Gold and Wine

Chapter 1:

The storm settled in for the day. Sharp winds cracked through the branches and dust devils overran the courtyard. Worse still, the lightning flashed constantly and the heaven's groaned in their quaking thunder. The monastery itself had provided some means of comfort, but some thought it to be an omen of some strange shadow settling over the town. None of us really knew where it came from, beyond the thought of intervention, but the Father said it came from the coast only a small distance away from the town that the monastery was established in.

It did provide a good ambience for prayer, so I couldn't complain. The Marian chapel became a refuge, with the candles flickering under the drafts yet remaining fully lit for the duration of the day which was a pleasant surprise. Eventually, I took back to the study where I had hoped to carry on with the transcriptions of an older book that had come into the monastery's possession. It was your standard mythology book, with specific emphasis on the forms of the Greek and North African mythological animals and spirits. The chapter I had taken to transcribing for the manuscript was one that detailed some smaller cacodaimons of mythology but also sirens, the Sphinx and a much more pleasant retelling of the Minotaur. The art was only somewhat damaged, so it was easy to adapt the art, but I was especially fond of the siren depictions.

I had always thought them to be mermaids, or akin to them, but the drawings here give them bird-features. A particularly beautiful one reminded me of the Burney Relief and that became the focus for a single-page spread. Sitting down, I turned on the table lamp, pulling out the photos I had taken of the illustration from the older manuscript and set to work with the page in the new manuscript.

I don't know why the monastery placed emphasis on hand-transcription, but it was a good practice. The Father had described it as the mixture of "ora et labore". He said that the meditative act of writing and drawing, especially of religious texts, was a means of prayer and, from that, we became one of the few orders which specialized in it. It then became a means of preserving heritage, not only of the cultures we worked with but also the history of the Church, and those monks which worked to transcribe the lore around them.

I had the page before me and I had indented it with the ruler and a pointed piece of wood that I had made a few months earlier. I wanted to include a border. Since it was a siren, I was thinking of drawing inspiration from "The Birth of Venus". From there, it was a matter of jotting the proportions of the body. The pictures themselves gave the siren the lower body of a sparrow, making them appear more harpy-like than anything else. So the lower body was reasonably shorter than the upper body. I had miscalculated and had to make a choice, so I decided to try and put a simple foreground and background, to show the siren on a rocky terrain.

I wonder if they were ever associated with carrion birds. I'm sure the symbolism appeared at least once in their mythology. Eventually, it was time to begin drawing the patterns in the border and I had chosen to use the clam-shell, ribbon and flowers in repetition. The swirling and rounded patters were a good way to start, I must say. Soon, it was easy to slip into a trance and focus on the lines and how they curved around the sharp corners of the border. I didn't know whether or not I wanted to ink the negative space, but I wanted to get the basic idea down.

I was so entranced by the work that I nearly threw the entire page at the window when a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder shook the room. Not only that, but something had flung itself directly against the glass. Getting up, I approached the window slowly.

I didn't want to open it, that would only let rain in and soak the papers, not to mention that some of them would fly but I did have a view of the gardens. Maybe it fell down there?

I looked out and saw a flash of black across two bushes. Peering closer, I saw a raven fighting with a disfigured wing. It hit me then. It had probably slammed itself against the window when the lightning flashed. I had only one option and that was to go rescue it, otherwise it would die due to the cold or the cats that prowled around the gardens. The rain only got harder, more violet as though my thoughts had provoked a warning shout from it. Looking down at the bird again, I had already decided and left the monastery.