Frost and Fire

Many, many, years ago there was nothing frost and fire. And where they met, where frost and snow met fire and flame, there was briny frontier of melting snow; a rimey edge between heat and cold.

And wandering that slushy margin there was a cow, she loved to lick the salty molten rime. For time beyond counting she had been there.

Then, one time, as she was licking, she loosened some hair in the ice. As though it was weed locked into the ice she licked it free. For hundreds of years she licked and licked until at last she came to the domed pate of a head.

Then she licked clear a forehead, ears, eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips. Over thousands of years the cow licked a head of prodigious size into being. The head opened its eyes and began to struggle against the ice that was holding its body fast. Over hundreds of thousands of years the cow licked the body free, releasing shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, and ankles. At last the giant shook itself out of the snow’s grip. Huge shards of ice clattered down from it onto the ground like breaking glass. It got up to its feet and towered above the gap between heat and cold.

It was both male and female, it was he and she.

For thousands of years it patrolled the slushy margin. When it was thirsty it crouched down and cupped its hands and filled them with the milk that flowed from the udder of the cow, it lifted the white frothing liquid to its lips and gulped it down. It grew bigger and bigger.

Then, one time, three men came out of the west, three brothers, they were walking along the gap. They saw the giant and they were afraid. They attacked it. With all their strength they hacked at it with their stone axes. They brought it crashing down to the ground.

And out of the giant, they made the world.

The giant’s flesh became the soil. The giant’s bones became the rocks and stones.

The giant’s blood became the springs and streams and lakes and the blue waters of the wide sea. The dome of the giant’s skull became the great dome of the sky. The giant’s brains became the white clouds. One eye became the sun, the other the moon. The giant’s breath became the wind that lifts the hair from our foreheads.

And we, the people, treading the skin of the world beneath the vast domed skull of the sky, we are its dreams.

Some say that the giant’s name is Ymir.

Others say that the wounded, sleeping being we inhabit is called Albion.

It is the grandfather of all the grandfathers, the grandmother of all the grandmothers. Its skin is a map whose every fold and furrow, hill and hollow holds the story of all it has ever known. We are its dreaming and every hidden scar and scratch of its hide, every wart and wrinkle holds the memory of all that it has dreamed in the past.

From Sparrow Hill to Threxton Hill, From Caudle Springs to Petygard Hall, From Castleacre to Shepherds Bush, The rise and fall of the dreaming land.