyn, his wife and child dead, threw caution to the wind and joined his brother in revolt against the English. No, he only cared about Llywelyn’s death, the dead that killed any hopes of an independent Wales. Llywelyn was tricked into separating from his army, and was killed by a random Shropshire soldier who had no idea who he was. It was only a while later that the English recognized the body and chopped off the head to send to London. The head was paraded around London before being set up on a Tower of London gate. It is said that it stayed there for fifteen years.

That, Bobby Wagner said, is what he feared would happen to him. He was convinced someone was after him, and his movement as whole.

“There’s a deep state out there, I’m sure of it. A coalition of English political figures, the English monarchy, and some Welsh traitors rooted deeply within our own government. They’re conspiring to keep Wales in the UK, all because it will probably help the people of Wales and keep Wales’s economy alive. And because they’re crazy for power, and all that.

“They talk in code, or in person: we can never figure out exactly what their plans are. But through an elite team of students at Aberystwyth University we have been able to break down some of their messages. We’ve learned that they are hiding something in the mountain of Y Lliwedd: the same conclusion you guys all came to through your CIA experience.

“We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s very important. We know they think it could turn the tide on Welsh independence, and maybe even bring down the government back in England too. They’re desperate not to let anyone get their hands on it. But we’ve narrowed down the location to a single cave on the side of the mountain, and with your help we’re going to raid it.”

“Why do you need our help?”

“Well, we know you and Lydia are valuable intelligence assets with non-zero combat capabilities. Your Welsh knowledge is also valuable. But what we really need is Llisbeth Salander. Her short term memory loss is the best thing that could have happened to our investigation. You see, the Alliance (that’s what we call the evil group opposing us) know that we’re on to them, but they don’t know how much we know. And they’re panicking over it. They’ve been sending huge squadrons of guards to follow us, they’ve been bugging our phones, they even tried to kidnap one of our members, a total genius named Kathy McDonald. She fought them off using her black-belt judo skills, but it was far too close for comfort.

“Our plan is to let Llisbeth get captured, right before we leave for the cave. All their intelligence forces, as well as some of their military support, will go to guard her and interrogate her—you know how feisty she can get. And we’ll put a paper in her pocket with some tantalizing fake clues about what we’re going to be doing. The genius of the plan, of course, is that no matter what they do, Llisbeth can’t tell them anything more—she doesn’t know anything more. She doesn’t even know most of our names. The only thing she knows is that—”

“—that she hates the government. The thing she always repeats.”

“Exactly. She’ll be the toughest interrogation target in history. You know the story about Gerry Adams in Northern Ireland, the one where they interrogate him for three days and he refuses to even admit that he’s Gerry Adams? It’ll be like that, except she’ll actually have no idea who she is!”

“It’s wonderful. When does she get kidnapped?”

Bobby paused and checked his watch.

“They’re in Narberth, right? Probably about fifteen minutes then. We leave tonight, you know. I have a car waiting across from those trees over there.”

It took a second before the words sunk in.

“Just past those… trees, Bobby?”

“Yep. Just past those trees.”

He smiled at me, and I smiled back, and we hugged, reunited at last. I had been waiting over a decade to hear him say that word: that wonderful, sideways-tree shaped word: tree.

Let’s get to work, he said. It’s a long and tiring journey ahead.

Post 19: Letter, Written from Wales

Dear mother—Dear mam,

Mam is a Welsh word, Mother, a circular word, suggesting cuddles, a personal word that can even be shouted in public. Something as comforting and as eternal as a barge. Though you, in spirit, I know are still a seal. Can swerve around like one and enter a creek in seconds. Still independent. Still private. Not a barge responsible for all around you. I have spent the last few days living with Bobby Wagner, and our talk has been slow, casual. After so long we are still awkward around each other, unsure.

He has been here for the past year. Through all the time I was doing this blog. He had no support from the states, no friends. His own family cared only about his football. And what did he have here, on this arm of an island so enthralled in its own history, and its own life, teetering in and out of existence?

He was in Wales and I was learning about Wales and we could have been friends. Do you understand the sadness of geography? I could have helped him or at least supported him, like one does a drowning duck. How long was he alone here, trying to speak Welsh by himself? With all these Welsh-speakers around him. Welsh over him. The whispers when he walks down the streets. Unable to play football because they do rugby here. He always hated rugby. And he was alone, without lover or kin.

I am sick of doing this blog, Mother. I want to come home. To your seal enclosure at the aquarium, with its skin-melting acid. I will take a plane back to Monterey. And from the airport I will text you a message, on your old red flip phone. And wait for you, wait to see the silhouette of you in the car coming to rescue me from this place we all entered, betraying you. How did you become so smart? How did you become so determined? How were you not fooled like us? You that demon for seals who became so wise. The purest among us, the darkest bean, the greenest leaf.

Basil

Post 20: The Chase

It was still dark when we arrived at Y Lliwedd. We had travelled through the night for the fourth day in a row. The car, it turned out, had been bugged by the Alliance. We couldn’t find a replacement in time, not a safe one, so we had to hike and bike through the hills. It had been a long, grueling journey. We had taken turns carrying Pip on our shoulders, feeling his arms wrap around us like those of a demented backpack.

But now we were here. The cave in question was below us, a large rock rolled over its entrance. We felt like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary going to wash the body of Jesus, if Jesus was a national security secret that would take down the Welsh and English government and Mary Magdalene was a CIA agent carrying a sword and half a box of chicken McNuggets (we had stopped for McDonalds on the way). Our approach was carefully planned out: I would approach from the northeast, Lydia would approach from the northwest, Bobby and Pip (he could carry Pip the easiest) would approach from the southwest, and the earl would approach from the southeast. If any of us saw anything suspicious, we were to make a low pitched whale call, or a light whistle. Once we got to the rock, we would incapacitate any guards and work together to roll away the stone.

The sun was just starting to rise as we began creeping our way through the rocks, careful not to disturb anything, keeping our eyes trained on the cave entrance. I navigated some huge boulders and realized, with some worry, that we were now completely out of sight of the trail. No one would see, much less hear, what went on outside the cave.

I was almost holding my breath as I walked, and at each stone I would tap the sword that dangled from my side to make sure it was still there. Step, check. Step, check. Step, check.

The world was silent except for hawks crying in the distance and sort of strange wind blowing in from the east.

Step, check. Step, check. The routine of progression and preparation.

Step, check. Step, check.

And then—one time—

The sword was gone.

I wheeled around to see a British redcoat soldier wielding my sword, surrounded by a group of five army men with old-fashioned bayonet muskets and spears. From down the mountain and to my left I heard two cries, and I realized the others must have been ambushed too.

But how? Bobby said this was foolproof. Bobby said that they had no idea what we were doing. Bobby said…

That’s when I saw him. Not Bobby, no—the earl. Shaking hands with the British troops, patting them on the back. He had betrayed us, the wealthy scum. He had sold us to our enemy, sold us into certain doom and destruction. I couldn’t believe it. Catching my gaze, he smiled.

“You really thought the best way for me, the earl of Northumberland, to get power was going in with a ragtag gang of young translators and insane asylum patients? Me? No, no, I’ve been working with the government the entire time. They have promised me a bit more money, and a bit more power for Northumberland; we are thoroughly British now, after all. Even I wouldn’t dream of an independence movement there. But good luck!”

He said this last line with a sick and twisted smile as he nudged the guards and ordered them to take me down the mountain. Stumbling over rocks, kicking sticks and myself, I met Lydia, Bobby, and Pip by the door. Each of them was accompanied by at least three redcoats.

I couldn’t believe it. The plan had failed. We had lost.

They patted us down for weapons and made us stand without backs to the stone. They took out their swords and began to taunt us, telling us that all they had to do was dispose of us now.

“Yeah,” they growled, “It’s time to take out the trash. Except we can’t actually take you out with the trash obviously, because you’re going to be dead bodies. And that’s illegal. Except this isn’t illegal because the government is letting us do it. And it’s not garbage day here today, that’s Tuesday. I know because I always miss it. I have thirty weeks worth of garbage piled up in my garage, because I always miss it.”

But no matter what they said, no matter how threatening they acted, Pip would only say one thing.

“Things will be best when they look worst,” he’d say. “Things will get worst before they get better.”

We had no idea what he meant.

We stood there for almost an hour as the guards waited for some order on their walkie-talkie. We were allowed no food, no small talk (except Pip, who continued to talk as if nothing had changed), and no movement, except for one straightening or bending of legs every five minutes.

Finally, the radio command came through: “Take out the trash.” The guards raised their swords, eying us hungrily. They had an evil look in their eyes, a murderous look.

“They’re coming,” Pip said suddenly.

“We know they’re coming,” I said, “they’re swinging their swords and walking towards us.”

“No,” Pip said. “They’re coming.”

Suddenly, a strange battle cry, in a language I had never truly heard before, burst out from above us on the mountain. A pounding of feet sounded down the mountain like an ocean wave, and before we knew it half of the redcoats were on the ground, either smacked down with swords or choked unconscious with what appeared to be long beards. Over a dozen ancient knights were in front of us, their beards as long as the mountain, their steel as sharp as it had been twelve hundred years ago. Suddenly, I understood.

These were King Arthur’s knights, the one that rumor said had hid on this mountain after his death all those years ago. Who would come back to defend the true ruler of the Britons in his or her time of need. I looked at Lydia. What did this mean?

We had little time to ponder the question, for we heard the cave slide open behind us and a dozen more redcoat soldiers poured out. The knights were still engaged with the redcoats down the slope from us, choking out the poor man whose garage was so filled with trash. These new redcoats surrounded us, their swords raised, their eyes furious.

I had to act fast. I reached my hand down my throat and pulled out the sword I had been hiding there the whole time, the sword I had practiced swallowing so many times over the years. My sword extended and flashing in the air like a mad snake, I spun around in a circle and disarmed all the redcoats before backflipping over them and pressing my steel into their backs. They fell to their knees and surrendered. I ran down the mountain to assist the knights with Lydia, Bobby and Pip at my heels.

I dodged the sword of one redcoat and rammed the butt of my sword into his stomach, causing him to stumble back. I almost got caught by another but Lydia’s boot flew in at the last instant, knocking him to the ground dead. It was the only fatality of the day. “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked her in awe.

“Kicking Morons,” she replied, before giving another redcoat a brutal foot to the stomach.

One by one, the redcoats went down, either by my sword, Bobby’s fists, Lydia’s kicks, or this insanely loud sort of squealing noise that Pip made where he plugged his ears and wiggled his head back and forth really quickly while screaming at top volume with his lips shut. The knights took out the last few stragglers before sitting down, exhausted.

“We didn’t really have much room to exercise in the cave,” they explained through an interpreter, “although we did do a lot of digging to make it bigger. We would take turns playing Badger in the Bag—you know the game.”

We nodded.

“Anyway, it’s just really good that you guys were standing where you were. We literally have not seen the sun in over a thousand years, so we were totally blinded when we came outside. We basically stumbled into those guys and immediately started fighting them, we had no idea who they were. I’m sure you guys will explain later.”

“Later,” I agreed. First we needed to see what was in the cave.

Slowly, cautiously, we made our way back up to where the cave was. We weren’t afraid of an attack anymore, but something about the occasion seemed dangerous, or perhaps holy. Whatever was in that cave was something of immense power: something that shouldn’t be messed with casually, or even seen with unprepared eyes. Lives had been lost for it; careers had been made by it; the world would be changed by it.

At the cave door, I stopped. A soft candlelight was shining from the crack the redcoats had exited from. This was the moment. I took a deep breath, and entered the cave.

All around me there was a soft white light, like a veil or a halo. The cave went farther back than I expected, turned a corner.

There was a couch at the end of it, and a bed. A single desk and a chair. A toilet.

And sitting on the toilet, looking a little embarrassed but incredibly happy, was a woman we all recognized at once. She was aged, yes, but nothing could take away that golden blond hair, that shy, beautiful smile. That royal face.

“Princess Diana?” I asked.

“Son?” she cried.

She rushed up to me and enveloped me in a huge hug, her white dress flowing all over the place. “Oh, my son, my true son, my only son.”

And in that moment, I knew it to be true: Princess Diana was my mother.

“But how? How, if you’ve been trapped in this cave since 1994?”

“I had you the previous year. Your father was the famous Welsh rugby player Gruffudd Iron-Neck. When I became too much of a liability to the government, they faked my death and put me in this cave, and they sent you to another family, in California. Where you’d never figure out your true heritage.”

“But that means—that means I’m—”

“Yes, you’re twenty seven, not eighteen. We figured you wouldn’t notice repeating kindergarten nine times.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know.”

Suddenly, everything in my life made sense. The reason I had been able to beat Bobby in rugby, even though he was so much bigger and stronger than me. The reason I had been so drawn to Wales. The reason I had been in Ms. Babcock’s class so many years in a row, the reason the kindergarten parents had looked at me so weirdly those last years. But that didn’t make any sense—why would they want me to be eighteen instead of twenty se—

“Yes, Basil,” my true mother interrupted. “You’re the heir to the Prince of Wales.”

And I was. It was magical.

Suddenly, there was a commotion at the door to the cave. Shouts echoed down the cave to me and then, around the corner, ran the person I wanted to see least in the world: the earl. He had hidden behind one of the rocky outcroppings while we were fighting the redcoats.

“You’ll never get away with this!” he screamed, throwing his spear right at me.

“Noooooooo!” yelled my mother as she dived in front of me.

The spear caught her right in the chest, right in the heart. She collapsed to the ground.

“Mother!” I cried, but it was too late. A red rose was blossoming in the middle of Diana’s dress, its curlings fingers stretching around towards her back, dropping over her legs. Her eyes were wide with the spectre of death. The stench of blood in the metal air.

She sunk to the floor as distantly Bobby took out the earl with a karate chop to the neck. My mother’s hands were white and slipping. The light in the cave flickering out and in.

It is important to die in holy places. That is one of the secrets of the mountains. So thousands of years ago they carried the Red Lady of Paviland seventy miles inland and outlined his bones with red pigment, strong enough to last to the afterlife, to now.

I had no pigment, but from my pocket I withdrew the McDonalds ketchup packets I had picked up earlier in the day when we stopped for lunch. Tearing them open, I traced her limbs, older and aged now, letting her body press up against the sacred colour. Her eyes were ringed with ketchup like glasses, her lips stained with it like blood. Everywhere was the call of the wild, and the frail old body trembling in response.

When I was done there was no light in the cave. A group of us lit a circle of candles around her, Diana still in too much pain to move. Her arms twitching now, flapping up and down like wings.

I know the devices of the demon. When I was young I was told of a sandman, who lived under the beach and would drag down any unsuspecting people who came near to him. He would trap them in his sand cave and force them to talk to him, and when they bored him he would eat them, starting with their eyes. None of this is really relevant, I just thought it was kind of creepy.

And then, just to the left of her eye, a feather bursting out. A light brown color, tipped with white. And another feather on the arm, carpets of feathers bursting into existence, her arms coated with the brown sheen. And then with a terrific pop and a flash of smoke the shrinking, and where she once lay with a spear in her chest there was a hawk, crippled and yellow-beaked.

Lleu Llaw Gyffes, I whispered.

The hawk ducked the mouth of the cave and flew up towards the peak of the mountains, ringing Y Lliwedd and the peak of Snowdonia where the giant Rhitta Gawr is buried. She swooped back down, giving one terrific squawk, then flew off south, back towards the sea and the trees.

I must go find her now, and coax her down from that tree with verses of Welsh. Just like Gwydion did, years and worlds away. That is another secret of the mountain. That we are transmutable forms, responding to the same nudges and mechanisms as every generation past, changing only when we are touched, touching only when we are changed. And whatever world we enter, others are just a step away.

I still don’t know whether my vision on Gorsedd Arberth was a blessing or a curse. Most new things, in the broadest sense, are both. This is especially true in Wales, where the past is as present as the present, and more powerful than the future. And where I should rightfully rule, a hawk perched on my shoulder, a baseball cap on my head, and a sword down my throat.

Behind me lies the mountain, and before me is a great valley. Let us enter with feet swinging.

Post 21: Epilogue

“AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE”

-Job.

The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck.

Actually, a lot of people did. Everyone except the redcoat Lydia kicked in the head. But I just felt really fitting to end with that quote.

Even more fitting, however, is a quote from my other mother’s ex-husband, G.O.B, talking about his favorite magicians tool: the Forget-Me-Now.

“They're pills that create a sort of temporary forgettingness. So if somebody finds out how you do a trick, you just give 'em one of these, and they forget the whole thing. It's a mainstay of the magician's toolkit, like how clowns always have a rag soaked in ether.”

So, if you’ve finished this blog, I’m very sorry. Look on the table to the left of your computer. Or, if you’re reading this on a phone, which I really don’t advise because it gets really glitchy with menus, just look to your left. You should see it there. It’s a small white pill.

You’re going to have to take the pill. There’s no other way out for you. I’m sorry. You’ll have to forget this, forget all of this. Perhaps it will be a pleasing memory, like a nice dream that you wake up from and think: “that was nice. But I don’t remember anything of it, and there was certainly no princess being brought back from the dead.”

I don’t want to have to do this to you: I really don’t. But it’s the only way me and my real mother can live happily together. So take the pill. Take it.

You don’t want to find out what happens if you don’t.

Sincerely,

Basil Lloyd-Moffett

PS: A confession: I don’t think ‘Mam’ is a circular, comforting word. I think it sucks. It sounds like ‘ma’am,’ or like a sheep saying ‘Mom.’ Saying that it was a nice word was the only untrue thing in this blog. I apologize to the scores of readers and Welsh mothers who will no doubt feel cheated and jilted by this announcement.

PPS: I actually have been east of Nevada. I have been to Ohio. That was another lie.

PPPS: If you're still reading this, it means you haven't taken the pill yet. Take it. Close your eyes. Close the tab. Goodnight. Thanks for reading--I am grateful.

My journey to learn Welsh, understand Welsh history, and get revenge on NFL Pro-Bowl linebacker Bobby Wagner