A Bugle For The New Day

                                                   Chapter two, part seven.

Geriant began to speak, low and gentle and reverent. “Mother Earth,” he said with a sadness enough to make a thousand bosoms heave, “Forgive thy thieving children come to steal what is thine…Taking thy family away from thee we are and well we know it.

But the taking is not of our choosing, for forced we are to take this road and nothing proud we feel. We ask thy wrath not fall upon us, knowing as we do that terrible indeed can be thy retribution. Small we are- aye, nothing but specks of dust in the wind. We pass in the twinkling of an eye; bedside thy great power we are nothing, and we humble ourselves before thee.”

As the supplication went on Glyn had a picture of Mr. Mostyn Jones, the Minister at Chapel, droning on with his “thees” and “thous” and then he saw one of his old school books and a native on some tropical island paying homage to a hideous god carved out of stone, but there was an intimacy in his father’s voice as though he shared a joke with the obdurate rock.

The one sided conversation, to the onlookers at least, now appeared to be over and Geriant turned to look past Glyn and call to the two below; “Right now, send for Handel.”

This was the second ritual destined to remain with the impressionable Glyn for the rest of his life.

It was custom in Brynllech to sound a bugle to signify that firing was about to take place. A bell was used in the open broad vein and at many other quarries, but here a more flamboyant warning system was employed, an embellishment made incongruous by the appearance of the instruments owner.

No one knew his real name; to all he was Handel. And now, summoned by Ifor, he shuffled before them, a ragged, shrunken figure with an old army cap on a few wisps of white hair crowning a face battered and scarred from wounds he would enlarge upon with great relish. The milky sightlessness of his left eye he attributed to an unguarded moment and an Afghan sniper, the loss of a finger to a Zulu assegai when he had been fending off impossible odds. All his colourful stories were accepted by the younger men, but the older were more doubtful, saying he came from the north, or the south, and maybe his injuries came from his time in the copper mines, or working the lead.

 © Mark Pearson 2007.

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