6.The Beasts, Duncan McGibbon [important books to read TXT] 📗

The Beasts

The Beasts

 

1.Maimona

 

Alka

 

Cold fear and darkness still at early dawn:

fifty galleys at slow scull.  Three rows of oars each

cut spurred wakes through a thousand years’ tides.

The mude surges against the waves, Malta vanishes

from coastal shallows to uncertain troughs.

L'alba part umet mar altra sol.

Here, memory lays out no seamless mould,

grasps images in flight from drying fact.

Day’s ploughshare turns darkness to quicken the sun.

Sunlight filters through rushed pelts of cloud;

coils of eel-brown rope, men crouched by bulkheads,

stiff canvas plucking at nervous gusts.

This day sought shadows thrown to action,

Poy pasa bigil mira clar tenebras!

found the black gull trembling to trim shocked flight

banking to veer beside a darkened swell.

 

Light shines from shadow, spills across the Alps.

Chroniclers will cast their nets, unsounded

to dredge up the ruin of those scared hours.

Living memories will die unheared.

Portolani charts enmesh chance mouthings

from scattered shipwrecks and survivors’ tales.

"Il n'est mie jours... l'alouette nous ment,"

but none can draw the acting primal sight.

Slowly the sweating mists unwrap themselves.

"It isn't daylight yet.  The bird's song lies"

 

A thousand, two hundred years have framed

an unsure fret for the God’s City repentants.

The black prows, glistening, lunge and thrust,

turning to Genoa, while the rasping winds

disperse foamed traces of the trail laid down.

Spiculator pigris clamat 'surgere.'

The tattered, salt-starched hulks hold pilgrim's robes,

bales of paper and barrels of gall-nuts.

The watchman's warning will wake the sleepers.

Their action's trace will be etched onto stone.

Sarcophagal effigies stare naked and grey:

the Terra Incognita more unknown than Hell.

Dark fear in the navigator's steerage:

not yet time to extinguish the lanterns.

Dark fear, in the choirs and houses of faith,

founds Cologne, the Sainte Chapelle

and the Alhambra mosque.

The gull hurtles heavily to a living prey.

A chronicler's mind drops on his evidence,

which grows uncertain in discovery,

or leaves myths as charms against the real.

Quos suadet freco clamans "surgere"

to embalm fatal fact in images

which cash human eyes for the night of time,

again the watchman's voice forbidding sleep.

The flowering sea plants, brown, green

and deep red Alka, gleaming from the blades.

Now the ice sheets deliver cold cargoes

foaled from the glacier’s featureless stretch

the small ice-age, drying the Great Plains,

to populate Mexico and overrun the Toltecs.

The foaling icebergs still equatorial winds

a calm that that urged the Almoravides

over the sands to burn Kumbi

and Kublai Khan to crush the Song

resistance on the Pearl River Delta,

learning the art of the cannon,

as Europe decodes Roger Bacon’s

magic formula for black gunpowder.

 

Deed of Sale

 

You, Oberto, and you, Antonio, two humble

notaries of Genoa, would have remembered

the slave, Maimona, from Malta,

taken in the season of flowering hawthorn.

She would have lived, dumb to the world,

had you not scrawled the bill of her sale. 

She had arrived on the ship that morning.

“Done in Genoa, on May the Eleventh, Twelve Forty-Eight.”

"I, Giunta sell, give and hand over to you, Raimondo.

Maimona, a slave, once of Malta.

I give you power and, physical dominion of her."

 

Each wild wave’s rush to the shore specifies dissent. 

Maimona's event conspired, unconscious,

to make a new world of Genoan things

Can't you remember Raimondo?

She was the only known one among scores.

Reges cannot cohere.

The searching waves’ undertow specifies

the counter drag of death on love.

If the waves mismatch, much more the heart

that wrangles with fast rule

in a tide of scattered debate,

rouses a torrent that will wrest Europe

from its rooted, residual shelf

and thrust it breathless into new hells.

The Greeks said the institution was

contrary to the freedom of God,

yet modified by Biblical tradition.

Augustine said by Ham’s unhappy fault.

Ham was an infidel. The law lay down

Infidels could be enslaved as a pagan race.

Maimona was denied the privilege

of keeping silent: admission forced

from a Christian slave. "And I, Maimona

admit I am a slave and wish to be

handed over and sold to you, Raimondo."

At Terce behind the Church of St. Lorenzo.

 

In twelve seventy four, Aquinas died,

at Fossa Nova, a new ditch dug to name

a point, spoken by men on speechless earth,

seen as the eternal changing moment in God’s eyes.

 

The reliquary pointed to no clocked salvation.

Warring acolytes, regum and sacerdotum bar

the Simple Soul, his way brokered by Avignon.

Early sun strands brightly filter through.

This day the living lived. Such facts die

when men's eyes fade to die.

Three centuries fear formed a doubting

framework for personal Man,

to wake only to keep face with fear.

In early dawn light to wait for the sun

to break through darkness.

 

 

Tarbagan Fur

 

In Thirteen Nine, Kublai Khan

was no more and in Pistoia,

Richo was born,

son of Buonomo, butcher.

The popolo minuto

remembered

him, chopping meat for his father

in the market

place at Pistoia;

red blood

falling onto the firm stones

 

Yet the crust quivered.

Rocks flesh would not rest.

Stone arteries tensed.

Subsoil blood welled up, made dry flint to flow

and erupted, harsh,

against the skull strong mountains, ligaments

of the great frame.

Infertile chasms opened underground seas.

Tsincheu, the mountain

fell into the dark. At Ki-Ming Chan

one hundred leagues

of anxious water gaped wide.

While river plains

dried to dead gravel. Locusts, famine,

death, floods then

thunder heard below the earth.

 

Beasts fled the tremors.

By Lake Issyk-Koul,

the tarbagan arrived in great numbers

from the celestial

mountains, Tien-Shan, and pleased the hunters

who traded its skin

along with wax, alum and sandalwood.

and an enemy,

with the tarbagan fur;

Pasturella Pestis,

a plague virus

stomached in the flea's belly.

Xenopsylla Cheopis

bit men's hands

hundreds were suddenly dead with buboes.

The Tartars bought pelts

to make fur-collars for their families

bought the flea and virus,

along with male and female slaves mostly dead

within days, of  terrible pain.

Then the human flea sucked deep

of infected blood

from captive wares and the trader lay dead

with his bound trade.

 

The celestial range had heaved endemic

fever to a rush.

The slaves transmitted

pandemic to free men.

Eighty-five thousand

were to die in Crimea, the arid land

of Cusman Tartars.

In Tana, a brawl

erupted and blazed to a seige

The besiegers

began to die.

Frustrated

they hurled

the bodies of their fellow men,

infected

over the walls of the port.

Fatigued,

stupified with crowding fear,

the Genoese

took ship to Kaffa

dying

as they sailed

then hurled themselves,

scared, westwards.

Taking secret fear

first to Sicily

then to Genoa

where Maimona

was un remembered,

shapeless,

somewhere,

placeless.

 

Jute Sacks

 

Cold fear, darkness at early dawnlight,

and a convoys row slowly.

Membranes of day filter through

pelts of fragment- fringed cloud bank.

Pink light breaks on unseen details.

Two men, Oberto and Antonio

would have forgotten the slave,

Maimonia. Holy scripture settled

just slavery, Thomas concurred:

over custom but not inheritance.

The person is led by the spirit,

as the boat is led by the pilot

and in the hold, a slave

arrived in port to-day.

 

Charts show surfaces. No navigator could

tell true distances from under-inked towns.

The West lay in shallows before the great cold flow.

Poor men and land, no longer distinguished,

rage, or fear, or pogroms, patterns of acts

unique to the day shaped an incomplete sense

the whole coast line guessed thought's physique.

 

Cold fear and darkness distilled in early dawn.

These boats know nothing of the harvest's decline.

By Thirteen Fourteen the West's corn ran dry

and Antwerp paid double that chilly year

leading to inflation in all French towns

and depression across the channel, forced ruin.

La nuech voi e'l jorns v’a a newer trade

now lay bundled below,huddled

under sacks of jute in the hold’s darkness.

Saverouse au cor gent si m'aid amours

Night vanishes to proclaim the daylight.

Sweet-tasting one, how you spur my love!

 

 

2.Fevronya.

 

 La Mória

 

“Took pen, ink and vellum

and scratched all night

until an hour before dawn.”

Caroldo's chronicle

did not wish to mention

the covering of well-heads,

dead lands, ice, dead people.

On January twenty-fifth

Thirteen Forty Eight,

tremours shook him,

his cronica, citta' di Venetia

e sua edificatione.

Three bell-towers collapsed.

In the heat of later months

brought forth black death.

La moriá extinguished

fifty noble families

and two fifths of the people

according to Anonymo.

Caroldo lived on, unamused.

 

Those same years

saw dead lands

come alive with jackals.

'Men surrendered

to the most shameful lives,'

Villani muttered.

'No-one had known such ways

before La Moriá'

'Servants and foul girls

wore the fair fine garments

of noble dead women'

 

The popolo minuto told tales

of how the humours came

in the holds of Genoese galleys.

 

“Some are masters,

some slaves by nature,

some slaves by wartime.”

Caroldo copied from Aristotle.

 

Sparse labour worried

the Florentine Signoria,

but infidels were being bought

'de partibus et genere infidelium.'

The jurists said,

'Slavery was instituted

by divine law and conformed

by customary and canon law'

 

Three hundred and fifty seven

arrived in sixty three

thirty four puellae under twelve

and eighty five under eighteen,

'healthy and whole

in all her parts

both visible and invisible.'

Coggio whispered in Sicily

'We have as much enemies

as we have slaves.'

 

In Avignon, Richo played off

pagan popes,against each other

Who paid for 'bridal caskets

all of fine gold

and painted in fine azure

with figures of ladies and knights.'

 

He married in Avignon,

took a Florentine of sixteen,

Margherita di Domenica Bandini

of Gherandini blood and sought

to build himself a house in Pistoia,

city of his birth.

 

'Fourteen bracchia by fifteen,

the lesser house,

Twenty braccia by fifteen, the larger

and an orchard

thirty one by twenty.

Piero di Giunta bought the land

on the corner of Via del Fabbri.

to this was added

a flower-garden, a warehouse,

a cistern, cellars underground

and above ground, a narrow passage.

 

The same day in Avignon,

Richo di Buonomo,

to Monna Piera; his mother-in-law

 

“Tell me if you would send me

a slave or another girl...

But if you say

‘I’ll send you an old woman,’

then I like not their cooking

and they cannot bear heavy toil.

Moreover, I would not remain

dry mouthed.

Send me a fair young slave

skilled in everything.'

 

 

 

Birch-Bark Letters

 

On the Novgarod lakeside,

Fevronya's father

delivered the birch-bark message.

'Mysl's orphans have agreed

to give rent in kind

to Trofalya and his brothers.

Six koraby’a of rye,

and one of wheat,

three of malt.

The gift is three martens

and a pud of honey.

The children;

each, three squirrels

and three bundles of flax

a sheep and canvas.

 

 

By the lakeside,

they already knew

they had to move on

when the second birch bark

was sent.

“Greetings to Yuri and Maksim.'

from all Mysl's orphans

Trofalya, the one you gave us

does not take our part.

He sells us

and we are robbed by him

and does not let us leave.

If he continues here

then we have no strength

to be settled with him.”

 

So no more of Trofalya.

 

“Give us a mild man

for that we beg you.”

Mysl and his orphans

followed the Msta river

to Torzhok

then carried bales

of flax to Tver

 

Mysl found a new land

with Mikhail

in the village of Medna

with the hamlets

and wastes of old

relating to the village and forest.

With the meadow

beyond the river Tvertsa

near the Istar hayfields

and the bound and limit

of that meadow

is by its old gully

from the river Tvertsa

upstream

and from the old gully

by the hollow to the rock

opposite three graves

along Vyshny grave

and straight

to the river Tvertsa

and down by the Starsky arable

passing the Medna meadow

on the Tvertsa.

 

Trofalya's children

could not end their movements

and left the posad of Tver

on the river Tvertsa.

They disappeared  in the environs

of Moscow,

took the rivers to Volokolamsk.

The good Nikon, chronicler,

probably did not see them,

as they fled into the city.

Fevonya, older now, more travelled

and strong and the others

huddled in a cart,

with baggage and wares.

 

Grand duke, Dmitri, fled

the city, so satisfied that

Tokhtamysh would not force

his citadel's stone walls

that he left Eudoxia, his wife,

with the boyars.

 

But the wealthy desired to follow him.

Fevronya had never known

such violence. The common people.

peasants, such as Trofalya,

held  a veche assembly,.

to forbid the boyars to leave

on pain of death

and confiscation of property,

except Eudoxia,

who hastered to

Kastrana in the North

without her treasure,

in this they were true to their word.

The Veche elected Ostei,

grandson of Olgerd

who ordered the city

and prepared its defence,

as more refugees came in from the land

 

August Twenty Third, Thirteen Eighty Two,

Tokhtomysh's army

appeared before the walls of Moscow.

Nikon censured the wicked people,

even though brave defenders,

who looted the cellars of the boyars

for sparse drink,

while the good prayed to God.

The city held three days and nights

and Tokhtamysh, Bozhi batog,

the cudgel of God,

proposed a deceit.

Flanked by two Suzdal princes,

he approached Ostei

asking only 'small gifts' for

his retreat on August twentieth.

 

Ostei, generous, opened the city gates

and led the people out to greet Dmitri.

“Then the Mongols fell,

delivered death and others

entered the city

and put swords, pikes

and scimatar to Russian flesh.

Then fell to looting

and carried off the contents

of the ducal treasury

crosses, chalices, jewel-bedecked fabrics.”

 

On Nikon's word,

“Tokhtamysh,(enemy of God,

enemy of pity, and enemy of mercy)

entered the citadel and stone pasad

of Moscow, six sazhers high

one hundred and fifty sazhers long

behind which the people

of the district were hiding.

He burnt it to the ground

and when the prince returned,

left only corpses and ashes

he paid his soldiers one rouble

for eighty corpses buried

in the dead land.”

 

Nikon grieved, for his churches,

lectionaries and books

brought by the villagers

from scattered settlements around the town.

 

All were buried

when the city was fired.

"Until then the city of Moscow

had been large and wonderful

to look at, crowded as she was

with , filled with wealth

and glory

and now all at once

all her beauty perished

and her glory disappeared.

Nothing could be seen

but smoking ruins

and bare earth and heaps of corpses.”

                       

Dmitri gave five hundred roubles,

and eightieth of one for Mysl.

The