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The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Dakhma 13

25/9/2019

 
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Though she had risen slowly, Susan had to stop halfway up the stairs to catch her breath, leaning over herself as she struggled with the asphyxia pursuing her amid the ascent into her throat of the contents of her stomach.  When she emerged into the clear air of the yard a distant sunrise had slid fingers of gold and ibis pink beneath the cloud sealing the valley, its light striking Sachiin's face as he looked up from cutting wood.  With Petrouchka's voice still rolling in her head like a black draught from the gorge itself she closed her eyes at the sight of him, the vampyre's gifts clasped to her chest.  He smiled and set another piece of wood upon its end.

"Hungover?"

When the inquiry was ignored he interrupted his swing and turned back to where she stood, plaster-white and breathless by the parapet, her hair confined to a strange, confluent web of braids.

"She’s underneath us...”
"Ça va, cloudcheeks?”
"Do I look like I'm alright?" she exclaimed.  "This is doing my fucking head in.  We're not staying here.”

Putting down the axe, he came to her and took the bundle from her arms, looking over the mirror in surprise before setting it down upon the row of stone; he lifted a garment from the shroud of disintegrating linen, its shattered atoms drifting around them in a haze of white while a dress fell open from his hands.  Composed of heavy lunar samite, its high-waisted bodice was densely figured with a nebula of hand-cut gems, finch-yellow and violet sapphires and rock crystal, as coldly lustrous as Olympian ichor where they were clasped to the silk by gold thread curling into buds and tendrils.  Susan closed her eyes, its cynical splendour so much more a cage than an adornment that it overwhelmed her.

"I'll have get it altered.” he lamented, regretting his flippancy at the sight of her reaction.
“If we had a toilet I would flush the fucking thing.  She doesn’t want us here, I told you... why do I have to keep saying it?  I'm not spending one more night in the same building with a... a fucking dead person, in a downward bloody spiral who lies awake at night and listens to us fucking...”
“You have to let the drama queens bust a move, Christabel... just wait til they get it out of their systems.”
“They’re not drama queens, they are psychopaths!  Psychopaths who can't stand the sight of me."  She dragged down the fabric of her collar to reveal the scars on her neck.  His eyes drifted over their ragged topography, though he knew every ridge and hollow.  “You can be as stupid you like! This is how I end up."
"I don't think staying where we..."
"You don't think, that's your fucking problem!  I can't spit the fucking bullets out, and I can't take someone else trying to kill me, Sachiin... we are going.  I'm not asking you!"

He took a slightly flattened pack of cigarettes from his pocket, holding one between his lips while he retrieved his lighter, never more aware of her gaze in spite of his deliberate silence.  

“I’ve never really done this before, so it might lack credibility." Sachiin admitted.  "But this is my foot, and it's coming down.  There's too much snow.  I’m not losing you to something as fucking stupid as hypothermia... so c’est comme ça... you'll just have to trust me.  Nowhere for a week."

She clasped her own face, everything she had stamped down in her chest emerging in tears.  He looked out over the parapet with a hand on his nape, his struggle manifesting in a deep tic that worked across his shoulders, deforming his resolve.

"You didn't hear what she was saying... for fuck's sake, what am I doing here?" she demanded of herself, sucking a broken breath through her hands.
"Christabel..." he exclaimed softly, immersed in her dismay.  "I’m saying no to you... be proud of me.”  

She struck at him as he touched her arm, turning to stride across the roof into the darkness of the ruin, snatching up one of Petrouchka's forgotten coats in the midst of tripping over its crumpled form and following the steps down to the postern door.  The effort required to heave it open checked the blurred impetus of her descent; she sank down into a crouch against the stone of the mountainside where it neighboured the weathered timbers, wiping at her eyes with her parka sleeve.  In doing so she caught sight of Kala'amātya returning from a solitary foray.  He ascended toward her slowly with no need to question the colour of her face, standing with his rifle on his shoulder while he waited for her to compose herself.    

“You hate this place as much as I do.” Susan murmured.  "And your fucking brother’s morphed into a fascist who knows what’s best for me, so can we please take him to a town where he can buy drugs and go back to being no fucking use to anyone?” 

"You'll lose too much condition trying to walk in this, and there's more to come.  Wait a week." he told her, his study of her referring him to the unspoken elements of her distress.  Looking up into his illegible features, she knew she could not command everything required to disclose Petrouchka's admission, the failure sitting like lead inside her stomach.  

"You must want shot of me more than ever."

“You could have stayed in Gévaudan.”

Susan shaded her eyes from the sky, shaking her head and expressing an arid obscenity.

"If you don't know why I didn't, I can't even feel sorry for you.”

He slid the rifle from his shoulder and made an offer of it, which she ignored until he took her wrist and pressed it into her grasp, meeting her glare without a word.  Susan threw it down onto the snow and dropped onto her backside to push off the edge of the steps, carrying on stiffly down the hill alone.  

A tumble of dry powder descended the slope with her, settling on her lashes and catching on the lush pile of the coat around her shoulders from which it shook loose, banished as it might have been from the back of an animal.  She marched on down the incline, making long bear steps that compacted the crusted snow.  It was not until she was reminded of the river by the sound of unseen water that she slowed, standing on a narrow piece of level ground and looking around herself.  Cold crept into her sleeves but made no headway against the warmth haloed about her neck and chin by the fur; the gorge accepted venous tribute from the slopes on either side of its sunken, blackened crevice and she followed the tiny streams of melt to the edge of the drop, sitting down on a drift to take in the sight of the half-buried river.  The cliff beneath her was not nearly as tall or forbidding as she had expected, its steep degree built up by enormous boulders cast from the ridges into a broken but passable grade, the great blocks ignored by the water shouldering past them, as dark as graphite in suspension.  Fine spray settled on the fur as she devised a way over the descent to a point where the river was pinched so tightly between outcropped stone that she might have leapt it; she wiped a drip from her nose, folding her arms and sitting in her hunch until the sun had shifted overhead and tipped her shadow backwards.

Susan looked to the north and south and climbed slowly from the drop on all four limbs, rising to her feet once more where the hill leveled into a broad shelf.  The air glittered with buoyant whits of ice in flues of sunlight drifting down from slim rifts in the cloud.  At first glance the trees seemed placed as though by careful hands at some considerate distance from each other, and that they cultivated sophistry, their slim shade cutting the white with stripes of matte grey, snow lying on their branches like inverted shadow.  Shrugging off her coat, she hung it from a sapling and lay down, first in profile, then on her back, imprinting two versions of herself into the pristine little plain.  Her own small scale annoyed her as it had always done, seeming closer to some minor, nameless scion of her order than the species to which she belonged, though she drew consolation from the adult nature of the impressed proportions.  A brief exam of her surrounds yielded broken wood, pebbles and bracket fungi; knocked from the fir they climbed in velveteen succession, the shapes of each were pressed into service as features on her effigies.  Crouching for a moment at their feet in the grip of a vague dissatisfaction, she leant forward and planted a cigarette in each emblematic mouth.  The effect was so displeasing that she flicked them away along with those remaining in the pack, tasting wet ash on her tongue and noting the narrow slash of red on the back of her finger before the discomfort of the scratch itself, hands almost disembodied by the cold's numbing, insidious empery.  From them she looked up through the curling tendrils that had escaped her braids, glimpsing movement flickering amid a copse of pines recently carbonized by lightning.  
​
​

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK-ISH
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

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20/9/2019

 
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Blackthorn Rose Review: Compassion (Hybrid Tea)

10/9/2019

 
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It can be difficult to find the most useful line to take when reviewing a time-tested classic.  Everyone already knows Compassion is a great rose and this has been objectively established for some time now, so... um.. yeah.  ​Then again, the factors underpinning Compassion's polymathic excellence aren't as widely appreciated as they should be.  She's been around since the early 70s and that period of rose fashion has been tumultuous in the extreme, with many perfectly good plants dropping out of commercial circulation- we've all been distracted by successive waves of overhyped contenders that flashed their floral tits, so to speak.  But while they faceplant into disfavour and oblivion, OGs like Compassion remain staples of the successful garden.  I'm here to tell you exactly why that is.
Compassion was the first rose I ever deliberately purchased, around 25 years ago.  She's moved house three times, remains one of our personal favourites and has spawned a phalanx of long-serving clones.

​Before saying anything else about her, let me assure you that one of her most endearing qualities is her willingness to reliably reproduce from pieces of random cane shoved into the edge of the vege garden over winter.  I just bury them one-third to halfway, then forget them.  In spring, new leaves and roots fart out the ends and save you thirty bux.  

That's what we pay down here in New Zealand for a first grade nursery rose these days.  I mean, I understand it's not cheap to graft and raise a rose to point of sale and we're eternally grateful to those who do, but it's shameful that a once egalitarian pleasure is becoming a fucking socioeconomic indicator.  You used to see everyone at nurseries- hippies, the gays, nanas, white gumboot guys, weirdos, farmers, the lower upper middle classes; now it's just sad old hos like me who managed to buy land in the 90s.  

​It's fucking depressing.
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Anyway, Compassion is one of those versatile in-betweeny roses, forming either a tall bush or a climber/espallier subject, depending on how she is trained.  There's no point trying to constrain her size, though.  She's a big Sasquatchy bitch and needs shrubs and larger perennials to provide sympathetic company.  Pruned conventionally, she will stand on her stout cherry-tinged canes up to around the 2.5 metre mark before requiring any support (we live in a windy coastal area so I'm confident about that).  When pegged out or arranged on a fence, I'm unsure of her maximum potential dimensions, although I have seen an old plant go 3 metres in either direction in a bot garden somewhere.
Compassion is endlessly vigorous and incredibly forgiving of shit pruning jobs, sprouting away from all points and putting out enough slightly olive-green HT foliage to cover our worst mistakes.  Her open, upright structure makes her a great prop for the smaller clematis and honeysuckles and she won't shade out anything growing around her feet.
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It's easy to take Compassion's flowers for granted because they are so consistently present and unbothered by climatic travails.  But they're certainly worthy of gratitude.  They begin as tight, violet-pink scrolls in the classic Hybrid Tea manner, holding on to that graceful twist for a long time before finally blousing out to reveal a golden heart and anthers, along with burnished coral, amber and apricot shading.  

They can hold for a couple of weeks in the vase on stems that are always strong enough to support them; that is only something you miss when you're cursing a saggy fistful of droopy, petal-dripping DAs.  They seldom ball or rot on the plant and keep their lovely colours for many days, even in our ruinous UV. ​  Compassion offers a weird assortment of bloom presentations, ranging from single stems to huge cauliflower trusses that will open in obliging succession. ​ I sometimes do a bit of disbudding on the latter to tighten their schedule in the vase, but there's no need to manage her production as her petals drop cleanly and all flowers will open in due course.
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Though she is thoroughly remontant all the way through from mid-spring to mid-autumn here in Zone 9, with little to no downtime, Compassion always insists on a rest during our fairly trifling winters.  It makes pruning easier.

Fragrance-wise, I rate her highly within her somewhat dodgy category; the tonality of her perfume is closely coupled with her colours, having a sweet and warmly classical true rose character, with none of the unpleasant plasticky notes than so often fuck up the Hybrid Tea nose experience.
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Compassion's disease resistance is highly gratifying in our no-spray situation.  She'll pick up a wee bit of blackspot in a particularly bad year but keeps on trucking while other plants are completely defoliated.   Her leaves are too shiny and leathery to provide much of a foothold to mildew or rust.  We bought our first plant in those distant days before most root stock was screened, so our clones are sometimes mottled with ye olde Mosaic Virus.  It doesn't seem to vex her.  
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​In the last few years I've taken to researching the ancestry of any potential rose purchase as a fairly reliable way of keeping duds out of my dirt.  Although fabulous plants can pop up randomly from indifferent stock, I generally want to see at least two seasoned rock stars in any prospect's recent background.  

​
Compassion is a great example of this principle and a testament to her breeder's diligence with multiple generations of quality plants underpinning her outstanding qualities.  Prima Ballerina imparted her best floral characteristics- substance and fragrance.  The other parent, White Cockade, is a busy pillar/climber descended from immortal monsters New Dawn/ Dr W. Van Fleet; it has conferred its muscular structure, unfailing floriferousness and shitkicking R. wichuraiana vigour.

​Behold the massive trunk-like winter canes of our original plant to the left there.  Pruning her is definitely a job for the Japanese handsaw.  I actually don't have any good pics of our Compassions in full summer livery- sorry about that!
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​Our two largest examples are more than happy with half a day's tree shade and lacklustre soil.  She is neither hungry nor thirsty, exhibiting her wild ancestors' feral indifference to pandering by foliating and flowering well on just a handful of budget fert and I suspect this is more attention than she actually needs.

In my scrabble for anything to bitch about in regard to this paragon, I can complain only of the inevitable rose-related injuries.  Compassion is not particularly thorny (see above left pic) and her picking stems are usually quite clean, meaning it's easy to forget the hooks; her stature can result in a hard shanking where you least expect it.  I'm tall and have one of her thorns currently dissolving in my tricep- smaller peeps could easily cop a hit to the face, so don't follow our dipshit example and go planting her beside a narrow path.  Durrr.
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5/9/2019

 
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