The Blessed Shore (first excerpt)
A few hundred unedited words from the psychedelic pirate novel that I am working on throughout November, for National Novel Writing Month.
I. Among the Hills of the North
“I saw the three crosses on the hill and the three men who had been crucified there. The man at the centre was our lord and saviour, Jesus Christ. Those to the left and the right of him were common thieves, named Dismas and Gestas. Presently, the dead men were cut down and were carried away to be buried. The crosses were borne down to the harbour at Jaffa and were bartered over in the market there. And they became the masts of a tall ship and were draped in sails made from grave linen. And all those who wished to be baptised were welcomed on board and their souls were made clean in the Mediterranean Sea.”
- The Beatific Gospel of Robert Meade (Modern English Edition)
The Mirrie Dancers have frisked and capered to the head of Scotland, where they layer their rippling translucent silks across the starry heavens. A deep blue firmament, bright with the frozen pinpoints of constellations, fading to pale blue in the lower reaches, meeting a horizon that is fixed with the seamless white glare of the day that is gone, and the day that is to come. The totality of the skies veiled lime green with fluid curtains of light that reflect in the dim panes of the old church. The islands of stained glass, corralled as nations by the will of man into lead-lined territories, and marshalled into a likeness of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee that momentarily kindles a spark of life as the sun rises behind the apse; or that otherwise dwell pent up within the gloomy ranks of the windowed saints in the nave, who keep vigil in the stony dark over silent pews that were dragged out of alignment, as the huddle of evening worshippers made their shuffling departure.
In the northern outlook, the play of light has been compressed between a bowed behemoth of slowly advancing cloud and a phantom headland, the leaching green transitioning to yellow as it assumes the form of heaven's temple; a jostling congregation of columns engaged in a joyful state of perpetual movement, changing places with each other, even as they are plucked one-by-one from the skies, and swallowed into the mass of the passing leviathan that is being dragged north-west on a steady wind.
In every last nook and cranny of the landscape, from straggly burrow to high-flown belfry, there endures a continuous sound, that is at times like a door being slowly opened on a set of tight, unoiled hinges. At other times it is like the mechanism of a clock that has been thrown into the burning white-ash pile of a dying fire, or it is like a roll of bone dice that are being vigorously shaken against the insides of a bone cup in another room.
“I never sleep contentedly when I hear that noise,” grumbles Beehag. “Even when I cover my ears, it still invades my slumber.”
“Find a way to end it and I will pay you handsomely,” says Scales.
“I venture that the oceans of the world would lie flat and still were it not for the perpetual warring of civilisations...”
Three men, whose days have been clouded by failure, are herded by the waves towards a life of piracy: Robert Meade seeks forgiveness from one who is indifferent to his guilt. Derrick Shapley fights on the sea for the rights of those who labour on the land. Charles Spry – 'the pink pirate' – sails into battle out of rose-coloured clouds of powdered coral smoke.
They are united under the flag of John Day, who has been delivered from the priesthood to run his family's trading empire, following the deaths of his older brothers, and who now seeks a back door to political power by captivating the souls of common men.
As whale song is carried on tidal winds from the Arctic Circle to the pinnacle of Scotland, and the islands of the Southern Atlantic collapse and burn to rubble, these four men, bound to a common cause, will find their union tested as they are pulled by the tides of fate towards divergent compass points.