The Swamp Mama’s Taste in Books

 

Kim Zarins

 

 

 

After the latest pestilence had finally lifted and swamp monsters young and old could again go marauding across moors and fens, the Swamp Mama let her little grendel out to romp with other young grendels, where he could learn about things by biting them directly.

Wending her way back to her bog, she found a scrumptious young Danish shivering at the bog’s edge, despite the large runestone scored with claw marks meaning Solicitors: Always a Welcome Menu Variation.

Her stomach rumbled in anticipation as she towered over him.

“Hold! I’m a monk!” he cried, and flung a page of parchment at her.

After snuffling its wonderful aroma she accepted the offering, luxuriantly nibbling the page up word for word. The choice morsel made her willing to forego the monk, now scandalized, before her.

 “Unbelievable! All those books you borrowed from our library — long hours and skilled craftwork on every page — and you’ve been eating them. We can’t keep pace with your ‘borrowings.’ I’ve come to say we’re nearly out of books!”

To the Swamp Mama, books were humanity’s best idea since being edible. Of course, she also loved their own oral tales, such as the classic, “Remember the Time We Found a Danish in the Swamp and Had Second Breakfast?” But they were only as long as their titles. Books really opened up the possibilities.

It was true, she had devoured books. She’d growl at the monastery window, and another codex or two would tumble out for her to savor in her lair. But now the monastery was running out? No wonder they burbled with tears whenever she showed up.

“I have lots of books at home,” she said, speaking in the bland human tongue lacking Swampish depth and howl. “I’ll show you.”  She gestured to the bog, dank waters churning with three-eyed serpents, and opened her scruffy arms wide. 

The monk’s heart pounded, and he stepped back.

She tsked impatiently and grabbed him. Thrusting his face safely into her protective undercoat, to the sound of muffled prayers she plunged into the cold bog and made the long swim down and into her dry cave. She released her cradled human, weak and wobbly as a newborn grendel, his thin fawn-legs losing their struggle to stand.  Collapsed, lying in the glowworms’ cozy light, he looked terrified, but still tasty. It was too late though — he was a young grendel to her now.

She dragged the monk into her den, with homey, comfortable nooks and plenty of snacks scattered about. Also strewn with parchment.

“See? Lots of pages.”

The Danish picked himself up and stood dripping bog water. “Why are they unbound?”

“Oh well, spines are delicious, you know.”

He quaked like an aspen and after that never faced away from her as he poked about. “Do you still have Beowulf?”

“Oh…him.”

 “Sorry, awkward topic, but it’s Denmark’s only copy.”

She hissed at the painful memory. That one was her memory wasn’t it, not an inherited one? “The nasty story where he kills my firstborn grendel?”

“Wait, so grendel means…”

“Child. What else, you acorn-hearted Danish? That poem, such lies! And if Beowulf killed me, why am I not dead?”

“But that wasn’t you, all those years ago!”

She growled.  She was sure, almost, that it wasn’t a memory from great great…grand-swamp-mama she’d inherited. “That was me. I remember it all — the fight, how he didn’t find an ancient sword in my cave and kill me, how the sword didn’t conveniently melt away. Either Beowulf or the poet made all that up. Look around…no ancient swords, no golden treasures.”

“What about that ancient sword on the wall there?”

“Oh well, so a few ancient swords. For trimming claws.”

“And that gem-encrusted goblet there?”

“Stop nit-picking! Anyhow, if my blood melted a sword, wouldn’t it have splashed on Beowulf and melted the flesh off his bones?”

“Not necessarily. It depends on the angle and depth of the cut.”

“Birch rot!” Swamp Mama roared until the monk’s whole body shook. “Unlike that poem’s pack of lies, I composed a famous and true story: ‘Beowulf Childslayer Doesn’t Deserve to be in Tales, Including This One.’ I’d wail it and set all the other swamp monsters howling all night.”

“What was the story?”

“That was it,” she confessed, furious she hadn’t composed more, but back then, monks hadn’t invented books yet. In fact, monks hadn’t invented themselves yet. The real story of Beowulf would surely fill a thick book and teach this young monk some humility. No grendel of hers was ever a rampaging murderer like the poem claimed. All her firstborn grendel had wanted was to chew on the little statues on that funny board with all the squares on it, and everyone attacked him. Of course he fought back, but he was outnumbered, out-weaponed, and spoke only Swampish. He’d gasped out the story, head in her lap in their little cave as he breathed his last. It had gutted her. She’d descended upon the Danish hall meaning to follow her child into death, but had survived, and survived Beowulf’s attempt to slay her. Somehow. But for a very long time, her cave had felt more a tomb than a home.

She and the monk gathered up the strewn parchment. He was grumbling something.

“…and how could anyone find a manuscript delicious?”

She roused herself from her cavernous memories. “The shocking thing is you don’t think them delicious. Never noticed the writing’s tannin-rich bite? Magical stuff. The letter-formed ink pops the stories right into my head. Even that mostly awful Beowulf sounds positively Swampish in places where those elegiac phrases really capture the grief of things, the senseless violence, the loneliness of those who live on and mourn. Not a single letter in gold leaf, but those alliterating half-lines about grief were pure gold.”

“You remember the words you’ve eaten?” The monk looked astonished.

She put her claws to her hips. “Oh, never expected a swamp monster to sound poetic, let alone literate? We have all kinds of senses and memories – inherited memories, life memories, food memories. I smell parchment, taste ink, feel words. And I never forget a meal, especially when it’s a manuscript.”

The monk clasped trembling hands together. “Let me make sure this – erm, this gustographic memory is real. Tell me about the page I gave you today. You ate it without reading it in the ordinary sense.”

“A recipe for rye bread, written with oak gall ink on vellum. The insular script gave the page a nice Irish Breakfast flavor. I can list the ingredients…”

“But this is miraculous! Could you recite everything you’ve eaten so we could write it down again? To save the knowledge we’ve lost?”

She frowned, feeling a little guilty but thinking of all the bothersome hours it would take.

Just then her grendel surfaced into their cave with a wide grin and latched his cute pointy teeth onto the Danish’s leg as if the monk were a treat she’d saved just for him. There was a bit of chaos and tears all round, but Swamp Mama firmly detached and gently dabbed both parties.            

And now she had an idea. “I’ve heard when one human does something nice for another human, like beheads their enemy for them, they get something nice in return…”

 

Some days later, Swamp Mama herded young grendels up the old mossy oak trees. The youngsters roared and screeched as they plucked oak galls and pelted each other. After they got a good haul, with great zest they stomped and chomped the oak galls into pieces or broke them on their budding horns and tusks.

Swamp Mama soaked the broken galls and boiled the mixture down, then added the iron compound the monks had given her. The mixture darkened like magic.

“What is it?” her young grendel asked. “Blood?”

“Even more powerful, dearie—ink. You know how the wasps lay their eggs in the bark of the oak? That hurts the oak, so the oak makes its galls around the eggs like a bandage to ease its hurt. Then we take the galls and make tasty ink for writing stories like in those books I showed you.”

The little grendel scratched his mane. “So wounds and bandages help put stories into books?”

“Just so,” she replied. He sounded as wise and poetic as a skald. Maybe he would be one.

Over months at the monastery she recited books from memory, while the scribes’ quills undulated like sea serpents. In return, the monks sat her and other Swamp Mamas and all the young grendels on the scriptorium benches and taught them how to make books and how to read and write. The monks created a new library rule, frequently enforced: you eat it, you make a new copy.

The Swamp Mama also set up her own scriptorium in her cave. She had her own books to create—and a specific story to set right. Working by the light of glowworms, her first letters were wobbly as fawns, but they grew straighter backs and prouder horns and friskier tails as she alternated between stylus and claw and got into the rhythm of making the letters, the words, the stories.

One night long ago, the Swamp Mama and her grendel loped about the moors, catching the moon in their shining eyes.

She told the story of her firstborn grendel and discovered that writing brought back memories she’d nearly forgotten but needed, and the words helped her sift whose memory was whose, and which memories were really stories swamp monsters had told themselves — and it was good that they did, because it kept the story their own, not uprooted by human storytellers. Something that had been muddled and snarled inside her was now combed into rows of words on pages: her truth.

Before long, she was flinging her volumes into the windows of the monastery and elsewhere, and teaching the young grendels to similarly disseminate their writing to unsuspecting readers.

The books she’d devoured had brought her joy, which was good, but now she wrote books of her own, which was even better. She’d been adrift since long before the latest plague.  Now though, she could feel the start of a promising new chapter of life.

 

 

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