The music swelled. The minstrel women plucked and tickled their instruments at the height of the disorder. Sunlight trickled on sweat-glazed faces. They were melodies Orpheus could not recall.

 

He sat along the stone fountain in the low hedges of the Southwestern Grove with his gaze lost. The cries and stamping of the honoured guests, in bleached gowns and vests, drowned the strings and horns in their fallacy.

 

Orpheus recoiled at their ecstasy, each one echoing an ongoing gossip that crashed and dragged one another along like a violent tide. Endlessly they danced on the plains, which were smothered beneath a platform of stone before a flowered canopy. Over the canopy, linen cloth hung in finely cut strips that wiggled in the wind on upright poles, folding and receding as curtains from the pushing draft.

 

Mothers, and their children in arms, pursed their lips and pointed on, reciting the names of the trees and the callings of the birds and the changings of the waves outshore, though never quiet enough to hear their soothing whispers. He watched as some circled the bride and the groom, like clear stone discs twirling the ceramic figures; the stiffness of their ballroom gaits forced a set of plain, twisted smiles that had been sown to their faces.

 

The laughter of the grove released itself into him like a toxin, churning Orpheus’ stomach in constant ripples and waves.

 

Orpheus fiddled his mother’s ring in his pale palm as he recalled the vows of his father to a woman he had never before known. He turned his eyes from the bride and groom as they made their slow exchange across the stone.

 

Peering faces that rounded the fountain were absent of comfort as though, in this place, he had no belonging. He lowered his eyes for a second. Only faintly could he remember the words of which to his mother he had spoken; but, she would not hear him now. 

 

He rose from the ledge of the fountain to be beneath the Murmur Yews and, as he went, he collided with something he could not quite see. When he lifted himself from the earth he saw a woman stir and he observed her without words. She adjusted the collar of her bleached garments often and held a sheath in her fingers by the leather straps beside a sword much too large. Muscles rippled from the white sleeves, constrained by seam and button. Dark splotches of black embraced the rims of her eyes, with each iris holding a differing hue. He brushed his clothes by the trousers and pressed his foot into her shins.

 

“Ouch, you little cunt,” the behemoth said with a tilted chin and still shoulders, refusing to lower herself to the boy that stood in her shadow - whether by pride or garments that threatened to tear. Instead, her boot swung forward in much the same way, returning Orpheus to the dirt.

 

“I’ll have you killed!” he replied with a closed fist, pulling himself back to his feet with his head hung forward in a charge. A claw too quickly halted him and latched over the red that hung from his head, lifting him into the air to dangle before her scolding expression.

 

“How annoying,” she uttered, observing the swinging boy with arms too short to reach her. He seemed no more than a puppy, or perhaps a rodent, or pest.

 

He struggled to free himself from her hold. Kicking and screaming for solid ground. Below him in a shallow ditch from the root of the trees could he see the rubied ring on its side - almost twinkling in the shade of the sunlight. She followed his eyes to the base of the tree and opened her hand so that he fell to the earth. She bent and observed the ring in her calloused fingers. Orpheus moved the strands of her from his eyes and turned to watch her. 

 

“Give it back! It’s not yours!” he said, “you… You little cunt!”

 

She laughed briefly to herself as she struck the branches with her shoulder, but never turned her gaze from the ring.

 

“This is yours, eh? It always glow like the ass-end of the moon?” she asked as it shimmered and warped the light around her serrated fingernails.

 

Her boots whined in their leather soles as she went further into the clutch of the Murmur Yews. He heard each thud before him. Orpheus rose from his palms and his knees and pursued her with splotches of green on the white ends and sleeves of his shirt. His chest stuttered and he rounded the trimmed hedges in her shadow, trekking pebble, sand and water to the end of a creek. When she stopped to watch the little river bounce against the jagged edges of growing rocky formations she turned and tossed the ring at him from the distance. 

 

He caught it in his palms and cleaned the ruby with the ends of his shirt. At his feet, he seized a stone and raised his arm to throw it.

 

“So, little c-u-n-t,” she began, her tongue sharp as if to mockingly guide his pronunciation, “You Orpheus?”

 

“Of course I’m Orpheus. What of it?” He replied. “I’ll hit you with the rock.” 

 

Her eyes moved over her shoulder. They looked to the stone and then to the sword at her side and then back again with a brow slightly raised. Orpheus lowered his arms to no answer.

 

“You are not responding,” he said.

 

“Clearly,” she responded, returning her gaze forward and moving for the rock formations along the creek. Without care for crease, fold or stain she planted her rear upon a rock to watch the water run.

 

“Not a bad view, this place.”

 

“It doesn’t belong to you,” he tossed the stone down creek and watched it sail in the river. “Are you here for my father’s wedding too? I haven’t seen many hogs with swords.”

 

“Haven’t seen many rats with rocks.”

 

“Rats can’t carry rocks. They eat cheese. Are you also ill in the head?”

 

There was only a grumble of slight irritation in reply, her paws moving to scratch the neck that hid under her hair. She then picked and pulled at the collar of her shirt, dragging her gaze away from the water and back to Orpheus. For a moment, words were absent. The sun dulled on the murky water and they could see nothing below. 

 

“You bother me,” she finally uttered.

 

He walked to the creek and bent above the edge. “Leonidas says so,” he began, “you know he likes to compare people to animals some days. He called my mum a dog.”

 

She chuffed briefly and coughed to hide the guilty laughter that followed. Her shoulders seemed to loosen, despite the winter-kissed thread that constrained her.

 

“A dog, huh?” she replied once her throat had cleared.

 

“Yes.” he brushed the ring with his thumb. “Do you want to hear what happened? The servants call it amusing.”

 

“Uh, not really.”

 

“So Leonidas has this really big paddle. And he tries to hit me with it when he says I’m being insolent,” he paused, “but he called mum a dog. And I wasn’t very happy with it.”

 

“Oh. No.”

 

“So I got very angry,” he turned his pale face to her. “Angry. You know what anger is like? Like something that makes you angry.”

 

“Who’d have thought,” she replied, rolling her eyes in the growing disinterest.

 

“Well my mum said to help those who are ill. So. He told me to come up to him,” he stood and folded his hands at his back. “Leonidas uses ink to write his long papers. I think it hurt when I hit him with it. To kill him.”

 

Her attention shot back to him with no short amount of surprise. A hand itched her temple.

 

“Come again?”

 

“I said I hit him. I think I wanted him to die. I told him I’d kill him,” he kicked a stone into the river. “I hit him with the really big paddle to see what it would feel like. Have you ever felt what it was like to kill people, Misses Hog?”

 

“Not with a paddle, no,” she replied, lost in digestive thought. “So this Leonidas, he dead?”

 

“Well. A paddle isn’t a sword. You know that, don’t you? He only bled from the glass.”

 

“Hm, a shame.” She clicked her tongue and rested her hand on the hilt of her blade, recalling distant memories. “So the dog raised a mutt and left him to the crows, eh?”

 

Orpheus had not been listening. He dipped his foot into the creek and watched as the water drenched his pant leg. Brief trails of sand spiralled off behind fleeing river fish.

 

“Father came in after that. He doesn’t seem to love mother very much. I told him I hated him for it,” he watched the creek spin and blur, as through a looking glass of fog. He raised his wet eyes to her and trembled in the wind. “Do you know if father still loves us both? Me and mum.”

 

“Probably not,” she said as she stood and stretched, or as much as she could. A yawn followed as her attention failed. The towering woman took careless strides away from the creek. “Should it matter?”

 

“I don’t know. Mum seemed to think so.” He dried his eyes with the cuffs of his sleeves.

 

Pausing in her stride, she lifted her gaze to the branches and clouds beyond them. She then spoke, though it seemed not to Orpheus; perhaps to herself, or some manner of being among the skies.

 

“It doesn’t.”