The Sister-Sows
From Dark Mountain: Issue 29
'Twrch Trwyth took one step closer. The whole Black Forest shook...' In the last of this series of extracts from our newly published Spring issue, writer and wildlife tracker Sylvia V. Linstead reaches into Greek and Welsh myth to tell the story of Phaea and Henwen, two mythological sows, facing the violent ascendance of human beings. Accompanied by a papercut image from Johanna Lohrengel.
1.
PHAEA SAID TO HENWEN BACK WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG: sister-sow, the acorns are murmuring in the north, do you smell them? Let us feast.
It had been a hungry summer since their young mother died by wolf. They had no sounder of other sows, no ordinary matriarchate to guide them to the fruits and seeds. No memory-paths of snail runs, or where the ant hills shone, or which grass stems the glowworms slept in.
They had only each other and what was remembered by their blood, their snouts and hooves. Morning after morning they foraged with their flanks touching. Soon they began to grow wise. Phaea had the kind of nose that could pick up the scent of anything, not just plants and animals but their dreams too. Henwen was more impatient but also more quick-footed, and better at foreseeing the weather.
It was summer’s end when Phaea smelled the acorns. A pregnant, self-satisfied smell, the kind that preceded a bumper year. The oaks were talking about it all through their underground miles, root to root. Snouting for flower bulbs in the dirt, Phaea heard their talking. It got on her tongue. Biting the bulbs in her teeth – shot of bitter and musk, crunch of resin – she also tasted a mate who waited there where the acorns dropped. The mate tasted like deep water. She was thirsty.
So they left the cave where they had lived all through the summer heat.
They left Mother’s mountain. Their hooves clattered brightly on gneiss and marl, on dolomite, on limestone. It was a good sound, a clatter clatter clip clip, clatter clop clip. It made them kick up their heels. It made them squeal, and race each other. Henwen always won. She was nimbler since birth, a shot of light, her fur close to snow’s whiteness. But Phaea could run longer. She never tired. She gathered strength from the buttery scent her hooves churned up from the soil. She was silver-grey to Henwen’s snow, less delicate, though both were big as boulders.
With one stride each they crossed the Danube. Henwen first, then Phaea. It was very blue beneath their round bellies. Blue like the umbilical artery, blue like the deer’s vein, blue like the hallucinatory bruise on certain mushrooms. Blue with trout-knowing, and cool, and good to drink from. After they had leapt, they drank on the sunrise bank. Then they ran on.
The season turned beneath them as they galloped up the banks of the Danube, following Phaea’s acorn-sense. There was time to wallow in wet places where the mud was fragrant. Digging and splashing, they coated themselves in muck and found little frogs to eat, and the stalks of fat rushes, freshwater clams and sludge worms and, if they waded out into the blue water, waterlilies. Their pads and stems crunched like honeycomb. Their petals melted on the tongue.
Behind them, where they had turned the earth with their noses, orchids that had been hiding deep in the ground for a thousand years erupted.
Behind them, where they had turned the earth with their noses, orchids that had been hiding deep in the ground for a thousand years erupted
Grasses speciated at great speed. New willows sprouted. Storks and other birds followed in their wake to eat the churned-up worms. Behind them, humans had started to make settlements in the river valley. They had come from south and east, they had come from north and west. They dug for clay and shaped pots with it. They put seeds in the silt and grain grew. They danced to bring the storks back in spring. Their medicine people saw the crescent-moon tracks of Phaea and Henwen in the mud, and called them goddesses.
Back then, any creature who drank from the blue headwaters of the Danube under a full moon would live for thousands of years. It was a full moon when Phaea and Henwen arrived, and they drank, sloshing their snouts, casting water back up over their bristles to clean off the river mud. Their silk ears flapped with pleasure in the dark. They slept gladly in the pine duff.
When they woke at dawn there at the valleyed heart of the Black Forest,
Phaea saw the big oaks. She smelled the glossy nuts. She felt the thirst still in her belly. Henwen smelled only nectar.
Phaea said to Henwen, here are our acorns.
Yes, said Henwen, and there is rain coming.
With it comes a boar, said Phaea.
For three days they feasted. As they cracked acorns in their teeth and swallowed the tannins and the fat, they grew in both size and knowledge.
On the third day, Phaea divined a big mountain full of thyme and the face of a human man looking back at her in the acorns. Henwen divined a green island in the scattered acorn shells, a field of golden grass, a bee, a kitten, and endless salt water. She felt the salt water cold around her.
For those three days they ate acorns without cease. On the fourth day they fell asleep still chewing, too full to move, curled nose to tail together amongst the cracked shells. When they woke they had grown to their full size, the size of matriarchs. The rain was falling on them, and on the Black Forest, and on the source of the Danube where it rose up from the mountain.
The rain fell silver-clear, the colour of Phaea’s coat. Its drops clinging to her looked like pieces of moon. That’s what the great boar Twrch Trwyth thought when he came crashing up through the acorns, having followed the sisters’ trail for a hundred leagues. He wanted to drink Phaea down like spring water.
But then he saw Henwen.
On her the rain turned to the furred white lustre of edelweiss petals. On her the rain smelled like sweet white trefoil clovers. He wanted to lay down amongst those flowers and never rise again. Twrch Trwyth foamed at the tusk with desire.
The sister-sows turned at the sound and scent of him – a mountain smell, an estuary smell, a male smell, the smell of the beehives he had recently raided, crushing all the pearly larvae in his teeth. Ferns and autumn clematis clung to his tusks. His bristles were very black.
For the first time in her life, Henwen felt her thirty-two pink teats hanging taut from her belly. For the first time in her life, Phaea felt her forty pink teats hanging taut from her belly.
Twrch Trwyth took one step closer. The whole Black Forest shook. Hebowed his head down to the ground, touching his wet tusks into the oak leaves. The last of the summer’s butterflies poured out of them, and three swallows as blue as the Danube. The swallows flew away chattering, while the butterflies landed on the sows.
For the first time in her life, Henwen edged away from Phaea. For the first time in her life, Phaea edged away from Henwen. They did not stand flank to flank. They had seen different visions in the acorns. They did not know how a mate would change them.
The fucking lasted for three days. The first day it was with Phaea, who enveloped Twrch Trwyth like silver water, who drowned him in her like a moon. They wallowed together in the Danube’s source. Phaea’s pleasure made oracles surge through the acorns and their roots, straight from the Black Forest to the great oak at Dodona. Phaea will be a mother, the oak roots sang, Phaea Phaea Phaea is coming with her piglets, she is coming to churn your soil and to teach your witches how to sow their seeing seeds.
But when Henwen came to Twrch Trwyth and lifted her tail, another thing happened. For two days and two nights the Black Forest dizzied. The source of the Danube welled not with cold blue water but with nectar from the beehive Twrch Trwyth’s semen had put in Henwen. Ambrosia came down the river. All the birds got drunk on it, and all the trout. The trout spawned in the millions. The storks laid eggs out of season. All manner of babies hatched from them – wildcats, apple pips, human daughters. Between matings, Henwen and Twrch Trwyth lay curled nose to tail together dreaming. Henwen dreamed of the green island, and a hundred children. Twrch Trwyth listened to her dreams.
On the fourth morning, Twrch Trwyth had no semen left in him, and the snow had come. Henwen looked pearlescent in it. Snowflakes on her bristles made the big boar’s chest ache. One part of his nature tried to push him on, to crash up over the cresting Black Forest and onward to the sea coast where he had spent other winters crunching amber and molluscs in his jaw. But another, newer, stronger part of his nature bound him to Henwen’s side. He did not want to leave her edelweiss flank, or her snowy bristles.
So he denned in for the winter with the sister-sows.
Phaea tried to drive him out. It was against the order of things to have him stay like this. She did not like it. He smelled too large now that the thirst for love had left her. He smelled too male. And he took her sister from her, surrounding her with his black bristles. Henwen was drunk on him, and he would not go.
When spring came, first with snowdrops and then with crocuses, it was Henwen who finally turned to Phaea as she had not turned to her all the winter long and said, sister, the babies will be soon.
Yes, said Phaea.
With that, they left Twrch Trwyth sleeping and went away together into the deeper forest to build their birthing farrow.
Henwen dug it with her slender hooves and with her great snout. Phaea stomped among the birches seeking the sweetest branches, the ones most full of sap. Then she went among the alder trees, stripping their red bark, and then the boughs of fir. She laid these all around the farrow, weaving them well. Last, she and Henwen gathered ferns and milkvetch, hazel leaves and strawberry leaves, heather and moss, and lined the bottom.
Between them they gave birth to seventy-two tawny little piglets whose stripes were just like the dappled light coming through the oak branches. In a matter of hours, Twrch Trwyth was a distant memory. Their days and nights were all milk and tiny hooves as soft as apricots, tiny snouts that were pink like orchids and squealed and snorted, tiny hooked tails that wriggled with glee.
When Twrch Trwyth found their farrowing place and tried to approach, both sisters drove him off, stamping the earth with such force that the fir tree nearest him fell and nearly crushed him. When he tried a second time to approach, their screeching killed a flock of geese passing overhead, which they ate when they hit the ground. When he tried a third time they drew blood from his black flanks with their hooves. He accepted their disinterest then, and ran. Phaea turned away, but Henwen watched him go. In the wake his hooves churned up she saw the green island again, and was troubled. But then a dozen of her children leapt for her teats, and she forgot him. Twrch Trwyth did not stop this time at the amber edge of the sea. He plunged on straight through the water and swam west and north. He swam until he came to the green isles of Britain, which he had smelled in Henwen’s dreams.
In his longing for her, there he stayed.
2.
For much of a millennium, Phaea and Henwen travelled with their daughters and sons. They were a sounder with two matriarchs, Phaea leading the way to food and shelter, Henwen warning of the weather. They had many litters of piglets with boars of less consequence than Twrch Trwyth, and their daughters had litters too. Their sons they drove off when they were grown, to find mates of their own. Their sounder grew to such a size that there was not any part of mainland Europe untouched by stories of their fertile flanks.
Nothing came between the sisters again until they wandered by fate across big mountains covered in thyme, and down beneath the branches of the great oak at Dodona, which Phaea had heard speaking when she conceived her first piglets by Twrch Trwyth.
Human women lived at Dodona now. They slept beneath the tree and listened closely to its leaves, divining oracles from them. When the sows and their sounder arrived, an old woman came to greet them with two buckets full of honeycomb and acorns.
Phaea crunched them first – shot of spice, shot of sweet – and as she crunched she saw the earth running with blood. She saw Henwen in the thyme-covered mountain, running with blood. She saw her children and her nieces and her nephews and her many thousands of great-grandchildren running with blood. She saw a spear. She saw a man with bright blue eyes. It was the same man she had seen in the acorns long ago.
The old woman saw Phaea tremble. Even though the sow was twice as tall as her, she reached up her hand and laid it on Phaea’s snout.
‘I have seen it too,’ the old woman said. ‘But what you know is needed here, Phaea Grey Sow. Run quickly across our country, and bring your bristles to our women, before it is too late. Send your sister north to do the same.’
Phaea was not sure of what the old woman said, but it didn’t matter because in the next moment a spear whistled past her ear. It was meant for one of their piglets, but it scraped Henwen’s side. A bright line of red leapt against her sister’s snow-white skin. Phaea wheeled, screaming, to face their attacker.
He was the man of bright blue eyes. His people called him Theseus. He smelled of bad blood. He smelled of deceit. He smelled of the women he had left behind on islands. He threw another spear. It killed a piglet so young he was still covered in stripes.
He smelled of bad blood. He smelled of deceit. He smelled of the women he had left behind on islands
Sister-sow, Phaea screamed to Henwen then. Take our children, take them now, take them far! I will kill this ingrate. She pressed her snout to her sister’s. Henwen pressed her snout back. She exhaled the scent of trefoil clovers. She exhaled the scent of snow, ambrosia, the place where they were born. Then, with all their children, she ran.
For harming my people, Phaea said as she turned back to Theseus, speaking in the language of sows, I will kill you.
She charged him, her great head down, bristles sharp as knives. But Theseus was fast, and he was wily. He leapt aside. He parried. He pulled out his bow but all his arrows glanced off her bristles. The only place she was vulnerable was her breast, which was hidden beneath her great head. She chased him from the oak of Dodona across the Balkan mountains to Thrace where even Orpheus with his lyre could not calm her, and then back down again through Athens, which she half destroyed with her rampaging hooves, relishing the crush of marble, the collapse of walls.
You can read the rest of this piece by ordering our latest issue
Sylvia V. Linstead is a writer, scholar of ancient history and myth, and certified wildlife tracker. Her books include the collections The Venus Year and Our Lady of the Dark Country, two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising, and the folkloric novel Tatterdemalion, as well as several works of nonfiction. She lives on the far tectonic edge of California. Sylvia has written for Dark Mountain online publication and in our books.
IMAGE
Johanna Lohrengel
Big Mama
Papercut Art
This papercut of a wild boar and her piglet was made by hand-cutting black paper with a pair of scissors. The piece was created after a poetry camp in northern Latvia, where I chose to follow the tracks of a wild pig for a week, thinking about the strength of the mother guiding her young.
Johanna Lohrengel (LV/DE) is a multidisciplinary artist and activist whose practice bridges social work, storytelling and ecological art. Engaging deeply with degrowth and permaculture, she explores how creative expression can nurture resilience and reimagine relationships between humans and the more-than-human
world.
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