#The Winter Spirit | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pageadaytale · 11 months

Text

NaNoWriMo "Week" 1: A Slow Start

Well I've made a start.

The problem is, I'm still about five days behind. A combination of brain fog, exhaustion, and depression as the nights close in have stymied my attempts to write. I wrote 1,000 words to begin, hated all of it, and started again. It's gone much better the second time - and I'm going to count those first words, because I've not deleted them yet. I'm going to put both attempts below the cut, and you can decide which one is better (spoilers: it's very obvious which is better).

If you want to check it out, read on below:

EXCERPT 1: THE FIRST VERSION

The first thing I sing about is the bridge. It’s where this all started, after all.

The bridge doesn’t exist anymore. It fell into disrepair, people forgot about it, the world moved on, as it does. No reason why it shouldn’t.

Only… I’ll never see her again now.

It starts with cold. Bitter cold. The song is about the chill in your bones that numbs your toes and travels up your legs, stinging your knees. But it’s also about loneliness. The loneliness that does the same to your tears and stings your heart. Maybe that’s why I heard it.

Maybe that’s why I ran.

There were a dozen of us in Camp F, but it was rarely the same dozen. Apart from me and chief, we were a rotating cast of the same characters: always an old-timer, an ox, a vulture, a quisling, and half a dozen shiftless layabouts. Never the same actor, not for long. I remember watching the faces change ever so slightly while the parts remained the same, the same lines spoken around the same table by different people.

We were in Camp F because we’d been captured, but they didn’t think any of us clever or strong or capable enough to try to escape, so they might as well work us until we dropped.

Camp F: Camp Fucked.

My first day it was myself and the ten I’d come to know so well through different people. Plus Chief; he was always sitting nearest the door, a great bear of a man with a long mane of red hair. But he was short-sighted and lame of leg, so they didn’t peg him worth a jot for running or fighting. They herded us into the back of a truck, the canvas doing little to keep the chill off our backs and the cold benches dampening our backsides. The sun wasn’t yet risen, but its light curved over to give the ground a blue hue. Black cabins on blue snow. Silhouettes breathing crystal breaths as we crunched through the barbed wire gates to the waiting vehicle. The camp guards formed a sort of honour guard, their rifles held to their chests as we were marched through – it was a lot of ceremony for us, all pageantry to break us further.

All the long drive to the bridge, I didn’t speak. Someone was complaining – one of the layabouts, I forget his name – but Chief let it run. So long as no one kicked off he didn’t thump anybody, and this guy wasn’t going to say anything about the soldiers. It was early, he was tired, he couldn’t nap on these damp seats with his back against freezing canvas, and he was going to let us know about it until one of the guards told him to shut up. And one of them did, with a pointed look and a slight, threatening raise of the butt of his gun which sent the layabout cringing into the shoulder of his neighbour.

The truck rumbled to a stop. The two guards at the back got off, motioning to Chief. He pointed to Ox, Vulture, and the Old-Timer, and between them they hauled a long crate from the floor of the truck down to the snow. After that we followed on, out into the lightening dawn.

Snow is heavy. When it piles up onto the ice too thick, it stops the icebreaker barges from clearing the river. They get damaged, and that wastes time and resources. Better to have prisoners of war clearing the snow so the boats can do their thing, and trade along the river can continue even in winter. It makes sense, from a certain point of view.

This was to become a routine for the next six weeks. The truck stopped before the bridge, and we would get off and step gingerly onto the river. Once we knew it would take our weight, we’d pass the shovels from the box down the line. Then, all twelve of us would begin to scrape up the snow from the ice, shovelling it onto a tarpaulin behind us. We’d clear a section, drag the tarp to the bank, and pile it up.

We would do this fourteen hours a day, every day, for six weeks.

We would’ve done it for longer, but for me.

But we’re not there yet. I haven’t told you about the bridge yet.

It was one of those old stone bridges, the kind with no mortar between the stones. It was just a well-constructed arch which went over a fairly small river – deep enough to drown in if you were careless, but you could practically walk along it if you were on tiptoes. I don’t know how they got barges up and down it, it twisted fiercely after the bridge. But maybe I was seeing things even at that point.

The bridge was old – I asked the Old-Timer about it, and he told me it’d been standing since before there was a village. People had needed to get over the river, and they’d built a bridge at this spot. They didn’t bother with mortar – they’d built a foundation of fill like any drystone wall, and they’d arched it over the river with carefully cut stones. The keystones still hung down, a little weathered, their longer tapers breaking the perfect semicircle formed by the bridge over the river. Every day, as we worked, the sun would rise through the arch, glaring off the snow and, if we were unlucky, blinding us. But if we were lucky, it would give us a glimpse of another world…

But I shouldn’t talk about that yet.

The only sound was the crunch of our shovels against the snow. Occasionally you could hear the guards in the distance, gathering around for a smoke break and chatting – their guns were always on their shoulders, so we still did not try anything. As a rule, we didn’t talk as we worked; it was a waste of energy.

That rule was broken twice. The first time was a few days into my stint as a digger.

Every night the snow piled up, and every night the river froze over anew. The icebreaker barges never got very far, and we were fighting a losing battle. This time I was between one of the layabouts and Chief, and I was enjoying the blessed silence as I dug. There was nothing like silence to mask the passage of time.

===

EXCERPT 2: THE REVISED VERSION

The only sounds were the crunch of our shovels in the snow, the click of the guards’ rifles as they swayed idly, and, if you believe the other diggers, my incessant humming.

Vulture liked to say I’d been shoved into Camp F because my constant noise-making would annoy anyone into leaving me behind if they tried to escape, but it was really a shrapnel mine. The same explosion that had got me caught had shredded my leg and left me deaf in my right ear, and since then I’d been twice as slow on my feet and half as quick with my wit. But I’d learned; I kept my songs close, try though they might to escape. In Camp F they called me Bard, because I always had a song or a joke on my lips – or, as Vulture liked to say, “because you never quit with the damn singing!”.

There were always twelve of us in Camp F, though most rotated through. The only ones who didn’t were Chief, a big man with long red hair that hung down in curls and lit up his face with a big beard; and myself, though I wasn’t to know that in the early days. The rest of them came and went, a series of sluggish layabouts who could barely hold the shovel mixed with a coterie of archetypes you always got in a work camp: Vulture, so called because he was always picking at the scraps (or needling the dead, and we all might as well have been dead); Ox, the tall and broad-shouldered labourer whose thoughts moved at glacial pace, and who was happier to serve than to lead; the Old-Timer, whichever ancient sage they passed onto the camp because they decided he could work the snow; and one we’ll call Quisling, the ever-present brown-noser who was never there for very long because there was no dissidence in Camp F to report. The closest we came to treason was joking that we were in Camp F because we were so thoroughly Fucked: Not dead enough to get out of hard labour, but too dead to think of escaping.

And so we were driven in the back of a rickety truck with four guards watching over us, with another truck for escort, to a bridge outside a village in a quiet part of the country, where we were given some not-very-good gloves and a shovel, and we shovelled snow from the icy surface of the river. We cleared the snow in the morning so that by the afternoon, the icebreaker barges could carve up the frozen surface to make way for the trade boats to head down to the sea.

It was useless work, because we were there every day. We shovelled the snow onto a tarp, and when we judged the tarp to be full we’d drag it to the bank and tip it onto the snow already piled high there. While the twelve of us did this, shivering and hating every minute of it, the guards watched us from the banks and from the bridge, hating it just as much.

The river, when not coated in a blanket of thick snow, was a glassy blue which shifted hues and danced with sunbeams as you watched, like looking through a kaleidoscope. It ran in a gentle, meandering path under a drystone bridge in rust-red and moss-green. I don’t know what kind of local clay they used, but it marked the whole town out like a blood clot. When I got out of the truck I’d always look over to see it, this wound jutting from the fresh white terrain. It was picture perfect – I wondered if the bombs would ever reach it, if the war would ever be something for them other than the greycoated guards on their bridge and the funny men in overalls shovelling snow from their river.

When the sun rose on the days we dug, it rose through the bridge. If we had been able to clear the snow fast enough for the barges to break the ice through to it, we might have seen a perfect circle – the arch of the bridge feeding into the slope of the bank beneath, which all curved into the river. We could’ve watched the sun rise from the bridge, and perhaps ridden it up and away from this place. But we could not – could never – be fast enough.

There was only one rule while we were digging, and it was a rule Chief enforced with violence. He enforced it to me on my first day.

I was listening to the shovel scraping against the ice. The wooden handle was old and damp and splintered, and it bit into my hand and raised welts which I wouldn’t feel until we returned to the prison camp and I warmed them up under my armpits. The gloves were thin and almost worn through, which made keeping a grip difficult, and meant I lost feeling in my hands within the first hour. The rest of our clothes weren’t much better – the overalls were not meant for outdoor work, and so the legs got soaked from the snow and the back got soaked from my sweat, and that moisture would freeze and making movement difficult, except in an awkward stiff-legged stoop; and the shoes were once good, solid leather with wool outers, but now the wood was threadbare and the leather had holes, and the rough, thick socks soaked up the moisture they let in with wild abandon, chilling the toes and leading to sores, if not outright frostbite. We’d been out there some three hours – I’d lost all feeling in my hands and feet, and the numbness was just starting to turn into a dull ache in my toes, and Vulture was muttering another jibe about my tuneless humming, when I heard the song.

I don’t usually hear things, not well. But this came through the heart. I paused in my digging, consumed by it, for the sound of it ached in my chest and I long to hear who was singing it.

The song went like this:

The last leaf has died

And the birds head for warmer climes.

But here I must remain

To reckon with my crimes.

To desire to feel

The wind and the sun on my skin;

For this solemn wish

The brambles grow thick and trap me within.

I am stuck with thorns,

How much must I bleed for you?

I am stuck with thorns,

My wings are staked wide for you.

I am stuck with thorns,

The brambles grow thick and trap me within.

I stood entranced to hear it. The others around me shook their head and groaned, all except a few; they tried to keep digging, but the few of us who had never heard this before did not know this ritual, we were drawn to the arch of the bridge, from beneath which the song came.

The voice was high and mournful. It seemed to carry from far away, and persisted even as the wind picked up. The guards looked around, rifles in hands – behind us, the barge trembled in the unstilled waters, rocking towards the bank.

I was utterly under the spell of the voice. I heard guns cocking around me as I dropped the shovel, walked towards the bridge. There was shouting behind me, my fellow prisoners, but in that moment I felt unable to do anything other than walk towards the bridge, towards the voice that dwelt within.

I made it two faltering steps before Chief’s shovel caught me at ankle height, and I tumbled head first into the snow. The cold shock burned my face and brought me back to reality; I came up gasping as a fist balled up the back of my jacket and dragged me to my knees. Chief laid a heavy hand on my shoulder and glowered into my eyes with a fearful intensity.

‘One rule, Bard!’ he barked. ‘Don’t listen to the music! Don’t let it in! Just dig your patch and block it out.’ I stared back into those eyes, so filled with fear, and I wondered what could have engendered such emotion in Chief.

As I made to stand, with his help, a sharp report made us both flinch and turn to look. One of the other new inmates, having been craftier than me or more reckless, or simply surrounded by less prudent prisoners, had used my fall as a distraction to run for the bridge himself. He’d made it halfway before the guard at the top of the bridge trained arms on him and fired. Now he lay spread-eagled in the snow, unmoving, unseeing, melting the snow and staining the ice a rich, dark red. I stared at the body, somehow jealous – he’d gotten so much farther than I had. Had we been hearing the same song? Had he been drawn to the bridge, as I had? I hoped that he heard it even as he lay dying – how beautiful, to hear such a sound as you die. As we returned to our digging, I thought I could die happy if only I heard that voice lit up in song once again.

The sun rose. Being a man down, our day ended up being longer than most; we finally got finished as the sun reached its feeble peak, our hands bloodied and our feet stinging with pins and needles. Breathlessly we dumped the spades into the crate and hauled ourselves aboard the truck. As I pulled myself onto the footplate, I paused to catch my breath, and my eyes lingered over the body which had been moved to the far bank. Vulture squatted in front of it, going through its pockets, until a guard barked an order at him raised the butt of his rifle. Cringing, Vulture made his awkward, hopping run back to our group. The remaining eleven of us sat in silence on the way back, most staring at the floor, though I kept my wary eyes on Vulture.

He returned my gaze levelly, as though he’d done nothing wrong.

===

So that's the two versions. Obviously I'm biased, but I can clearly see the difference. I find the first version so disjointed and muddled, it reflects my mental state when I was trying to write, disliking what I'd written because I knew it made no sense. I was trying to do everything at once, and I think it showed.

The second version is much more streamlined, I'd come in with an idea of what I was trying to say and how I was trying to show it. It takes a little longer, and it tells more of the story, but mainly it shows what's going on clearly.

Which I think is sorely needed for an opening.

#NaNoWriMo #Novel #Fiction #The Winter Spirit

0 notes