The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis Page A

me to be a dream of myself as Blodeuwedd.
    I’ve no choice in the matter. I’m a prop in his story, never mind the rage inside me. I hide that and present the blank of my petal face. He has no sense of smell, so I weave a fury of fragrance in the air around him – a spite of galingale, used by Arabs to make horses fiery. He talks at me and I exude a cloud of musk for my voluptuousness that he’ll never reach. He gabbles again and I reply with a mist of Japanese star anise, the mad herb, used to scent tombs.
    Of course, they insist that I learn his talk. But does he ever bother to learn the language I speak incessantly to him?

    He
    I still think that the figure of Math might be our solution, an actual log of what happened on board this ship.
    Lleu decides to visit his uncle at his home and leaves Blodeuwedd in the marital home. I think about missing kings and masculine power in the realm of magic.

    She
    If he’d smelt me, listened, he would never have gone.
    The enemy of magic is time. They made me from summer flowers. Have you not seen the rust in meadow­sweet blossoms, the brown of high summer as loveliness turns, as it must, towards its own decay? Have you not smelt its rank sweetness, like the stink of melon on the turn? Nearly delicious, but sickening.

    He
    Math the magician, the one who can make a home for the parentless, a kingdom for the rejected boy, cursed by his mother.

    She
    He knows that Nona’s predisposed to drown in a role. So he throws her into a story in which a plant is kidnapped into the human realm to please two magicians, whose only concern is how things look. This she construes as a gross assault. I swore to kill him if I was raped again.
    Let him go to Math and let my imagination change the terms of the story. He has no idea how sap burns in the veins of a woman.

    *

    She
    What’s the imagination of a flower? A bee.
    I’m wandering outside the house one day and I hear a horn and dogs barking. A company of hunters. I follow and watch them, unseen.
    The stag they’re hunting is tired. It’s been a long chase. This is no illusion with humans turned into deer. The animal’s panting and I can see a crescent moon in the white of its eye as its pursuers close in from behind.
    I gaze, entranced, as the kill is made. The process takes its course. Before working on the body, the hunter removes his outer garments and folds them carefully, so that they don’t get soiled. He turns the felled deer on its back, spreading the hind legs. Then he makes an incision from the breastbone to the base of the tail. He slices through the hide, using the knife to keep the intestines away from the rest of the corpse. Then he severs the anus and draws that in to the body cavity, removing the intestines and bladder with great care and feeding them to the baying dogs.
    The hunter’s forearms are bloody up to the elbow. Here is a man not afraid of death. He thrives on it, feeds from the feast of real time.
    Next he works on the diaphragm, cutting into the chest cavity and pulling out the lungs. He spreads that open with a stick, to help the carcass cool. Next he turns the stag on its stomach and lets the blood drain out.
    Then he covers the whole with a clean cloth and washes his hands in the nearby stream.
    Behind the tree trunk, from where I’m watching, I smell my arm. The same kind of meat, in need of dressing.
    When he passes the house with his company, I send a servant to invite him in.

    He
    Math and Gwydion’s magic works by distraction. It draws attention away from the undesirable aspects of life, inconvenient hatreds, like Aranrhod’s rage against her brother and Lleu.

    She
    The hunter’s a man who makes an art of death. That, I respect. He doesn’t use conjuring tricks to get round language.
    He made a ceremony of meat and I found that exciting.
    It was only proper that I should invite him in.

    He
    But what happens when flesh and blood enter