(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
9. Of the Bitterness of Beauty
IN THE NIGHT-LAND laws were forgotten, prisons emptied, and tax-men shut up snoring. Titles were tossed aside, armies disbanded, churches left locked and forsaken. The world of Day had been ruled by men pious and old; the Night was for the young, the charming, and the wicked. Courts were opening everywhere, round needfires lined with tents and rude wagons for now, but soon building palaces with tilting gables.
Outside the quiet wood, outside the ring of hedge, the land of Ireland was sparkling with thousands of such fires, burning into eyes brilliant with hopes, ambitions, wild desire. It was no world for the faint of heart. Only one law was dredged up out of the past. Pleasure ruled all their wild hearts; and the seat of their parliament was in the abbey in the mist.
Alone in all the landscape of the Night, alone of all the Wakeful, Master Aengus looked to summon back the Sun.
There had been a rock in his dream of bringing back the Sun; he climbed where the blind birds wheeled. There had been water in his dream; he crossed the sea into the dark continent of Europe. There had been voices in his dream; he stole through the ruins of cities, oppressed by the sleepfulness of the peoples of the Day. Through all that year Master Aengus searched.
And the Sodality of Light found Master Aengus, in a ruinous abbey on the Rhine, and offered him a way to the bright shore, where the Black Sun was shining, if he would forsake the White Hind. He answered them, ‘Before your light I will take my darkness, because it is mine.’
Master Aengus went into the kingdom of France, and from France he went to the kingdom of Spain, and from Spain he went by way of the black, blind sea to Scotland, where all the children ruled, and from Scotland to Wales, where he found no way to summon back the Sun. At last, defeated, he sailed back to the Irish land, on the dark of the moon when Lady Agatha used his art to conjure up the Mask.
NOW THE FORMER HAPPINESS of the Honey Hall was gone. Maid Mielusine teasingly would be trying her arts upon the trees, and a jealousy sprang up amongst them they had never known before. Each boasted of the smallest duais of a kiss the maid granted him, until another won a more recent award, driving the first into the dark wood, groaning and hacking dead trees with his ax.
Agatha left the Maid and her trees, and she went out of the hall without her cloak. She walked up the top of the hill, where the trees were sparser, and the sky loomed over the dark. The Moon was just rising out of the south: the second moon after she had made the Mask, and the fields still spangled with the red embers of a hundred needfires. The brightness of the Moon and stars was glimmering off the snow, but clouds soon came, blotting out the sky again, and light, stinging snow began to fall. And for a space of three hours she was standing on the hill cloakless in the snow, shivering, looking out.
What had happened? Where was he?
She turned back down the hill.
Maid Mielusine was stirring the mash in her cauldron in the glade for the animals in her byre. Pigs and cows she had, that had come grunting and lowing to her in the darkness, lost, and she’d taken them in for pets.
Agatha stayed by the edge of the wood, watching the maid and wondering, Is she ready yet? Is she strong enough?
Already Agatha knew she had waited too long. The dream of the moonlight was troubling her. And yet she herself was putting off those words to Mielusine: ‘Come get your gowns, we will be going now, to hunt down Master Aengus.’
Lady Agatha saw one of the trees lurching across the glade, and bending over the maid. The Maid, alarmed, dropped her paddle and hurried away with the tree into the wood.
Lady Agatha watched them go. Not yet, she was thinking. She is too tender-hearted still, and harmless.
Straightway Mielusine had seen the terror on the wooden face. ‘What is it, Conn?’ she asked. ‘What has happened?’
‘Something – something awful, Miss. Let her spare me, it’s Owen. I killed him. Yes, I’m sure he’s dead.’
‘Take me to him,’ cried Mielusine. Along the way she coaxed the tree to be telling her what had happened.
‘It was my idea, Miss,’ Conn said. ‘We were digging, and Owen pulled out a big stone split in two, warm and beautiful. I said to him then, “This is just the right stone to hollow out, the way the birds will be coming and drinking from it. You know how Mielusine loves her birds.” It was my idea, Miss, and I only wanting to please you.’
‘Yes, Conn. But Owen?’
‘Well, Owen said that was just what he’d been thinking all along. He wanted all the praise for it, you see, to cut me out completely.
‘So I got mad and said, “Why, you termite nose! It was me came by the idea. You would’ve used the stone like all the others you get, to warm your rooty toes when you snore. Get another rock for that, but I’m taking this one, and it’s me’ll make the bird pool for Maid Mielusine!” ’
‘Does it matter that much who made it, now?’
‘No, Miss, I suppose not. Yes! You are so lovely now. We know we don’t deserve you. It was my idea. Why should that knot-nosed Owen win a kiss for it?
‘But he wanted it, you see, and wouldn’t let go. So “Owen,” says I, “I’ll take that stone now if you please, and if you won’t, then I’ll take it with your hands attached.” And I pull out my ax to show him I mean it. I was sure he’d back off then, Miss. Only he didn’t.
‘Next thing is, we’re on the ground kicking, and there’s Owen reaching for his shovel to give me a whack. That maddened me, and I went for him. I guess the ax was still in my hands, and when I came to my senses there I was standing and swinging, and Owen on the ground, and splinters flying out of him.’
Tears welled in the maid’s eyes. ‘Is that what happened now?’
‘Yes, Miss, and I’m ashamed for it. Straightway I flung down that curst ax of mine and came begging your pardon before my nerve failed. I’m hateful, and you’ll never smile on me again.’
His step slowed. ‘That’s it, Miss,’ he said. ‘Just over that knoll. I can’t go nearer, Miss, don’t ask me!’
‘All right, Conn,’ said Mielusine.
There was earth mounded up on all sides in the glade, strewn about with rocks from the pits in a tri-na-chiele. In the middle lay a broad round stone, and Owen.
Mielusine knelt over him. Her gentle hands ran up and down the knotty flesh. She was feeling the deep gouges in him, where the wood shone raw and fresh. On every hand the faces of the others were peeking from behind the piles.
‘Come, my lads, and help me,’ she called to them. ‘I do not think that he is quite beyond all hope, but I must have him back inside the hall.’
Charily they came down amongst the dirt-heaps, even Conn. They shouldered Owen’s body, and trudged the long way home.
Inside the door they laid him down. Great sugary tears were oozing from their eyes. Softly Lady Agatha stepped inside the door, watching.
Mielusine hung Owen’s belt on his peg on the wall. She took water from her cauldron and washed Owen all over, head to toe, root to crown, covering him with the bubbling warm foam. By his branching hair she held him, drying him with towels.
Then she made a paste with herbs and her honey, thick in the bottom of a dark old crock. And she filled in his wounds with the paste, squeezing the gashes together. With the last of her honey, she daubed his wooden lips.
Then, at last, she was kissing him. She was kissing his eyes and his honey-smeared lips.
But when Mielusine washed Owen he did not sputter. And when she daubed the honey on his lips, his mouth did not open. And when she kissed his lips there was only the taste of honey in her mouth, and under that a bitterness, of raw wood.
Tears were streaming from the Maid’s eyes onto the great, long, chopped-at log. She turned to the others; but at the look that was on her then they all shrank back. Last of all Mielusine’s eyes sought out her friend, Lady Agatha, standing by the door. For a still, soft moment the two women were regarding each other.
Agatha turned, and stepped out of the hall.
On the border of the Night, Agatha looked up to the Moon. Still was the air, silent and deathly the wood on the dark hill side.
From the beginning, the Maid had been pretty as the reflection of a star in a pool’s calm water. The difference is always this, the way prettiness is innocent, beauty is knowing, prettiness comes of nature and beauty of art. And all art is dangerous.
Lady Agatha had made her beautiful in the way Master Aengus thought of beauty. She knew and none better, what beauty he was seeking. She had made a country-girl into the embodiment of Master Aengus’ dream, the better to be snaring him and freeing herself. But at the same time she robbed Mielusine of her innocence.
Had Mielusine still been innocent, then the charm of her honey would have brought back Owen’s life.
It is almost ready she is, Lady Agatha thought. She begins to know, what a thing her beauty is. Now let her take pleasure in it.
Lady Agatha lifted her head, taken by a sound in the air. It was not the wailing from the hall, of the virgin Maid and her trees. It came from down the hill, from the deep of the wood.
It was the beat of horses Lady Agatha was hearing, and the baying of hounds, and the shouts of men.
