THE CRONE'S CANTERBURY TALE

General Prologue: Love and Patience met the crone from the Wife of Bath while she gathered coriander from the Chitern Hills green pastures. They smelt the crone's aura, for she had a familial scent when the South Wind blew. Love and Patience spoke of their courtly love, and the dilemma of who they were in the partiarchal system. The wise crone empathized as she listened to her sisters.

Flowing copper locks and chestnut brown eyes, enhanced the bridge of Love's Germanic nose. Long oak hair and verdant eyes, captured Patience's wound scar over her left brow.

The Crone's Tale:
After a decade of dream dormancy, Love and Patience awakened. Hallucinating and drinking mead was the problem, they thought. No. The problem was the inevitable reality that two crones who role played as nights were not allowed to fall into love's trap and still keep their day jobs or lives. They simply refused to understand anything, but their perception of what was love.

Battling the Anglo-Saxons at Hastings, Patience and Love, Norman French Knights, met and fell madly in love. Wounded over the left eye, Love tended to Patience. Crones are healers; so a remedy in order, Love cleaned the gash with salt and gave Patience cinnamon tea her favourite. As she helped her lover, they thought the chivalry would alleviate strife; they were wrong since the perpetuating evil was not past warriors.

Love and Patience were beside themselves in confused bliss. Raven the Medieval, flew the crones messages on the second Imbolg (February), for the fire festival has begun. Cringing and raging as Ego and Jealousy read the dreadful message: learning the lady crones were in love. How could this be conceivable?

"It was forbidden. We controlled it, didn't we? Wizards could experience (love) but not...crones who masqueraded as knights. Love and Patience knew they had to follow the Knight's code except showing off their Caritas, spiritual love or even Cupiditas, earthly love. Their audacity for love and defeating our potion would be their damnation, Ego and Jealousy screamed and chuckled."

Wrinkled faces and grey locks of hair, these alchemists and third cousins of Merlin, the magician, conjured up in their blood, honey boiling cauldron the hoaxed potion. They told Raven the Medieval to fight the wind's howls and reply that the wizards wanted to meet them that evening. Wanting to share their red feelings, Patience and Love travelled to Black Wood's sacred circle where Ego and Jealousy deceitfully waited. They went back to the wizards after a comatose decade for help again; even though Love and Patience did not know their wizard past life friends
were now epitomies of Ego and Jealousy.

Eager to inebriate the merry crones, the attacking bloody wizards offered them mead. A hurling electrical thunderstorm engrossed the Black Woods. Lightning struck Love in the lower spine; then the smell of coriander flushed her senses and heard Athena, the goddess of wisdom who changed into the Wife of Bath's crone and whispered,

"Call your ordained horses and leave. Poison in the mead was your necessary evil. Gallop to Wessex and when you reached the meandering river, Thames, recite your mother tongue verse and let your soul dream."

Dodging the fierce lightning bolts, Ego and Jealousy were hugging the stalagmite in the blue humid cave when Athena appeared and dispersed their livers to the wild dogs...

The auburn coloured stallions delivered Patience and Love where Athena predicted, and the red orange dawn gave them the ideal yellow mood for both had to read vows for their souls and hearts:

"You are the secret of the silver moon's glow.
Forgive the green battle of the past
And Keats' roses are your natural smiles.
But you are a Raven's feather
Who will return to earth's dark womb.
Vermillion wine is our ritual,
And Egypt's frankensense is immortal."

After they read their vows and passionately kissed, Athena smiled and gave Love and Patience a silver Pentangle, for it was all the truth they needed when the potion clouded their red senses; the second dream consciosness would reawaken them in a beautiful and tolerable life in a bed of coriander.

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