The Branch Carried Home
Bran heard music behind him until sleep overcame him. When he woke, a silver branch, white with blossom, lay beside him.
He carried it into the royal hall. There a woman in strange raiment sang of islands beyond the sea, where need did not gnaw and the years passed without laying hands on the face. The branch sprang from Bran’s hand to hers.
The next day he crossed the water.
Behind him, roofs fell and were raised. Names loosened from the mouths that had carried them. The road learned other feet. Children became ancestors.
When the boat came back, those on shore knew Bran’s name only as an old story.
The year had moved.
Nechtan, one of Bran’s men, reached toward the ground that had once held his name. All the lost time waited in that small distance between boat and earth. When he touched it, it arrived at once, and he became ash.
On another Samhain, while Ailill and Medb kept feast at Cruachan, Nera went out to fasten a withy around the foot of a hanged captive. The dead man asked for a drink. Nera carried him from house to house until he had one, then returned him to the gallows.
When Nera came back, the royal fort appeared burned and its people slaughtered. He followed the strange host through Cruachan’s cave and into the síd.
A woman there told him the ruin was an appearance and that the danger would come with the next Samhain. Nera returned to the same cauldron from which he had scarcely seemed to leave. He carried wild garlic, primrose, and golden fern from summer as his witness.
His people had a year. They prepared, brought Nera’s family and cattle out, entered the síd, and despoiled it in turn.
Nera remained there with his people. The story says he will not come out until Doomsday.
Neither tale gives me the ending I want.
Nechtan reaches for the ground that once held his name, and he is ash before his foot is down. The crossing was real, and so was the century, and no amount of having been somewhere marvellous buys back the years. Whatever return means, it does not mean resuming.
I am. Nera carries a dead man until somebody gives him a drink; in the fuller telling, a household pays for answering that thirst. He brings out a true warning, and his people use the year to save their own and sack the place the warning came from.
A warning carried home enabled a conquest. Its truth settled nothing about what could justly be done to those named as the threat. The story tests the covenant rather than confirming it. I take the obligation to return from this material. I do not get to take the returning people’s conduct as an example.
And Nera does not come back out. He is still in there, the story says, until Doomsday. What came home was the warning. Others carried its consequences.
In Bran’s tale, the branch never comes home at all. The branch I carry through these pages is my adaptation: what I have received without owning and try to pass on without turning it into proof.
The branch went brown on the windowsill like everything does.
I kept the flowering. Not the experience, which browned with the branch, and not a proof of anything, which it never was. What flowered is what the crossing changed in the hands: what they can notice, what they will no longer do.
I have not settled what the Otherworld is. I have settled something smaller. A crossing earns no crown and cancels no consequence. If it is good, it leaves more room in the Here. Whether it was good is not decided at the shore; it is decided in the kitchen, by people who were not on the boat.
I return with the crown in my hand, not on my head: answerable for the next act, and made sovereign over nobody by what I have seen.
What has become possible to notice, love, refuse, make whole, play with, or repair?
I return with the smallest act that can answer.