(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
7. Of the Maid in the Wood
BEYOND THE POND the blood spots failed, or she lost them; the path continued up. There everything was white, even the trees in snow coats. The stars were eating up the sky as Lady Agatha climbed among them. Beyond the hill the bow of the moon slipped hugely into earth.
In another clearing, silent in starlight, nine trees stood in a half ring before a snowy hall. Lady Agatha stepped into the untouched snow, feeling it over the top of her shoes, secret and chilling.
The nine trees were swaying as she passed them. The dim starlight discovered strange features in the bark, like faces smiling and closed.
At the door of the cottage she halted. Seeping through the cracks of the door was the savor of onions, potatoes, carrots, turnips and gravy. She all but felt her knees give way, the smelling of it was so wonderfully keen.
Her fist, frozen and hard, rapped upon the door. A soft voice answered from within. It was a young woman appearing at the door, slender as a grass stalk.
Her hair was black as black could be, unpinned and fine, clouding her face. Her face was small and delicate. The palest blush colored her cheek, but her skin was else as clear as whey. She wore a simple homespun kirtle, and you would have called it white had you not seen it against her skin. Her fingers were a wonder, slender and long, whiter than the ninth wave of the sea.
She was the prettiest country-girl Agatha had ever seen.
‘Let her love all here,’ Agatha blessed the girl.
‘Mary increase you,’ answered the lass for a failte in her turn.
‘I can offer you nothing for your pain,’ said Agatha. ‘But will you take me in, and let me warm myself?’
‘Surely,’ said the country-girl, pushing back the door. ‘Poor lady, you are burning up. Come in, sit by the hearth.’
Lady Agatha allowed herself be led across the clean swept earth to a hob-seat on the stones of the hearth. The girl drew off a bit of stew from the cauldron over the fire, pressing a bowl of it into Agatha’s cupped stiff hands, and talking all the while, the way of one too long alone.
All at once she stopped with a blush of a smile and said, ‘I am Maid Mielusine.’
‘I am Lady Agatha.’
‘It’s the company I’ll be glad of. I hope you will stay a good long while! I wish we can be like sisters, do you think that may be?’
Lady Agatha was leaning back against the stone, watching the stew in the bowl on her hands, unwilling to eat it right away, unwilling to show her eagerness. She looked up at the girl, at her trusting eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse, with a bit of wildness lurking in it; a perilous voice; the voice of a lost soul.
‘Oh, but you must be thinking me only too forward! There’s that difference in our stations, after all. But if you could stay awhile, after you are well…’
‘Sure, this illness I’ll never be well of,’ said Agatha.
The girl fell silent, abashed at her own eagerness. Lady Agatha carefully supped the stew, cleaning the bowl and setting it down by the hearth.
‘It is calm here in this place,’ she was murmuring. ‘There is peace here, and you are innocent, Maid Mielusine, as I was. The perfume of your innocence pervades your house. I am tired now, and weary so that I wish I could sleep as the Sleepers are sleeping. But it’s the fever dancing round in me, and I cannot rest for dreaming…’
‘You speak so wonderfully,’ whispered the girl. ‘Anyone could tell you’re a great lady.’
‘I had such dreams, once. I was pretty enough, and free.’ She was staring into the fire, into white lines and black knots, and the red tips of the flames where they vanished into smoke.
‘And he loved me,’ she was murmuring, ‘and abandoned all to be chasing on my heels. And in my innocence I was scorning him, and mocking his pain with laughter. Folly!’
‘Moy-rua, it’s a bad fever has caught you, Miss. Let her spare you! Don’t fret, there is no one else about.’
THAT DARKNESS Lady Agatha lay in the girl’s bed, the way Maid Mielusine could not rest. Three times the girl climbed to the bedside, looking on her visitor to see that she was real, and really there.
In her dreams the lady had turned her face away to where the dark roof timbers swept down close and cozy above the bed. The lady lay there, wan and flushed by turns, and her hair bedraggled, and her gown in tatters. But there was no mistaking her quality, as Maid Mielusine was assured. She was a lady.
Maid Mielusine sighed for clean delight.
WITH THE RISING of the Moon Lady Agatha woke and clambered down out of the warm bed in her shift. There in the middle of the cottage she found herself alone. She stood by the fire awhile, warming her hands and thinking. In the firelight she looked on her palm marked with its black spot.
Maid Mielusine came back with a pail of water. Her cheeks were less pale now, and some of the threads of her hair had strayed across her brow.
‘And how are you now, Miss?’ she asked. ‘But you shouldn’t have risen! Will you be wanting anything?’
Agatha shook her head no.
Then they ate a bowl of cream together, and spoke of this and that.
During the day, Maid Mielusine told her, she had been living in a cottage with her ma and her da and her sisters, Grisalta and Merrwyn, and Mielusine the baby. But when her ma died, her da changed.
‘Och, he was right enough with my sisters, but with me he was hard hearted, I cannot tell you why. Of the three of us girls, I looked the most like our ma, but still my da was giving me the hardest chores, to be cleaning the pens and cleaning the hearth until I smelled of dirt and ash.
‘ “Sini, you’re no good,” he’d be saying.“Sini, you’ve a pinched face. Sini, your nose is thin!”
‘Until one night my sisters wakened me, whispering, “Sini dear, our da’s gallous cruel with you, and it’s worse he’ll be to you before he’s better. Let you get dressed now, and we’ll go from him for ever and a day.”
‘Shoes in hands, we tiptoed out. The night was like summer in Italy, as they say in our county. The stars were shining in the dew on the grass, and we girls walking barefoot in heaven.
‘We had taken some cakes, and ate nuts and mugoreens from the sweet briars along the way. Soon in the wood it was so warm we did off our clothes, and naked in their shifts went bathing in a pool, giggling and free. We little knew the Night was hanging over us all.
‘The next day the sky was black until the red burst out of the spot on the Sun, and fire was raining out of the clouds everywhere, and I like a baby crying and running, the way I lost my sisters in the wood and found them never again.’
The Maid fell silent, stirring a wooden spoon in her pot over the turf. The lady observed her out the corner of her eye.
‘So you are all alone here?’ asked Agatha.
‘Ah,’ said the maid, ‘I’m not so all alone as that, Mary save me. There are my guardians; or should I be calling them my children now! Would you see them, Miss? They’re so eager to be meeting you!’
The country-girl drew her guest outside. They went into the middle of the snow, to the nine trees planted in a crescent. Now Lady Agatha saw that those trees were not bending of the wind, the way there was none, but of their own will.
In the gnarled wood Agatha saw faces very plainly smiling down at her: knotty cheeks, knotty eyes, and wide-pecked mouths. They had no necks, and their arms were branches, some doubly and some triply jointed. Their roots served for squat legs and curling feet.
One by one the trees were bowing, stepping forward, and introducing themselves to her.
‘They are my friends,’ said Mielusine, giggling at Lady Agatha’s astonishment. ‘They cleared the glade, dug me stones for warmth, and built the Honey House.’
‘What now!’ growled one. ‘She is our first guest!’
‘Aye now, Tadgh! You’re right about that!’
‘Celebration now! Dancing and mead!’
‘Mead and dancing, you mean!’
Laughing in gnarled voices, the trees were tipping over and crawling into the hall, mindful of their branches brushing through the door.
The maid served them from her cauldron, and poured mead for the trees. Merry they were all, though keeping their distance from the fire. They were singing and drinking and winking, and even went so far as to make the maid dance a jig with them, clumsy as they were.
Mielusine fell back at last breathless beside Lady Agatha, and brushing her locks from her brow. ‘Ah!’ she was saying, ‘That’s work, now!’
‘But this is a marvel,’ said Agatha. ‘What are these trees, that they speak and walk and dance?’
‘Well, but I told you, sure, how as I lost my sisters? And then I’d nowhere else to go, it being all night and strange, and so I went back to my da’s. But the cottage door was closed with sleeping. Then I wandered in the wood, until an owl and a swallow told me the magic of honey. It was honey I spread over the mouths of the trees, and charmed them into life.’
‘And here we are!’ said Finn, loudly, the way mead was ever raising his voice. ‘Mary bless us, as good as saplings, some of us!’
‘Ho, but Finn, you’ve a few holes now, begging your pardon – better watch those woodpeckers!’
‘Watch yourself, Ned my lad, for your bark is curling!’
‘Sini, come hither, bide a while upon my knee?’
One great tree swept up the maid from her seat and swung her round in a great galloping reel. The others stamped the earth with their rooty feet, marking time of the measure and shouting their complaints and cheer.
‘Shawnee, boy, don’t be so boisterous, can’t you see you’re all but bumping Sini to the ground?’
‘Moy-rua, I am a hobby-horse, and let her make me a fast one!’ said Sean; and sure enough in a matter of moments the maid, giggling and blushing, slipped to the ground. Ned swept her up in his branchy arms and spun her round the hall, his rooty feet clumping and kicking the floor.
By moonfall the trees were mopping their brows and blowing out their brown cheeks, and stumbling out to their circle again. Where they stood leaning in the snow, snoring and snorking.
THE SMOKE curled blue and cheery from the hole in the roof of the hut under the Moon. Inside Lady Agatha and Maid Mielusine sat on the hob by the hearth and told each other of their lives. Lady Agatha told of dances and masquerades, of journeying to Dublin and across the sea to London, where the King’s house was. Maid Mielusine blushed to have nothing to be telling but her own narrow life.
‘Why do you not go looking for your sisters?’
‘But I’m afraid of what I might be finding, there outside the wood.’
‘So pretty you are, and living like a hermit.’
‘Well, but I have my trees now, and we are happy.’
‘Are you now? I dare say cows will be happy enough grinding their teeth in the middle of a field. But a girl of your charms might aspire to more. Look at you now, your hair all tousled and draggling. Let me comb it out for you.’
With an amber comb she combed the girl’s tresses; and the while she was combing, Lady Agatha set to singing a bit of old poetry, with softness and ease as of long practice:
… come forth,
And taste the air of palaces; eat, drink
The toils of empirics, and their boasted practice;
Tincture of pearl, and coral, gold, and amber;
Be seen at feasts and triumphs; have it asked
What miracle she is? set all the eyes
Of court a-fire, like a burning glass,
And work them into cinders, when the jewels
Of twenty states adorn thee, and the light
Strikes out the stars! That, when thy name is mentioned,
Queens may look pale; and we but showing our love,
Nero’s Poppaea may be lost in story!
Lady Agatha’s voice murmured away, and Maid Mielusine felt the words sinking inside her, seducing secret dreams.
‘I’m sure we must seem low to you, Lady Agatha. You are used to such fineness of manners. I’m sorry for my trees. Their hearts are kind, and maybe I’m no better, and too humble and coarse to be your friend.’
‘You are not low, merely untutored. That you could feel such regret shows you capable of better.’
‘Will you tell me more of courts and ladies?’
Agatha eyed the Maid thoughtfully.
‘What is it you’re wanting to know?’
‘Oh – fashions, dancing, and courtly manners! I’ve dreamt of it always, you see, to be a lady, elegant and sought after!’
‘But that’s the least part of a lady, Mielusine. These elegant ladies are the stupidest showhorses you ever did see. What truly makes a lady is much more than that.’
‘What, then?’ the maid was asking after a bit.
‘Ah, as for that, you do not want to know it, Mielusine! I did not know it, and am sorry now I learned.’
‘Tell me, please, Agatha! For how else will I ever be anything but the merest, commonest country-girl?’
‘There is danger in my lessons, Mielusine. Stay rather as you are, the way you are pretty as the third moon, and that ought to be enough for anyone.’
‘I see,’ sighed the Maid, letting her head tilt down to her breast, and looking away.
But it was late for warnings. In the Day Mielusine had been content to be a cottager’s daughter forever, the way that would never be changing any more than the Sun. But now the Sun was gone, and in the darkness trees could catch life, and why could herself, Maid Mielusine, not become a lady?
‘It is love makes a lady,’ said Agatha, after a long bit of silence. ‘Love and suffering ennobling her.’
‘Don’t my trees love me?’
‘Your trees? They know no more of love than you, my goose. There are two paths of love, Mielusine. Bright and broad is a boithrin, and that green lane glimmering in the Sun beside golden flowers all the way down to the blue Sea. But I can’t be helping you there, you see, it’s not that path I know.’
‘What is the other path like, Agatha?’
‘Ah, that one, now! Narrow, twisty, treacherous. You cannot see the end of it at all. And its banks are hemmed in with primroses dark and voluptuous as Eve’s own lips. But their brambles clutch and scratch at you, and a dark man waits hidden in the thorns. He’ll watch you suffering, and smile and offer you his hand, but he’ll press you back with the whole of his body into the swallowing fragrance of the briars.’
Mielusine stared at the lady, her eyes big as her fists. Agatha caught that look, and laughed a bitter laugh.
‘That is all I know of love. It’s the great heart is not poisoned by it. Only one or two ladies of a hundred might have managed it. These are the ones, bear the secret marks of their passions on their bodies and their souls. But the rest of us, we have been maimed by it, soured and gone old before our years.’
Lady Agatha’s voice was falling away into the merest whisper, and it was only the hissing of the fire filling out the silence.
‘It is wonderful, what you said,’ whispered Mielusine. ‘Ah, do you dream I could ever be like the one or two?’
‘It must come out of the untouched depths of you, out of your untried heart.’
‘Please.’
‘I might teach you, Mielusine,’ said Agatha after a bit. ‘But I’d want you to repay me.’
‘I’ll do anything,’ said the girl.
‘Do not be promising so quickly as that! It’s a burden and a danger you’d be taking onto yourself. Who are you but a girl, helpless and innocent as a hind, to be daring anything so terrible? You make me laugh! But here now, don’t be pouting, girl! Forgive me. A dark man’s put a spell on me, and I cannot be breaking it. And I’d be wanting you to save me.’
Sadly, Mielusine shook her head. ‘It’s not a blessed thing I know about spells; let her save me from all such!’
‘Isn’t beauty sorcery?’
The maid looked at Lady Agatha for a long while. Then she said solemnly, ‘I don’t understand. But I will do anything you tell me. Only, teach me love.’
Lady Agatha went on combing the fine black tresses, but she was not answering the maid, only looking at the fire, and her thoughts far away.
‘I will make you beautiful, Mielusine,’ she was murmuring. ‘Beautiful, beautiful…’
‘Am I really pretty?’ Mielusine asked. ‘I’ve never seen a mirror.’
‘I will make you a mirror in the face of every man. And most of all in his.’
THAT DARKNESS it was the Maid lay down in her bed, the way Lady Agatha would have it no other way.
Lady Agatha went before the hearth. Where like a dog she cast herself down on the warm stones. And she gazed upon her open hand, upon its hollow with its little black spot.
Oh Aengus, Aengus, why did you need embitter all the sweetness on the world, and change the day to Night?
She buried her face in her arms. But like a poison still she felt his fever working in her blood, like rust, like sickness, like a pregnancy. It was his song, come back to torment her.
