Writing with Stardust: The Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers and writers (36 page)

The autumn sky is dark and vengeful. Steaming shrouds of cloud coil and writhe. Then an unearthly caterwauling sound fills the air. The wind whips up into frenzy. It is a shrieking, keening omen of the carnage to follow. The clouds race across the sky, thrumming with the charged energy they are desperate to release. It starts with big, sopping drops of moisture. They are wild and indiscriminate, plump missiles of mass destruction that splatter onto the soft soil. The topsoil turns into slushy goo, but it doesn’t matter. The harvest has been taken in and the farmer stokes the glowing coals with a poker and a sigh of contentment. The rain is sissing and hissing off the roof, teeming onto the spongy earth. The farmer thinks about how most gifts come with a cost. He shudders at the thought of another winter, but counts his blessings that the rain has once again ensured his livelihood.

To him, the rain is the nectar of the gods and the serum of the sky. He is neither philosopher nor ancient mariner, neither writer nor jungle adventurer, yet he understands the importance of nature’s bounty.

If beauty is God’s signature, then rain is his final flourish.

A Level 5 passage may include the rain only as an incidental event in the story. It could have a central hero or anti-hero (a man/woman with bad characteristics doing some good or vice versa). The plot should contain a theme or moral and the use of metaphor/simile/pathetic fallacy should be advanced. Above all, it should be enjoyable to read.

        
          Level 5: The Crime o’ the Ancient Mariner

“The water, like a witch’s oils,

Burnt green, and blue, and white.”

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Samuel Coleridge.

An ancient mariner was, in times of yore, a sea-gazer. That, at least, is the common perception.

Many people today, however, see the mariner from a snuff-induced perspective. They envision him as a doughty lad, his hand clasped to the tiller, his far-seeing eyes scanning the horizon for signs which mere mortals could not fathom. His hair is windswept and hobbit-curled, his skin is a healthy, kelp-brown and he has eyes of the deepest, Atlantis-blue. He carries himself with an easy grace and he is ruminating on fate and empires. Tacking gently into the nuzzling breeze, his nostrils inhale the mesh of pelagic scents. Moon glades appear on the sea every so often. When the rickety clouds disappear, their bright, pearly pools of glow make his soul rejoice. The sea itself is a winding-sheet of silver and the opaline light of the moon makes it shimmer with a tightened beauty. Stars fizz and shoot across the night sky like the faerie-fire mentioned in dusty tomes. Oh to be an ancient mariner.

The truth, unfortunately, is somewhat different. The mariner, you see, was not quite the romantic we think of him today. He was not so much a seafarer as a sea-fearer.

His hand is gripping the tiller with abject terror. His sea roving eyes spy a whirlpool developing and churning beneath his feet. He fears it is the doom-crack of the world and that he will fall over and into it. His little boat bucks and bobs.  It is a strain to keep it from being cloven asunder by the white fangs of the vortex and the sanded teeth of the reefs. His feet slip and slide on the deck made slick by fish guts and spilled rum. The moon is carbuncle-red, the blood moon of October, and it leers down at him over the shocking clap of the waves. The stars do not register because he wears the stunned, slack-jawed expression of a mooncalf. His eyes slowly widen and gaze down into the boundless depths of his doom. His eyes are sprat-wide with terror.

This ancient mariner is a bootlegger and the sea is his enemy. For many years now, he has taken to describing the sea in terms normally applied to the accursed.

To him, the sea is a heaving salt coffin made by the ark wright of the Gods. The spray washes over him like a sea-spectre’s breath. The rain is as hot as a hellcat’s spit, bitter and stinging. The air itself is a burning brine-shroud, making his eyes bleed with salt. Thunder booms out like a dragon’s cough, high and rumbling. The lightning is as splayed as mandrake roots and the foam-flecked waves are like a madman’s slobber. The mist is the devil’s milk, clotting his mind and clawing at the air. To him, shooting stars are the sizzling sparks from sprite-fire. He has to take care not to be hit by one. The fog is Lucifer’s grog, chafing and cutting his skin. He is mindful not to inhale too much of it. The clouds are necromancer-black and wear the garb of the damned. He is wary of becoming like them, drifting into infinity, nameless and valueless.

And yet, there was a time when this bootlegger was a future mariner. When he was a little boy, his father used to take him seafaring in his one-mast cutter. There he would huddle amongst the cargo, gazing up at the stars, with the hull creaking raw, the rigging rippling and the rum casks heaving. Under the light of a moon bow, the ocean became as still and flat as a tarn and it burned blue and green and white, burning with the brightness of an alchemist’s oils. The barnacles on the boat used to shine like bucklers and the smell of tar and rope, of teak and rum was like snuff for the soul. The elemental hymn of sea and boat was pleasant, a harmonic rhapsody of swell, jingle and creak. Then, when the wind was low, the waves hushed and the water lulled, he would learn the ways of the sea from his father.

Everything was expressed in minimalist English, with neither ornament nor gloss. Everything was made simple. Thus, the waves we now call rollers, whitecaps, breakers and combers were given simple names. He learned of scroll-waves and barrel-waves, curlicues and tubes. There were wave-billows and bellows, wave-furrows and hollows, all of them designed to send you to a watery perdition of no return. He learned of the sky, how there were woolpacks and thunderheads, wolf moons and cloudbursts. He learned how the fool-strewn sea floor had been scooped out by Neptune’s leviathan hand and that now it stretched down into infinity. He learned of the haunting emptiness of the sea and how it could never leave the soul once it had navigated its way in. Finally, everything was caulked down into one oath, one vow; never to sail under a blood moon. For the blood moon is no honey moon; the sea under it is a cruel bride.

Then his father had died. It was from a locker of reasons, not just one, but chiefly the lung rot. The chink of coin had died with him, the windfall ripeness of life turned to fester, and the family slowly starved. He and his brothers fell on hard times and turned to brigandage, plundering up and down the King’s highway. Two of them had been caught and were forced to dance the Tyburn jig down London way, the day before Cromwell was disinterred and danced his. The image of them dangling and swaying from the gallows had driven him back to the bosom of the sea, where a man could make a dishonest living in peace. Now he was here, dancing under a blood moon himself, with a mistress and unborn child awaiting him at the shingled cove and the hole from hell at his feet.

Many years later, a black-clad lady would go into the village inn of a blood moon. Men with woollen hats and cruel laughs would mutter into their glasses and curse her name when she entered. She would sit in the corner ‘till the clock chimed 10 to midnight, defying them with her presence. Then, when the tallow burned dull and the frothy mugs low; when darkness shut mouths and the fire dim glowed; a lone voice rose from among the shadows. She would sing a mournful sea shanty in a plaintive voice, pregnant with anguish and longing. She always started it with an exclamation: “o!” and their hackles rose as their souls froze. A few of the men would get up and leave.

“The wind howled long, the sea growled wrong,

The night that my Jack cried.

No aid came from within the inn

The night that my Jack died.”

“That’s enough of that, now, Mary,” said the innkeeper. “He’s not coming back and neither should you.”

“A pox on all of ye,” she hissed and left the same way she came in.

Jack knew it would be a rough passage home. The sea was too placid for a sanguine moon. There was a storm a-brewing.

The boat began to roll from side to side and the temperature dipped all of a sudden. Dark clouds obscured the moon. They churned grimly in the night sky, as black as a witch’s Sabbath. The moon’s mercury flush was painted silver by the thunderheads, casting down shivers of light with a ghostly glow. Underneath the moon, the rain moved towards him like a wraith’s veil of sorrow. A winnowing wind fermented and sighed, rippling the surface of the corpse calm sea. Thunder clapped. It boomed out, leaving a concussed silence after it. The sea itself was tomb silent. Then the rising wind rasped his sails and made them flap jaggedly. Kinked lightning wriggled from the sky and fizzled with a golden sheen. A yowling sound rolled across the arch of heaven, tumbling out like the rocky echo of a cavern. His boat heaved and tossed in the rising swell and he gripped the tiller with his naked fingers. He could just make out the figure of his wife standing on the shingled beach, lamp raised aloft to guide him home. Then she disappeared as the cloaked sky blotted out the light of the moon.

The rain-shroud passed by, spitting at him with its Undead tears. It wrung his hobbit curls into a mop and soaked his jerkin through. He could smell his own fear as the fumes rose from his clothes, a mixture of sea mongrel and must. A monster’s cough bellowed in the sky and it sounded like all the hunting hounds of hell were unleashed together to kill him. War trumpets followed in their wake, blaring out like the clarion call of the condemned. The rain whipped down like crystal nails and streaky lightning emblazoned the sky. The sea swells rose and his beard rime froze as the north wind blew and sped him to his doom. Lacerating rain stung his bare arms like ice burn and the sea throbbed grey with woe. His boat bobbed like a cork upon the capacious sea and for the first time ever, he felt his own mortality. The brine hissed and sissed, lashing his face, and he felt a fever in his eyes. His little boat keeled and tilted like the death flop of a mackerel. The timber planks buckled and bulged, then screaked and shuddered, but the boat righted herself once more.

The bedlam of the sea caused a hectic in his blood, but he could swear that an old man’s, spectral face was fixed in the sky where the moon should be. It wore a mask of hatred and longing and it transfixed Jack utterly. He looked at it aghast, like a mooncalf would stare at the night sky. The old man’s eyes seemed to glare at the sea on his starboard side. Jack’s own eyes followed and slowly widened as he gazed down into a whirlpool opening and spinning beneath the boat. The words of his father came to him unbidden then: “There’s nothing worse than the dreadful curse lodged in a dead man’s eye.”

Jack became angry, trying to remember the rest of the advice. He knew it was important, but he couldn’t think with the tumult and the tempest. A few lines of poesy his father had taught him sprang up instead. He clenched the tiller tighter with his numb left hand, straining with all his might to defy the whirlpool, and shook his fist at the old man with the other, crying out above the wind:

Ochon, ochon, o! o! ochon,

Ochon on a wide, wide sea;

But that’s a song she’ll never sing,

‘till I’m in perfidy.”

The whirlpool spun faster and wider, sucking Jack into the doom-crack of the world. The old man’s eyes burned brighter, hypnotising Jack with their intensity. He shook his head, as if casting off a glamour. Jack let go of the tiller, raising both his fists in defiance of his fate and screamed up at the apparition:

“I know thee, Ancient Mariner,

I know thy skinny hand,

(And know thee too, thy grey-beard loon)

Come oath or curse or vow or Hell,

I’ll make the shingled sand.”

The sea boiled and churned like a cannibal’s cauldron. It heaved and bulged, pushing up giant waves from the fathomless gullet of its depths. The wind screamed like a banshee’s wail and whipped at his face. Jack’s two hands gripped the tiller and refused to let go. His father’s words came back unbidden; “A true mariner never deserts a sinking ship.” He gripped on tighter. A mountainous wave rose up before him, blotting out the sky. The wind howled out his doom, the whirlpool span faster and whiter and the old man’s face leered down in triumph. The boat rose with the swell, inclining upwards to its destruction. It was propelled up onto the lip and hovered there, a fly-speck on the cobwebbed lines of the wave. Time seemed suspended.  The whirlpool gaped under him with dire-white jaws. It roiled and spun, inviting Jack in. Then the boat plummeted down into its milky depths, swallowed whole in a final, terrible, squeak of timber.

The waves subsided and the sea stilled. A terrible silence followed, and then a head rose from the surf. Jack swam towards his wife with steady stokes, following the light all the way to the shingled cove.

“I ran to the inn for help but no-one would come,” she said.

“That’s all right, Mary,” he said. “I never liked the Mariners Inn anyway.”

“How did you survive
that
?”
she asked, looking at the timbers washing up on the slurpy shore.

“Promise me one thing first, Mary. Don’t go back to the inn again.”

“We’ll see,” she said doubtfully. “Answer my question.”

“There’s only one thing worse than the dreadful curse lodged in a dead man’s eye,” he said. “And that’s taking bad advice.” He paused and then for effect, he added. “Mariners be damned. I jumped.”