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By Root 209 0

family? I asked Robin. She pointed them out. They were by the drinks table with Venus, Artemis and Dionysos; her father and mother were cuddling the baby Cupid, which was problematic because of the arrows (in fact there was a bit of a fuss later when Lorraine cut her finger open on an arrow-tip, and even more problems when Artemis and Chantelle were found down the riverbank in the dusk light firing arrows at the rabbits on the grass at the side of the Castle and, Chantelle being very short-sighted, the damage to four passing cars had to be paid for, and Brian had to be comforted after Chantelle swore eternal celibacy, so it was lucky that Chantelle’s mum had come with her after all).

Then we had the speeches, and Midge read out the apologies, including one from the Loch Ness Monster, who’d sent us an old rusty underwater radar scanner, some signed photos of herself and a lovely set of silver fishknives, and there was a half gold-edged, half black-edged telegram-poem from John Knox, sorry he couldn’t make it to be there with us even in spirit:

Here’s tae ye,

Wha’s like ye?

Far too many

And ye’re all damnt to Hell.

But whit can I say,

It’s a weddin day,

So come on, raise your glasses now,

And wish the damnt pair weel!

We had the blessings then, and the toasts. Honour, riches, marriage-blessing, Love, continuance, and increasing, Hourly joys be still upon us, Juno sing her blessings on us, till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun. May our eternal summer never fade. May the road rise up to meet us, and may God always hold us in the palm of His hand. A dog on two legs was drinking too much whisky. A goddess so regal she must have been Isis spent the whole reception making fine new guests out of clay. A beautiful Greek couple came graciously up and shook our hands; they were newlyweds themselves, they said, and how had the run-up to the wedding been? was it as nervewracking as it’d been for them? They’d never thought they’d make it. But they had, they were happy, and they wished us all happiness. They told us to honeymoon in Crete, where their families would make us welcome, and that’s exactly what we did, Robin and I, when the wedding was over, we hotfooted it to the hot island, its surfaces layered with wild flowers, marjoram, sage and thyme, its rocks split by the force of tiny white and pink and yellow flowers and everywhere the scent of herbs and salt and sea. We stood where the Iphis story had originated, we stood between red-painted pillars in the reconstructed palace, we went to the museum to see the ancient, pieced-together, re-imagined painting of the athlete, the acrobat, boy or girl or both, who was agile enough to somersault right over the top of the back of the charging bull. We stood where the civilised, rich, cultured, Minoan cannibals had lived before nature had simply flooded them into oblivion, and we thought about the story that arose from their rituals, the story of the annual sacrifice of the seven boys and seven girls to the bull-headed beast, and the clever artist, the man who invented human wings, who devised the girls and the boys a safe way out of the bloody maze.

But back at the wedding the band had struck up now, and what a grand noise, for the legendary red-faced fiddler who played at all the best weddings had come, and had had a drink, and had got out his fiddle, he was the man to turn curved wood and horsehair, cat-gut and resin into a single blackbird then into a flight of blackbirds singing all the evenings at once, then into a spawn of happy salmon, into the return of the longed-for boat to a port, into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people who don’t yet know each other to meet exactly there, where the stones grass over, the borders cross themselves. It was the song of the flow of things, the song of the undammed river, and there with the fiddler was his sidekick, who doubled the tune and who, when he played alongside his partner, found in everything he laid hands on (whistle, squeezebox, harp, guitar, old empty oilcan and a stick or stone