Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

CXVIII. The Third Conversation With Death: Long Gone Were The Orange Trees

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     Long gone were the days of orange trees.

    When Scotland wept, the citrine tenderness of the cold raged in Angusʼ heart so intensely that he could see his own breath coming out of his mouth like smoke. Dubnosʼ tendrils crawled across the land, suffocating him in that raw, decaying smoke, leaving a sour taste in his mouth.

Where Scotlandʼs snow met the spoils of war, he felt the cold thread of needles carve into him. Ice cold shards sucking the blood out of his bones, crucifying him in the snow. The needles created thread, a distant memory, and his raw, naked body fell to prey, a frost-ridden ravenʼs feast. His muscles jutted out of his skin, veins wrapped up around the needlesʼ teeth, and when he screamed, crying into the ether, there he remembered the dead.

Pale shapes, hunched shadows, with flesh as pale as a motherʼs milk – corpses dressed in thick black, boneless beasts with sullen eyes and ghostly bodies. Blue Men of the Minch. Water spirits that haunted the Minch Strait, frozen by the cold of Scotland and the sands of time, soldiers that fell into the ruin of the infamous Battle of Glamis...

    And for the first time in Scottish history, an orange trader – whose veins sunk into the earth like thirsty roots – sank with the earth, listening, writing the bloody history of the King Duncanʼs wicked advisors. At the beginning of time, there was the Triple Goddess Annora the Olodumare, God of Lucumí Santería, whose fingers were meaty roots choking the life out a black-winged angel, who commanded the darkest corners of Cuba and the Congo.

Then, there was the Red Lady of Caribee, the Soucouyant, Goëtia, the swallower of souls, twisting the thorns of the Tree of Life to milk the blood of the poor Writerʼs Wife, and finally there was Zarqaʼa Al-Yamama, the Immortal Woman, the ghost Aïsha Kandicha, whose bony gums would shred the muscles of the Writerʼs Wife, reducing her to meaty, mean spirits of the afterworld.

As the orange trader hid in the corner, watching as the Three Sisters punished their prey: viscerally, relentlessly, mutilating every rotten corpse in their wake, Angus remembered as their nails raked away the pulpy skin, tearing and gnawing at the flesh until the blood was thick as snow.

    Where have you been, sister?, hissed the Triple Goddess Annora the Oldumare, God of Lucumí Santería.

    Killing swine, hissed back the Red Lady of Caribee, the Goëtia, the Soucouyant, her beady crimson eyes bleeding in buckets.

    That Writerʼs wife, the Tigerʼs master, a thread without a needle, Zarqaʼa Al-Yamama, the Immortal Woman, the ghost Aïsha Kandicha, hissed finally, lecherously lapping the wounds of a strange woman, an ethereal woman, a beautiful woman with one eye. The threads of time were woven from veins of gold, veins of flesh, cast into the snow and dew as a...spiderʼs web. The veiled woman, so ethereal, so empty, stared at him, eyes of fire choking on the last of smoke. As the Witches milked the life out of her, the veiled woman transitioned between consciousness, cloaks as dark as the night, skin smoldering against the sinew.

    One moment, kneeled in prayer, surrendering to the snow.

    The next, fighting against the fray.

    First, I will drain her, dry as hay, Annora would say.

    Then, I will squeeze-and-pull, pull-and-squeeze, just as the prophecy once said, the Goëtia would sneer.

    Then, sleep shall neither find night or day;
The one-eyed woman now cast away.

    So eat, dear sisters, eat to your heartʼs delight.