A Green Man Review

The Neverending Session was off elsewhere one quiet night in the Pub recently and Finch was tending the bar, so I stepped outside to play a few tunes to clear my head after several hours of doing the Pub accounts. I like being the Publican but doing the business side of it can be bloody boring. Though I do look forward to busman’s holidays with my wife Ingrid, the Estate Purchasing Agent who’s also our Steward, when we go off looking for interesting spirits for the Pub!

So as I started to play ‘The Changeling Reel,’ someone moving in the shadows caught my eye. And he was, even at first look, not human, as his skin was all very small overlapping leaves, so dark that they looked almost black, and his hair was made of dark green moss. I’d have been surprised if I hadn’t encountered him, or a kin of his, in our incarnation of the Wild Wood sometime back.

I watched as he stepped into the light cast by a nearby window in the Pub and pulled a fiddle from, well, nowhere, as he or one of his kin had done decades back when we first met. A fiddle made of living wood, it seemed, with strings of ivy stirring of their own accord, as there was no wind ‘tall.

With a gleam in his golden eyes, he matched me note for note as we played that tune and several more before we nodded to each other and he faded back into the dark. I finished off by playing ‘Banish Misfortune’ and went back to the Pub.

While our Kinrowan Hall is justly famous for the music that keeps the old place resonating nicely, we’re also home to a fair number of our feline friends. While some of the cats just come and go (not unlike the notoriously peripatetic musicians of The Neverending Session), there are a select few who’ve taken up permanent residence, albeit sometimes in the cellar while the music’s going on, especially if there’s whistles.

Collectively they’re generally known simply as ‘the cats’ (original, huh?), but we figured that it was time to introduce them to you; it’s usually polite — and politic — to greet a cat by name (using his or her sensible, everyday name, or at the very least using ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’), and one often comes across one of our feline inhabitants in one nook or other around the Building.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the moggies . . .

First up is Ysbaddaden (‘King of all Giants’ from the story of Culhwch & Olwen), who’s sometimes affectionately known as ‘Bad Daddy’ by the human staff. He’s the alpha tom of the place, and you mainly find him guarding the gardens, or stalking the great hall. He’s probably tortoiseshell, but it’s difficult to be entirely sure given the amount of ‘markings’ that he’s picked up over his long life of battles. Fiercely loyal and protective towards the other cats, he still packs a hell of a wallop and a frightening turn of speed for an old ‘un!

Didjan is a smaller-than-average tabby female, probably the runt of her litter. Something of an outsider, ‘Didjie’ somehow manages to thrive on any food scraps left unattended for more than a second by the others — and occasionally the inattentive human as well. She can generally be found in the windows of the kitchen passageways. Both feline and human rumours of her forming an unholy alliance with Maggie Pye are probably completely accurate. . . . (A ‘didjan’ is a morsel of food — the bit of pasty crust that the dirty fingers hold, left by Cornish tin miners to appease the ‘buccas’ in the ‘bal’ (mine).

Phynnoderee is a very sleek, black Manx tom cat. ‘Finn’ is of the ‘rumpy’ (no tail) rather than the ‘stumpy’ variety of Manx, and seems rather proud of the fact. He’s hugely popular with the she-cats (which may explain the high percentage of oddly-tailed kittens mewling around underfoot.) He can often be spotted in the Reading Room, on some high spot overlooking his domain.

Wattie mysteriously arrived as a kitten in the Green Man cellars, shortly after a touring Scots band (friends of Our Jack) stored their flight cases down there . . . Growing up to be quite burly, his indescribably long and shaggy ginger fur means that he’s sometimes known as ‘that orange brute.’ Wattie has claws like claymores, and pursues his favourite sport of ‘moosing’ in the storerooms with an intensity that borders on the psychopathic.

Maddy and June (aka The Silly Sisters), are two tabby females, very alike, and usually seen together. June is the slightly larger of the two and is distinguishable by the white patch below her neck. Maddy is probably the wilder-natured cat (and has been known to bear a few ginger kittens). One stumbles across them gamboling together wherever their fancy takes them.

Blodeuwedd is the youngest of the females. Denise found her by the Green Man entrance, hiding among the flowers (in a hanging basket, strangely), and invited her in for a saucer of milk. While ‘Blod’ co-exists quite happily with the other cats, she frequently seeks the company of humans in the offices of the building, and has the unnerving ability to magically appear on desks like a very sudden Cheshire Cat.

Maeve is a splendid and stately black and white female of indeterminate age; she’s at least as old as Ysbaddaden, who she’s clearly known from kittenhood. Largely sedate and inactive these days, and usually to be found on the velvet cushions of the second floor landing window seat where proper homage may be paid to her when one goes past, when Maeve does go for a stroll, she does so as queen of all that she surveys. Though well past breeding age, Maeve will still (when no ‘prying eyes’ of the younger cats are about) invite Ysbaddaden to assist her with her grooming.

Cats, underfoot and in unexpected places, skulking in the cellars, haunting the hems of the drapes, purring to themselves on sunny windowsills, licking each other’s ears before the fires, and, while you’re reading this edition of the Review, probably draping themselves over your reading material. It’s in their nature.

Gutmansdottir was her family name and the only name she went by. She said she was a botanist and was interested in studying our Wild Wood, the area of the Estate that’s  virtually unchanged for over a thousand-years, if not a lot longer. I was intrigued enough by the idea that I asked our Steward at the time, Jean-Pierre, if she could use one of the staff yurts and get her meals gratis for as long as she was here.

That was seven years ago. I don’t think either party realised how bloody big her endeavour was going to be. It’s gotten so long-term that she works for me part-time for what she needs for cash and spends much of the better weather when she wasn’t working for me out there, usually several days at a time. She said that it indeed looked like nothing had been touched there except for a few standing stones, possibly what could be barrow-mounds and one bloody big stone dragon which she’d like to know the story about.

She spent the first summer just cataloguing fungi and lichen, dozens that were thought gone in Scotland. That was followed by a winter of collecting scat as that she said told her a lot about the botany of an area as reflected in the diet of hares, owls and so forth. I assisted her in setting up precipitation meters which sent their data back to a central computer by radio. The Several Annies, Iain’s Library Apprentices, spent a winter skiing out there to map the terrain and look for any signs of habitation no matter how long ago. They didn’t find any. Or at least none that was of this world…

So her work continues. We built a new, much bigger yurt with enough shelving and storage for her notes, books, tools and of course botanical samples. Not to mention her scat collection. Will she ever be done? I doubt it. I’ve got a great worker and the Estate has a superb community member.

It was well past the witching hour on a night when a hard rain was beating against the windows in our Pub when the stranger started her story: ‘The Sandman is a far more dangerous, feral creature than modern folk think of him as being. The Sandman of old didn’t make children sleepy.  No, he gave them nightmares that harmed them deeply for years after they became adults.’

I asked why had The Sandman became a fairly harmless bogeyman. She reminded me and the other listeners that the original versions of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm were full of incest, murder, and even cannibalism, but were watered down substantially by the Victorian Era translators who brought them first in the English language.

So The Sandman as she told the story was a creature cloaked in darkness who face is so hideous that it made children scream. He would get very close to them and whisper in a voice so low that only his victim, and yes they are his victims, could hear the awful things he said to them. Whatever it was that he said, it made children wake up screaming.

There is a much darker version of this tale that says that The Sandman was so hideous that his victims became blind literally from seeing him. Call it nightmare creature induced blindness. I hadn’t heard this version but it sounded plausible. It’s surely a scary idea.  She added that there was a rare variant of The Sandman myth that said he induced the fear in children so that he could be the last thing they saw before he tore their eyes out leaving them blind, and also so he could savour the salty tears of fear in their eyes as he ate them down like treats.

She drank deeply of her autumn ale and ended by saying ‘Pleasant dreams, everyone.’

Snuggery is informal British slang for a comfortable or cozy space. And that’s what my office is, behind the Green Man Pub. It’s actually a space specifically designed by me when I took the job as Pub Manager here at the Kinrowan Estate over a generation ago. Before me taking the job, the Pub Manager commandeered the Snug when he needed to do the books, and that’s how it had worked since the Pub was added here in the early eighteen hundreds.

But I wanted something more private than that. And something more permanent, as it was becoming obvious that the attendees of the various conferences, festivals, and such held here were making the Pub more profitable and more complex to manage. And even though Ingrid, my wife, as Estate Purchasing Agent does most of the Pub buying of spirits and all, I still need to keep track of inventory, customer drinking patterns, and work with Bjorn, our Brewmaster, on what we’ll be serving her as the seasons change.

Then I got an idea — the best Snuggery was a hidden one. Iain, our Librarian, has one that’s hidden under a staircase with the door being invisible unless you know how to find the latch in the wood paneling that opens it. Obviously mine couldn’t be that invisible but we decided that it could be made to look like nothing was back there. So the door is hidden behind a false set of shelving that very much looks deep to the eye, a fey custom designed spell, that swings inward to left me in and out.

I first had to find out what was behind the Pub. As luck would have it, there was a storage room there that actually had an exterior window, as it was built long before electricity was installed here. It was not that big — just twenty by twelve feet — but big enough. So I got one of the Estate lads who had drafting skills to help me design it.

We decided on a built in desk facing the greensward that sloped towards the area of forest called Oberon’s Wood, lots of bookshelves to hold countless ledgers, reference books, and various travel memorabilia I had such as the centuries old matryoshka, a set of Russian nested dolls that Ingrid, my wife, found in Moscow. Oh, and I keep my collection of rare single malt whiskies there.

So I requisitioned a Turkish rug from Estate stores, found a century-old office chair with a comfy leather seat that was also in stores, got a flat wall mounted heating unit put in, and had electricity installed. All in all, my Snuggery makes keeping the accounts almost pleasurable.

There’s a void in the records of this Estate around thirteen hundred. No, not in the made-up history that the Steward in the eighteen hundreds created out of whole cloth, a comforting lie that neatly created a history for us that didn’t on paper or in memory truly exist.

Something bad happened here, something that the Estate inhabitants wanted not a soul to hear about down the centuries. Something bloody, something abhorrent. Those of us who’ve The Sight, who can see the ghostly visions of the past, can’t have see anything that tells us what happened. No ghosts, no traces of anything happening. It’s not that we can’t see anything — it’s as if nothing happened at that point in time.

Even the old stone church, strangely built in the Viking way like a long boat made of stone and built likely in the twelve hundreds, simply leaves no impact upon the Grey that is the ghostly traces of what happened then. I even tried asking the Fae and they just look blankly at me as if the question itself makes no sense! Tamsin, the current hedgewitch and another one with The Sight, says that asking the owls what their collective memory happened also draws a blank.

The only physical clue to what happened is a burrow mound that the Estate ghosts and Irish wolfhounds won’t go near. It’s got magical wards on it that chill even me who has fought gods and demons and monsters down the centuries.  Hell my ravens won’t even fly anywhere near it… Those who don’t have The Sight aren’t even aware there’s a burrow mound there — they just walk around it, not even noticing they’re doing so. We who know ’tis there think that’d be a very bad idea to disturb whatever lies sleeping there.

I didn’t say this was a comforting tale, so drank up your whiskey and I’ll have Reynard pour us another one. Sleep well tonight if you can…