And the Crosses Shall Cry

The Kingdom of Britain, 1794- Out through the misty glare of the window, a thousand tonnes of rusting ships spiked through the glacial waves of the winter-sea. It rose as great mountains of wrath- cold and unsparing as they came. Even the albatrosses and gulls seemed buried under the brumal frost of its salty hands.

As he gazed into the endless sea, a crumpled portrait of his wife remained in the moist grip of his fingers. Close to the chuckling crackers of a dwindling fire rested the holey pages of his diary. Domitian J. Throne said the wary leather of its cover. The blade was cold and the soul-claiming barrel of his gun was anything but cheering. 

The Caribbeans were a long way from home and the return was almost never. The war had bewitched an umbra on the flying heydays for butchery was upon every head. 

The rusted shades of warehouses were flash-flooded by white tears of snow. Their umbrage sheltered the other posted brothers who sat rubbing their hands under the motherly-glow of fire. Cigars remained sellotaped to their shivering mouths as the smoke melted like a warm butter on their valorous faces. The flogging squalls that smothered the land in a vice-like grip had died down into an ancient chorus of creation. Sabbath-silence had groped every eye, every gun and every sword. 

A song drizzled upon every ear and every heart as they girdled around the singing-stalwart, Cap. Elijah Bartholomew Knowles. His “And Ye Shall Walk in Silk Attire” was listened by every brave and in the euphoria, rapture swam clean through their true-blood eyes. 

France had caped every heaven with the tricolours of her jack and now a sword was gripped tight against the world’s throat. The blest billows of Father Rhine were beyond us and much of the continent rotted under the shadow of her revolution. 

The wavering ship was ashore as the last lyric concluded. Dank with heavy gouts of souvenirs from the sea, were the slaves- packed as a cluster of spoons. Their mouths were encrusted with blood and water while the bones were left jarred- still an ‘acceptable’ gift for their ’noble’ lords.

The Empyrean, their ship had turned landwards and it was time to say adios to the homelands for a further voyage to another conquered world. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Martinique, The Caribbeans- After months of crimson swords and battling guns, these lands were ours. The French were defeated and stormed were the bulwarks of their forts. The rains were early and the blood of our braves spewed into the vessels of Valhalla. 

The battle was won but not the war. The French were driven back but what followed was a myriad of plagues which claimed our mortals to beyond. Those who hadn’t met their end by a blade’s kiss surrendered to their stock-still sickness. 

Slaves from West Africa were brought to fill-in the posts of the deceased. 

The just and noble Cap. Knowles didn’t have the slightest trace of a ‘coloured mind’ or a ‘coloured heart’. Different skins were treated in the same way under his command. 

A battle sat on the extrinsic but a war had begun to explicit its roots on the inside. A similar disposition towards ‘ sons of the velds’ was beyond the pale. Tensions were inevitable and so hollowed the army. 

A fever took the captain and his ship was left leaderless. 

And sown were the dragon’s teeth when on his death bed he appointed Kaikura, a ‘bondsman’ for his ship and gun. Negotiations and threats were thrown upon him but a brave brother as he was - never abdicated a position for fear. And to defend their hurt honour was formed the ‘White Harrier’. Conspiracies were kindled, swords were sharpened - for the new captain was to be 'ended'. 

Then came the Glorious First of June, when the ships seemed like a tossed ream of papers besieged by the behemoth-boomers of the Atlantic. Their swords flashed like the flares of moon fire under shrieks of the struggling gale. Bullets gored the proud flags and every soul seemed stripped of hope. The effluvium of slaughter had encompassed every deck . The agony of those squealing wounds running supreme on every body had become a mere song of glory. Both, the British and the French had done a hundreds but the battle was no one’s. The ships were wrecked and so was the spirit of every soldier. 

Domitian was sprawled on the clammy deck and his head was greasy with gore. His ear was made done by a bullet but his life was the lucky one. The ships had vanished into the curly combers of Poseidon and so ended the maelstrom of bullets and cannonballs. His muscles rippled but refused to stand - too tired to stand. His face fell into an expression uncomfortable for his features. Braced with stiffness were his blurry eyes to see a floor baptised in the blood of his fallen brothers. 

The flags were broken and the sea was still savage. 

The captain had survived the stand . He gaped at the sharp silence that had started to crawl upon every deck, every ladder and every bulkhead. 

Then scrabbled a broken body with his gun pointing towards the oblivious captain and what followed goes without saying.

A minute later the dead leader had met the retreating surfs as they entombed him along the flow - and killed was humanity.

Back in the land, rumours hovered across the skies for the slave-leader to have met a bullet - well, in the battle. 

The White Harrier was at peace and their prestige was as high as a victor’s sword. 

The society with her influence forced Gordon Smith (the avenger of their fame) in command of the Empyrean and so unleashed was hell against their ‘ Cachet Catchers’- the slaves.

But not all eyes were blind for Domitian had seen the act.

Telling the truth, his eye’s story was turned a deaf ear. No one would believe the lines of a single person. The White Harrier was feared by every trooper and they dare not act against her .

Justice for a stout-heart was benighted by their blue-blood but principles of humanity and impartiality were not dead for Domitian. He had never fought in the 'crusade of colours’.

Fort Saint Louis, Martinique- He walked in the packed corridors of the conquered castle. Tonics and gins brimmed every cup, songs and ballads environed every light while full-throated laughs roamed free in every room. 

Back at the end of the long table sat Smith- engulfed in his shaggy-dog stories, guffawing and drinking. 

Our justice-seeker ambled towards him and with a dagger to his heart gifted him with a few inches of the cold blade. It was all over in seconds. A cold meshwork of crimson threads came alive and the red of his perplexed heart was poured upon the table.

Justice for one was done but a millions lagged behind.

‘But a white is a white- he shall not die in vain and has his own pride of avengers lusting to test their arms on his killer.’                                           (sarcastically speaking.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE DIARY OF DOMITIAN J. THRONE 

(AN EXTRACT)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Diary,

Scrambling through the woods, checking back to see if I was being followed, my heart bumped like a bang-beating drum through the dilapidated chassis of waned ribs.Through the kingdom of tartarean-trees that stood deathless was a shadow, darker than the devil’s heart. Every minute, it grew- bigger than the rocks, then the cathedral-high trees and finally pulverising the marvel mountains around. The tall, black, crouching creature crept nearer and nearer with the fall of every senescent second . The moist of its pale tongue slithered over the ashen jaws which seemed sharper than the spikes of a morning star. Gulps of hell-breaths released against a hiss against my crying skin as they started a skirmish between the augmenting maelstrom of verglas and the holocaust of its blazing tongue.

Those dark scarlet stripes of dried blood intwined through the ribcage to its spine were perceptible and so were those broken scales of axe and sword blemishes that spewed out heavy gouts of its essential ‘black’. A simple equation to murder snorkelled in its moist talons. A ghoulish-giant, it flew with feet on level ground while its behemoth framework of bony wings, bigger than the pinions of a hippogriff waved to create a demonic dust-devil across the gyrating woods. Its eyes were cloaked in poltergeist-white but still seemed darker than the unholiest of the blackest nights. They glittered with hostility and were as wild and harrowing as any bull. The ear-eating screeching from the darkest depths of its throat-hollow was as lifeless as a burial chamber while the hairs as hard as a boar’s bristles sprouted from the major of its black-blooded face. But when the crippling-claws pussyfooted on me, something happened, a flash from the past. A familiar touch. The familiar wings.

Who was it?

As the grasp tightened and the free edges of its nails dug deeper, I was no more oblivious. 

It was the glacial-grip of HIM, what man feared, what hell welcomed…….It was the glacial grip of DEATH. 

I came alive to the kraken-cruel world with my eyes almost gouged by terror. The nightmare wasn’t virgin but every time it was unleashed in my dawn-terrors, my soul was killed to the core. Staring blankly towards the blur of dull colours laced on the top, I struggled for breath and my diaphragm swayed in and out on the scathing-strings of reality. Eyes dank with tears and an impassive expression, I knew that if I let even a fraction of those brimming tears out, the rest will follow into a never ending torrent of grief.

My wrists refuse to move. The cold peck of handcuffs hold a tight grip on my crackling bones. The chortling sounds of their chains become whispers urging me to flee lest I end up as lost and lonely as they. The familiar feeling of bones crushed under the tight of the skin and the pooling saliva in the back of my throat are swallowed by this miasma of misery. 

I wait in my cold cell and here comes the chiming bell of the noontide perforating through the tomb-still of the air. With a doleful ink and a merciful feather I write, this may be our last meet, diary and its time I call you ‘dear’.The asphyxiating-austere of the profane-black slithers silently through the scratched walls of the damned while those baleful eyes of the impaled gaze upon me from the stygian-silhouettes . Harsh lines of blood and charcoal capes most of these dwarf walls, forming a bizarre web of overlapping pictures and writings that is almost painful to look at. 

The ‘no more’ shadowy figures that once curled up in the corners of the other cells lamenting their demented secrets are gone. Not many of those breathing corpses could recall their names while most of their desert-dry tongues had lost the taste of words. For the most part their sanity was shot, they oscillated between crying for their mothers and battling invisible demons which seemed to grow intense every dawn. Many of them are sent to the gibbet while the others, digested by their droughty dungeons. I heard their screams of agony and they palsied my senses from even getting close to the door. Rumours say, if a prisoner didn’t deteriorate fast enough, they got a serum to start the hallucinations…

With a confine so bare of windows, the calendar and day particular lost, the motherless ceiling dripping moisture like the eyes of a weeping widow, I speak to you defeated. The light of the cell of ‘a month ago’ ignited an inferno of hope in my undead eyes but now in a place so soulless where even the rasping rats are dead, I groove crosses on the softening mortar peeping out through the lacunas between the bygone-bricks.

Every time, the black hoods come in to interrogate me, convince me that I am mad as a March hare, railroad me through their stone-cold blades that I am guilty, it is the crosses I look at, the crosses to share the pain, the crosses to pull me out of these plaguing maws of torment. With the sanity of my fighting eyes effaced , when the bleary-blanket of the showering blood is set to mantle them, the crosses sit ‘glaring’. When I could feel the callous-claws of their leash goring my back, when tears roll out in a series of crimson cascades, the crosses still smile. 

The crosses are cruel. 

The gnome-dead walls do not hit me or steal my rations. The crippled-concrete does not sing the same lines of a forgotten ballad over and over until I loose these last threads of sanity I am clinging to. 

Every time, the tardy-tapping becomes a pitter-patter and the bear-black clouds begin to cough great gouts of teardrops, our dungeons are inundated to the brick.The ceiling is defeated and the biting showers engineer a pool of tears, excrements, urine and vomit. Sleep, then is no more a game. The company and the draughtsman have poured in their pure hatred into design, the throttling winds says it all.

A man can create his own stories and his own reverie-realities. He can glide over the highest of the skies or swim in the fathomless of the oceans. He can jump of the tallest ledge and survive in his own curiosity but never can he outrun these unsparing gates of Beelzebub. 

In here, I am just an undead wolf, gnawing on the putrid pack of thrown stones. It is a coffin with headroom where the only light that creeps in under the door is that of the dwindling flares of burning-blazes. 

As I sit theorising absurd meanings from the wall’s blank stare, I remember those times when these dungeons were brimming with other murderers, rapists and goons. How the morning shift layered their screams one on the top of other into a gruesome choir of pain and torment. 

The songs and stories of our Old Bridger, his beyond-belief escapades at St. Domingue and his jungle sprees with the Nawab of Oudh are missed by every ear. 

The days when the orchards were in blossom, when skylarks of the hazel thickets warbled a twitter of bliss are long-gone .The times when our people sowed barley at the lower fields while we smoked shapes to the never-ending blue, when we fought in the auburn grounds of faith and fellowship are veiled by a hopeless ballad of discrimination. The neonate rays of the sun, the warmth of its burning exquisiteness settling over a face, the touch of the grass or the grip of a cricket bat are all lost to the Prince of Darkness. 

The aureate days of my life are traded for years in these grim hallows of the ‘fuck-fated’ where the olid smell of a leaking sewage is your fragrance and the cluster of spiders, your family.

But this barter of life has taught me one thing- a gospel truth.

The sun never follows us like a lodestar, diary. He dons his blackest cloak of redemption. And when he does, there is no going back. It is knowing that the road you take shall never conclude in the sea of paradise. It does not matter whether you’ve been running for days, weeks or perhaps years. You keep fighting for lives, for justice but the beacon of fair-play shall always be in the hands of fate not faith. It shall always be barred by a robe of mist- a puppet on the strings of the doom’s crack. It shall leave you with yourself to let the other you in you speak, blather and argue with thoughts, screaming for attention. And it is when it shall break you, leaving you to break yourself, until there is no more of you but a shell, a hollow. 

Now comes the last caw-crow as say the tolling bells and it is time to say adios. 

I have dug my final cross on the last peeping onyx of mortar and I promise they shall cry to see a free cube of bare-bloodied walls- a dungeon void of ‘life’.

They shall cry for their god who defied hope.

They shall cry for a colour that is loathed. 

Yes, the crosses shall cry.

Next time, Next life, diary!

Your mate,

Domitian Javier Throne.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The hooded servants escorted him to the final grounds. His feet were reluctant to fight the iced floors but something was changing.

The snow was whalebone-white. Winter’s flogging squalls and whining winds had come and gone, leaving a terrible calmness. Gravel-grey skies oversaw the seas as they stretched along the ether.

A new beginning seemed to be in order.

A tint of goldenrod invaded the changing sky for the gates of the promised land were opened- opened for a man who was redeemed of a fight. 

They painted the grounds in endless piles of white. It was as if God forgave every Earth-born of his mistakes and crimes - for him to become pure.

Those black stone-hearts of death, the crows feasting on the last isles of flesh, the wolves padding for a shallow grave - all shall be pardoned under the doubloon-gold of his sacrosanct sword. 

As they walked him to that wooden stand of ‘the end’ , the priest started with his last rites. The executioner donned in his lifeless cloak blacker than a witch’s sabbath sharpened the blade of his shining Excalibur. The hallowed prayer ended and the sword rose for a nice sharp stroke. 

“And your last words ?” Asked the priest.

“Hallelujah” and he knew the sword promised heaven.