This Must Be The Place and Other Stories

Seven Sisters 🏆

They had once been caryatids, seven young women carved from stone, the entablature of a Roman temple resting heavily on their heads. Until the day the Iceni came, roaring out from the forests, and set fire to the settlement.

The caryatids lost their footholds and tumbled to the ground, their faces scorched black, their limbs cracked by the heat, as the temple collapsed in on itself with a groan, swirling smoke and cinder into a cloudless blue sky.

They'd lain there, like the rest of the corpses strewn about, blank-eyed and unmoving, when the British warriors moved on, leaving blood-soaked streets and silence in their wake.

But they were made of stone, the caryatids. And unlike the corpses, crows and foxes did not pick at their bones and scatter their remains haphazardly through the shadows of the gutted buildings. But rather, over time, grass grew high around them, young trees twisted roots around their feet, and the ground itself rose up and swallowed them until only their upper bodies, their broken-fingered hands, were visible.

As the centuries wore on, memory of the once-flourishing Roman settlement became as vague as a fantastical dream half-remembered in the pale light of a new morning. Local peasants came to the site to cart away the pitted stones for their own needs, spying here and there mysterious structures, pictures and objects, only to create stories about them round hearth fires when the cold of winter set in.

The caryatids had been young maidens, so the stories went, seven lovely sisters, tasked with weaving a tapestry for an demanding king. But they had failed, and in his rage he had turned them to stone. Now they lay in the forest, still beautiful, but alone and forgotten.

For the caryatids, things looked a little different.

The feeling of the temple beams pressing on their heads, the tang of incense and the drone of Latin had faded, washed away by centuries of weather and the monotony of time. Not so the lash and sting of the flames and the sickening feeling of falling, of smashing onto the earth and breaking, which sometimes overtook them in waves during clear, moonlit nights. Something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong, they concluded.

And so, as they lost their original memories, the stories the living whispered to each other filled in the empty spaces. They had been weavers, the entablature their tapestry. And they had failed. The king, the marble man seated in the temple crowned with gilded laurel leaves, had been angered. 

The flames, the falling, the death. That was what had happened.

And it was all their fault.

Guilt gripped them and they fretted and rocked in their earthen beds, working themselves further and further under ground. They reached out, frantically tapping over roots, insects, pebbles and layers of clay to find their lost spindles, carding combs, and the reassuring wooden frames of their looms.

They would weave another tapestry. One like no other. 

They would be forgiven and stand upright again.

Many years passed until a vibration from above drifted into their consciousness and was altered into the warp and clack of a shuttlecock being pulled through taunt strings of wool. The living had created a road over their resting place, but the caryatids believed themselves to have finally found a room of the old temple full of weavers. In their mindscape, they sat down to work on their redemption, interpreting the vibrations from above into vivid, wondrous scenes.

At first, the scenes were full of men with carts drawn by oxen, women with walking sticks in wimples, occasionally a pack of thieves hiding in the bramble, men on horseback wearing armour. That slowly gave way to images of red brick houses and carriages, men in wigs carrying sticks that shot metal balls, women in bonnets and children chasing hoops down stone-paved streets. Then came panoramas of workers pushing strange machinery, towers that smoked, wagons without oxen or horse, and ever more people, more and more lives, more and more and more.

One day, as they worked, they felt the earth tremble and convulse, and tunnels with roads for the oxen-less wagons were laid close over their heads. From then on, the vibrational images came in with startling clarity, and the caryatids understood that they were rising, that they were being forgiven.

Their shuttle cocks flew faster.

The name of the multi-storied palace that occupied the thoughts of the people passing overhead on their daily journeys, with all their worries and their joys, floated down to them to be woven directly into the fabric of the tapestry long before the caryatids realised the name referred to themselves and their story: Seven Sisters.

They smiled into the darkness as their fingers carded and spun mounds of dyed wool to the constant humming of electricity wires, the clicking of switches and the echo of service announcements. The living knew of them and would tell the king they were still weaving his tapestry. One day he would come on his chariot to see it, and they would be restored.

Standing upright and whole again, under a cloudless blue sky. 

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This was one of the winning entries to the "Underground Tales" sponsored by AmbassadorsUK, Fantasy and WattpadFairyTales, November 2020.