(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
30. Of Aengus in the Sea
OVER THE SEA was a bluff, driven up by thick slabs of stone; and the waves foamed over those rocks, and gulls and rooks wheeled in those airs. A pile of rubble stood on the bluff. Once it was a strong man’s dun. Folk said the Druids built it before the first grass grew.
Before its gates the well was sunk.
It was dry, that well, a low circle of the same gray stones, bleached by the casts of birds. Deep in the well the stones were black as hearthstones. And in the brightness of that county, with the sky bright on the glassy sea, Master Aengus looked down into the well. Dark and black it was. He thought he saw a little light far down in it flickering, like a candle. But there was no sight of the beast.
Aengus let down into the darkness a ladder of rope. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
Grain held a lantern in her hand. Mielusine was cloaked with a red mantle against the sea-breeze. The dancer nodded.
‘Och, my heart trembles for the two of you,’ muttered the old woman. ‘Are you sure you’ve taken all measures?’
Half was he swallowed up beneath the stones. Ghastly pale was his face in the lantern light; and his jaw was set.
‘I will do it,’ he told her.
The fishwife pressed into his palm a bit of trefoil.
‘If it’s hot you’re feeling, eat a stalk of this. But save enough for coming back.’ He closed his fist about the green.
And she was handing over to him the lantern, and he was going down into the well. Mielusine went after, bearing a basket of quinces.
Grain’s face shrank with the closing of the mouth of the well above them, but the moaning of wind was growing.
Deep down in the well the ladder ended, but that was near enough the bottom so they could climb down the rest of the way. The sides of the well were rough stone, hard gravel, and broken bits of pottery. It was dry as bone.
‘Aengus,’ whispered the dancer, ‘I’m afraid for you.’
Before them a tunnel led down into the earth. They followed it in silence, to where the tunnel widened, showing three dark, gaping mouths.
And stretched out before the three openings was a thing as big as a horse and white as dead bones: Henwen, the monstrous sow of men’s nightmares and fears.
Such a thing you never have seen in life. Her jaws could have gulped down a man’s head. Two of the cave mouths she lay across, growling, her breath rough as yew-bark. Directly the two entered her cave she started up and snarled and snapped at them. But Mielusine scattered quinces before her, and held out in her hand the white stone.
The huge sow snorted at the fruit, but she licked at Mielusine’s hand, and nibbled daintily at the quinces.
‘Do you see, Master Aengus?’ said Mielusine, patting Henwen’s great bobbing head. ‘She’s just hungry, after all, half-starved for love.’
But Master Aengus was already stealing down the tunnel Grain had told him of, moving swiftly in the black and brightness, catching and feeling the walls close around him.
Mielusine took the lantern and went back up the ladder. She and Grain rolled it up and carried it away.
The small, dark shapes of the two women walked slowly down the broad beach under the weight of the bright clouds in the sky, back to the hut.
Mielusine glanced back. ‘Who is that,’ she asked, ‘standing over the well?’
‘Where?’ asked Grain. The old woman shaded her eyes against the gleam of the waves and squinted. ‘Ah, but my dim eyes can hardly see a thing in all this gloom.’
‘He is standing over the well,’ answered the maid. ‘A tall, thin man hidden in a tricorn and a dark gray cóta mór.’
‘Could it be our Aengus?’
‘No,’ answered the Maid, ‘no, but it seems I know the fellow.’
Fergus, the dark man, watched the women pass. When the coast was clear, he stepped up to the well, and peered deep down inside.
IN THE HUT it was dark but for the dim glow of the embers. Mielusine and the old fishwife crouched over the cot, tending to the dying woman. From outside the hut came the sounds of wind and rising waves.
‘She is weaker now,’ said Grain. ‘She has been unwell that long a time.’
‘I shouldn’t have left them,’ said Mielusine.
All at once a great crash sounded from without, and the sod roof shook.
‘What wave is it?’ cried Mielusine, covering Agatha with her body.
Grain answered in a hushed voice: ‘He is there.’
The dancer rose, and catching her skirts round her legs with her hands, stepped outside the hut.
Agatha moaned, and twisted in her place. Grain had taken off the damp, mouldy shirt and breeches, ragged from the thorns of the wood, and dressed her in one of Mielusine’s shifts, and covered her with blankets. The old woman took a bit of straw, lit it off the embers and held it over the bed.
Agatha’s face was pale and flushed by turns, and the sweat standing on her brow, and her teeth chattering with cold, in spite of all the blankets covering her.
Then the straw burnt out, and shadows swallowed up the sight of her.
OUT ON THE SANDS the dancer twirled her skirts with her hand. She stopped on the cobbles of rocks above the wrinkling lace hem of the waves.
‘Hello, Mr Vasquez,’ she said.
The dark man standing at the well-side bowed to her with an ironic flourish.
‘Will you dance for me, Maid Snowflake?’ he asked.
‘Surely,’ she answered, ‘I’ll do that, Mr Vasquez, after we talk a word or two.’
‘What is it you’d be wanting to know?’
‘Why you’re here, and why you wear the mask you wear, and who you were, and who you are, and where it is you’re going, Mr Vasquez,’ she answered him.
He laughed, and ran his fingers over the fabric of the mask. ‘It’s not so much,’ he said, ‘you’re asking.’
‘THERE WAS A PIECE of the Sun,’ said the fishwife, sitting rocking over the lady in the darkened hut. ‘It was the very heart of the Sun, to tell by the heat of it. It fell into the Sea yonder; for the longest time we lay buried by mist singing up out of the boiling sea; lobsters and crabs were tossed up cooked onto the cobbles and sand.
‘In time it cleared,’ she sang, soft and gentle like. ‘And some of the boys went out onto the water, to see what they could see. They dove into the deep. But only darkness was there, and a black heat rising from the seabed. The way we knew it had gone into the Earth, swallowed up forever. But later, in the darkness, we were seeing strange lights flashing out of the well up by the old dun.’
And another crash sounded from outside the hut, like a fearsome wave tearing round all the coasts of the Innis Fodhla.
A wind tore through the cracks of the hut, and the fire in the embers roused and sprang up.
Agatha’s dim lips opened, and she breathed, ‘Aengus…’
‘He has found it,’ whispered Grain.
THE WARM WET SPUME was draining away from Vasquez’ dark gray cóta mór, and Mielusine felt her gown clinging to her through the wet. In spite of the fearsomeness of the wave, he by his singing, and she by the quickness of her feet and the weight of the white stone, had held off being washed out into the deep.
‘Tell me then, and tell me true,’ said the dancer.
He answered, ‘Well, and I will.’ He held up his hand, considering; and it was plain that his thoughts went into the past and he was forgetting the well and what Master Aengus did there; and that was just what the dancer was desiring.
‘Once of a time,’ said the dark man, ‘old Tadgh and Maille May were visited: that fell out on an evening just at the moment the first stars come forth. A woman and a man, wrapped up in their cóta mór, shawls, mufflers, bonnets and hats, asked the cottagers if they hadn’t a boy, a dark lad, living with them? And they went on and told the shape of your Aengus, Maid Snowflake, to the last feature and trait. Tadgh and Maille May looked each other in the eye, and didn’t know what to say. When Aengus himself, a tall lanky boy, appeared in the doorway next to them. And it was just his seventh birthday, or near it, if you trust what the calendar says.
‘Then the strange couple were much relieved,’ said Vasquez, ‘and they told how they had heard such good things of the cottagers, and they said that they were the best of parents, “and we have here a lovely child,” they went on, “and we know of nobody who’d be better at raising it than yourselves,” and they handed over to them another boy. Of course, old Tadgh and Maille May fell in love with the child from the start, and raised it after Aengus, and those two got on so well together, that in after years they were swearing blood brotherhood, and sharing all the secrets in each other’s hearts, and went under the sod as one, and were of the same mind in all things; all things, that is, save for one. And it was said the second boy was a Tinker’s child, the way he was dark, with a red, red lip, and I know the tale well, having heard it enough, the way the child was myself.’
‘Go on,’ said the dancer, ‘if you please, and tell me all of it, Mr Vasquez. It will do you good.’
So the dark man took up his tale again, and all the while, unbeknownst to himself, he was speaking his words in a rhythm like chanting, and moving his feet to the swaying of her hands and hips, the way indeed the very waves out of the Sea were starting to do.
‘FAR AND WIDE,’ said Grain over the shivering, dreaming lady in the cot, ‘we were sending, to find one to go down there and heal the Sun’s heart, the way she’d be rising again. But the few daring enough to try never returned. They were longing for Day; but it’s only a true child of the Night could be winning there.’
‘Aengus, beware!’ hissed the lady in her dream.
The old woman took her hand and lightly stroked it.
‘Agatha,’ she said, ‘what are you dreaming? Tell me what you’re seeing, Agatha, the way my eyes are blind to it, and I cannot see it at all!’
‘The tunnel,’ muttered Agatha in her dream. A fit of coughing took her, so that for a time she was too weak to speak, and her hand closed tight and cold in Grain’s, like one who has been drawn up drowned out of the deep.
‘He is stealing down the tunnel,’ whispered Agatha. Her eyes were still shut, and it was her dream she was telling the fishwife. ‘The darkness is burning with growing flames, and winds are beating up out of the deeps of the tunnel. The streams of fire are pouring round him, but he is unburned…’
…And deep underground, under the bed of the Sea, in the deep cave, Aengus paused, the way he was feeling her thought on him and her heart beating along with his.
The fire was burning, breathing, roaring all round. The stone walls glowed red and white and blue with the heat of those fires. Nothing human could have lived there; but Aengus stood against it, armored in the last of his art, and he pushed on forward again, and fought and battled down into the breath of pure fire.
Deeper and deeper he walked, bending his head low against the fire, beating it away from him with his arms; his shoes burnt black in the flames, and the iron buckles of his shoes melted away; and even Aengus had to pause.
In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.
‘He has eaten the first stalk of the green, and feels cool now in the oven! And he is staggering farther down, and the flames are red hot beating against him. He is falling!’
…Deep under the Sea, in the pits of the Earth, Aengus fell with his hands before him onto the hot fiery floor of the cave. His coat burned clean off him, and his hair waved and flashed in the fire, and the sweat off his brow boiled off his dark skin where it gleamed like a mirror of diamond and iron.
And the breath that went in by his mouth was all fire, and flames were turning in his lungs, and fire was going up and down his blood with the air that went into his lungs. It was near boiling, Aengus’ blood; it was near catching fire and bursting out from his veins and tearing him apart still living.
Aengus looked up, and saw down before him the end of the cave, and the entrance in fire to the Chamber that lay beyond.
In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.
‘Girl, girl!’ breathed the old woman. ‘It’s on fire you are, you’re all burning up!’
‘But on the ground he eats the second stalk, and he is managing to rise to his feet again. His body is black with soot, and the flames are bright yellow, tearing at him, battering him.
‘And the flames are white, and the tunnel walls lost in brightness. Aengus is standing as if over the edge of a white blind cliff. The heat growing in him, and he with but the one stalk clutched between his fingers, and it the smallest of the three.’
Grain took a wet cloth, and she laid up along the girl’s brow, and the heat there made the cloth bubble and steam.
…And Aengus where he stood in the entrance to the Chamber felt a soothing coolness on his brow, the way the girl was taking some of the hot breath of the fire away off from him.
And he pushed against the flames, and shoved into the fire.
Inside the Chamber it was hotter still, the hottest yet, and the flame was like pure light, like the heart out of the Sun, and so vast was that Chamber, that its walls all fell away, and Aengus stood on the brink of a space that seemed unending, broader than the sky, deeper than Day.
Aengus squeezed his eyes against the pure hotness of heat, and he tried to see with his eyes deeper against the light that roared and shot and streamed out against him.
And it was like he trod on light itself, the way the brightness of the hot was all around him, and under and over him. And it was so bright his shadow fled away from there.
In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.
‘Waves of light are swirling up, rising round and round. It’s like music they are, the beating coils of light. But the music is flawed. There is the slightest break in it, like a halting of breath.
‘Aengus! Aengus! Do not go so near it!’
WINDS were tearing off the waves, casting spray like rain across the face of Mielusine and the mask of Vasquez.
‘Tell me more, Mr Vasquez. Tell me all.’
‘Out of exile in a far land, when this Night fell, I came back into Ireland,’ he answered, and his words were reft out of his throat as though against his wishes. ‘And I hunted him, who’d killed my love, and left my foster parents to die in the ripeness of their age, and he looking still so young when I, born on the same year as the calendar tells, wore the face of a man twenty years older – thirty years older, forty or more! And I took up his bow and arrow, and took to trailing him across the fields of the Night.’
‘To kill him?’ she asked.
‘Nay, now! What man can kill the devil? But I know his love as well as he’d known mine. She was the very spirit and joy and romance and deep delight of the Night, was the White Hind: I knew she’d be about him where he was, watching after him, though never showing herself, for fear of the curse was lying between them. In the abbey I had to take pains, the way the old Man of the Bog was there before me, and he’d know me – so I put on this mask and kept myself out of the way of him. And in time you nicely took Aengus away out of the abbey, away out of safety. And when he lay dreaming, now,’ he said with a laugh, ‘and all alone, the White Hind couldn’t help herself, and went down to him, and gave me such a clear shot, now!’
‘You didn’t!’ cried Mielusine.
‘I did, and she’s dead!’ shouted the man.
At once she stopped, still as death herself: and he had to stop, and all the face of the Sea, like a painting, or a carving on a cathedral door, had to stop, all stop, for one moment: then the heart in her took up beating again, Mielusine breathed, stepped, swung her arm, and all the rest fell back in step with her.
‘Now he’s out there, the doomed devil,’ said Vasquez, just as though he wasn’t aware of the death of the moment that had passed over him. He stretched forth a hand to her.
‘Come with me now,’ he beckoned, ‘Maid Snowflake, come with me up to the dun, and we’ll stop up the mouth of the well with hand-small stones, so Aengus has no way out.’
‘Come with me instead, Mr Vasquez,’ she called, and danced out of his reach down along the waves. Her bright eyes were stormy as the waves, and she was dancing him after her, and dancing the waves up too, higher and deeper over their heads.
She was seeing, but he was not, that they two were no more alone in the Sea’s edge in the storm. There was another there, and it bore the likeness of a man’s shadow standing at the edge of the sand.
Mielusine gestured, and the man stepped into the waves.
‘Show me your face, Mr Vasquez,’ she called.
And she danced back, and he trod a step after her.
‘Show me your face, and the grimness of it, Mr Vasquez.’
He reached for her, she danced away, and helpless, he staggered after her.
‘You should have been sleeping, Mr Vasquez. You are the Man Who Should Have Slept – aren’t you, Mr Vasquez?’
Mielusine waved her hands, and the shadow stepped up behind Fergus in the waves.
‘Stop, come back,’ groaned Fergus, but she only danced on farther afield.
‘You should have been dreaming, Mr Vasquez,’ she called. ‘Look at your face now, shame on you! Can you stop dreaming and stop from going mad, Mr Vasquez? Ah, but your face is telling me another tale, Mr Vasquez!’
She reached out her hands, dancing back deeper under the waves. And he, helplessly stumbling after, followed step for step.
Until the shadow behind him could reach him, and locked up both his arms in his grasp.
IN THE FAR CORNER of the hut Grain was huddling, hiding. She was covering her face with her shawl, and muttering prayers in a tongue long forgotten upon the face of the world. But out of her prayer she was asking, in spite of herself,
‘Tell me what you’re seeing, Agatha. Tell me, the way my eyes are blind to it, and I cannot see it at all!’
In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.
‘He is standing over it! It is on the floor between his feet, the root of the flaw in the light!’
…Up and down, round and round about Aengus, the pure light of the heart of heat and of all things hot danced and swirled, round and round with the beat of Maid Mielusine’s wild dance above, back in the world that we know, in the dark of the end of the unending Night.
And Aengus reached, and it seemed to him he held something struggling in his arms.
But not all evenly, nor all cleanly, did the hotness swirl; but there and here Aengus could discern a little flaw, and a break in it, like a gasp, or the snag of a sleeve on a sliver of wood in a rough plank.
And somehow Aengus could not find the source of that break, until all at once, as if the girl’s words rang out in his ear, he looked down between his feet.
And he saw it there.
In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.
‘Small it is, dark and round, the size of a man’s brains, and the white flames bending round it.
‘Aengus, do not – ah! He has it in his hands, he is picking it up!’
…Against all the strength and the madness of the light, against all the evil of it bending and bearing up over and against him, its very enemy, Aengus bent low, and he drove and strained, and managed to bring his arms down, and shove his hands deeper into the heart of all that hotness, to the thing that lay buried there.
With a great will, Aengus was bending his fingers and clamping them round that thing, and he was pulling and tearing at it with a heart and a half, until it began to break free. Then it was with twice the effort in his heart, Aengus strove with the thing, and now all at once it was as if the pure hotness of that heat knew what he was about, and it came to his aid, or he would never have done the thing, not even Aengus, not even himself.
And all at once the thing tore free; Aengus staggered backward in the light, and the pure hotness of heat throbbed and thundered through the unending space of that pit.
‘And now the music of the light is restored. And fiercer it’s growing, and awful beyond denial.’
…Back Aengus staggered, and he was finding himself at the entrance to the Chamber once more, and fighting his way back up the cave with the fire tearing and shooting at his back, twice as hot, thrice as fearsome, four times as evil. And it hit against him in the back of him, and threw him forward and down on his face.
And the thing in his arms tore free of his grasp.
THE STORM rose up in a great tower over their heads, and Mielusine danced across the waves, a wild and dangerous dance. Fergus tore himself free, and turned to face the shadow. The face of Fergus went all white, and Mielusine laughed.
‘Aengus! You!’ shouted Fergus. And he swept out their father’s sword.
But the shadow dipt its hand in the sea, and sent bits of salt scattering into his brother’s eyes, and it leapt forward and caught Fergus’ wrists in the lock of its fingers. And for a time they were struggling there, and the great waves throbbed and thundered about them both beneath the dancing feet of the girl.
Fergus threw the shadow back, and went for him; but the stroke of the sword went past the twisting shadow, and cut only brine instead of flesh; the shadow rammed into Fergus’ chest, and the sword broke out of Fergus’ hand and dropped into the Sea.
Under the Sea swam the shadow, and Fergus after it, and the great waves roiling the sand and stones of the shore up and about them. Deeper the shadow dove, and Fergus after it, down to the bottom where the sea-bed glowed red and orange from the heat of the fires of the heart of the Sun below.
IN THE CALM LITTLE HUT by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.
‘But no! he’s eaten the last stalk, and manages to hold his footing. But it was the last!’
…All the cave filled with fire; it tilted and it spun. Aengus was pitched backward as though he were swimming down, down toward the mouth of the Chamber where the new-wakened Sun was growing and bursting like fifty kegs full of gunpowder and pitch.
The Sun growled, and groaned, and roared out, Awake, Awake again!
But in the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned her fingers upon the rough planks of the cot, and her nails tore and dug into the cracks in the wood.
…And Aengus turned his fingers upon the stone of the cave, and his nails tore and dug into the cracks in the stone. And he held on, and did not fall back into the mouth of the Sun.
Slowly Aengus went now, slower and slower his feet and his hands were gripping and pushing back the stone.
Something was calling him. Some voice was calling out his name from the back of him, deep in the Chamber of the heart of the Sun. And it was a dire duty in his heart to be turning and looking back and beholding the source of that voice.
‘Go on, go on! Don’t be halting, don’t look back! What are you listening to? What words are you hearing breathed upon the fire?’
…He lowered his head, and he was starting to look back; and all at once the cave twisted and spun like a wild pony; there was no standing or holding on to it then.
‘Tell me what you’re seeing, Agatha. Tell me, the way my eyes are blind to it, and I cannot see it at all!’
But then the crash sounded from without the hut, and it shook the Earth.
DEEP UNDER THE WAVES Fergus swam, and he saw his father’s sword half-buried in the sand; he reached out his hand for it.
But the hand of the shadow flashed there before Fergus’ hand, and it was the shadow gripped the sword, and turned it and stabbed it, deep in the black heart of Angus’ brother.
But then the crash sounded from above, and it shook the Earth. The third great wave of Ireland broke on all the coasts, and bluffs fell into waters, and stones shattered in foam, and vast bites of beaches were swallowed into gray-green waters. Grain shrieked: Agatha’s body shook and went lifeless and limp in that last of all moments.
And the shore to the grianan was the hardest hit; and the peak of the wave smashed into the little hut, breaking its walls and toppling its chimney and burying all within.
And the third wave ripped away the dead bones of the dark man, the Man Who Should Have Slept, with the sword still sticking out of it, and the dancer laughed a wild laugh and danced up on the white spume of the wave, all the way up to the headland over the dun, where she lighted down nimble as a sea-bird on the wild grass blades.
She turned, wet through and drenched, her white dress clinging to her, her black hair streaming wet and wild down her back, and her lips red as Arianna’s cloaks.
‘Take him away across the Sea, my wave!’ she sang, still dancing and showing the leag lorgmhar. ‘Take him away back to his place, and let him be happy there, and wash away out of his heart all the evil robbing his peace and his contentment!’
And the while she was dancing, the wave was rolling away, away across the Sea, until it rolled over the far horizon.
BUT WITHIN THE CAVE beneath the Sea it was quiet for that moment. Huddled on the sooty ground, Master Aengus loosened his grasp of the sword hilt that he felt but might not see. And the feeling of waves over his back left him, and he raised his head.
He found that he had fallen in the cave of fire, and soon the winds were swirling up again out of the deeps. But he saw, too, that the shock of the wave had cast him up out of the reach of the flames, and around him was only light.
No more than light glancing up the tunnel walls, and he lying on the cool floor, his eyes open and staring, his lungs sucking in the unburnt air in sobs.
Later he was rising to his feet, and picking up the stone. He climbed the last reach of the tunnel, past the sleeping Henwen and up the well-wall, easily. The clouds in the sky were breaking, and the wave falling away out into the glassy deeps of the Sea, its mother. The stars were peeping down on Ireland, and a rosy light was shining, of the moonrise.
Master Aengus laughed, the way he knew he’d won. And he knelt and touched his brow, and prayed out his thanks to the Moon aloud.
But that was ill done.
