Critical Enthusiasm by Jordana Rosenberg

To the north, in Ely, the monks bustle in their island citadel, laying supper for the Raiders. The afternoon sky leaks pale to the south over the grim behemoth of the wold, the penumbral tree-shadows mirrored in the shoals. Smoke lifts from the cooking-fire at the Fen-shore. Hereward brings his net down behind, sweeping peat, river-stones, small seafish lost in the twisted Fens, and loose grasses into the narrows. An eel snakes the reeds, thinner than a snake, knifing through the water, then strands against the crosshatches. Hereward follows it in his mind to the North Sea, glacier-clogged with great blue and dirt-smeared ice-mountains poured down from the freezing wells, the water frosted with the breath of the Dead, Hereward’s brothers, claimed by the Norman Raider. Hereward will not return to Ely, the monk-burgh on the hill above the Fens, north along the black water crawling with weeds and phosphorescent-forewinged dragonflae. Gold-flanked roach eye the surround and flick away. Hereward watches the silts and clays wash and spin. The water-silked dark under the grey clouds-bathes the weir-stakes. But with eels he will go to the edges of the High Fen forest, the outlying burghs of Angelcynn and Gywre, and trade for browis-stew with boiled dove, and a deerskin shirt. He does not prefer eel to pike or sprat, or sturgeon or even the dry white flesh of watercray. The sun is a bare grey ring behind the clouds. Hereward the Wake has come to rest by a slice of sun-stone set at the shore, iolite refracting bluegreen. Iron stakes pounded into the bed of the saltmarsh arc from the blacksoil into the shallow reeds, straw crosshatching the stakes, a water-net for the sprats and silver pike, eels, and the marshcray hunched among the reedbone husks in the mud. From The Pocket Encyclopedia of Revolutionary Violence, for the Years 1066-2092, vol 1, entry 1

Critical Enthusiasm by Jordana Rosenberg