(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
10. Of What Lay Buried Beneath the Sea
DOES HE come to us now? she wondered.
Fifty horsemen rode into the moonlight, reining in their mounts. Their dogs swarmed around Lady Agatha, white as sows with blood-red ears, showing their teeth.
Gray were those men, steeped in old sins. They might have been King’s men in the Day.
The foremost tilted back his hat and laid his hand gently upon the stock of his gun. ‘Mary bless all here,’ said he in a foreign voice, shouting down the hounds.
‘Let her increase you,’ answered Agatha. ‘What can we be offering you gentlemen?’
‘Hunting a rogue, my girl,’ he said. ‘A thief, and a murderer no doubt. Have you seen aught of him? For he’s surely come into this wood.’
‘We’ve seen no one, the way you fine sirs are the first guests we’ve had since Day. But one of our men saw tracks in the snow down the way yonder.’ As well to be rid of them, she was thinking.
Grimly the men traded glances. ‘My thanks, girl. Tell your men to be keeping their eyes open, and you keep to your door. If we cannot find him before moonfall, perhaps we’ll be accepting your hospitality.’
Then ‘Away, my lads!’ he rumbled, and the pack of them turned. Only Lady Agatha called after them asking, ‘But just what is it this man’s done to you?’
At which the hindmost looked back at her. It was a murderous half-smile on his lips, and he answering her, but his foreign tones were beyond her ken under the crashing-away of horses and hounds.
The door to the hall was open a crack, and the cottager’s daughter looking out with reddened eyes.
‘What was it?’ she was asking.
Lady Agatha smiled and answered, ‘The last running of the law.’
Now the door opened wide and the trees appeared, bearing the chopped log between them. In the glade they dug and planted it, the fallen tree that had been Owen. Mielusine was weeping and moaning over him, and the knotty trees chanting, some last rites they were inventing.
Lady Agatha went into the hall.
Just at moonfall the sounds of the chase redoubled – screams, brays, and gunshots exploding in the quiet wood.
After a time the echoes lapsed away.
Lady Agatha sat at her sewing. Maid Mielusine sat by the door looking out at Owen, unable to eat.
The trees were in their circle again. Their branches were bristling now at those strange sounds, and what they might be meaning for the maid.
In the middle darkness shouts rang off the door and Lady Agatha went out.
‘You may tell your masters now it’s done,’ the gray man told her. ‘The traitor’s dead. We’ll not be troubling you more, the way it’s a hard track to be following, and a long way to be going home for us.’ He seemed tired and hollowed out, now his work was done, and he empty-handed from it all.
They all fifty rode away then.
‘It’s never they’ll be finding their home again, I’m thinking,’ Agatha said. ‘They played the Night and lost.’
‘What of the man they were chasing?’ Mielusine said. ‘At very least we can see him rightly buried.’
‘With what rites? Is it a priest you’ll be looking for now?’
‘Faith, it might be Master Aengus!’
Agatha looked at the girl. She had not seen such strength in the pale face before. It raised a touch of doubt in herself. ‘It isn’t him,’ she said. ‘It could not be. But if you must, we will go looking.’
In thin darkness they were wending their way down the hill, the maid and the lady, and the trees slowly catching up. Oimell Moon it was, the beginning of Spring by the old calendar of the day, and the hill still caked in snow.
It was fear was in the trees. They had been happy once on a time, alone with Mielusine. Lady Agatha had ended that. Now those horsemen were come, with guns and growling dogs. What other evil fortune would follow?
In a deep lost place they found a horse, its reins caught in a tangle of thorns growing from the snow. The skin of snow in the place was torn, and the black earth seeping through like blood. Not far off they found the man, face down in snow.
Agatha stared at him, fearful now. He was of a height and a color and a shape, could have been Aengus after all.
‘Is he dead now?’ whispered Maid Mielusine.
Lady Agatha soothed the horse and bent over the rider. She caught him by the shoulder, turning his head.
It was a stranger.
‘No,’ she said, breathing. ‘This one’s not Aengus.’
‘But how goes it with him?’ asked the maid, stepping closer.
‘He’s shot, and the hounds have worried at him,’ Agatha said. ‘And those are not his only wounds.’
The man let out a groan. ‘But not dead now,’ he said ‘—not yet.’
He tried a thin wan smile, but his face paled and his eyes rolled up and round. All the blood ran out of his head and he slumped back on the snow, moaning.
‘He is burning with fever,’ said Agatha. ‘And pale from blood loss … but his voice is from a land across the sea,’ she added wonderingly.
The Maid turned to the trees, only now arriving. ‘We must bring him to the hall.’
Grumbling, the trees set about lashing wythes and cípíns together. When they lifted the stranger up on the bier, the wet white snow under his body was black and red with blood.
HE WAS SHAKING and shivering with wet, was Master Aengus, when he stepped back upon the wet Irish sand on the dark of the moon. He put back his cloak, and raised his face in the snow and icicle rain, and looked up into the secret huddled masses of hills.
Now he was driven back almost to the place he’d started from. And now the dream was lost, and he knew not at all how to be bringing back the Sun.
‘What now?’ he muttered. ‘What now, and where?’
He shouldered his pack, and set off down a path. In thirteen darknesses Master Aengus journeyed round the coast, to the great cliffs of Moher over the Western Sea.
That was Imbolc Moon now, Candlemas, and the land was starred with a thousand needfires cold and white in the Night. During the Day, the land would have been greening, and Spring not far afield. But still the deep cold it was gathering, and at the back of the north the Sea was groaning and cracking with ice.
Atop the cliffs, at the very edge, Master Aengus stood, wind curling his hair, his head swimming with suaran.
He made a rope and clambered down the cliffs, and found a little strand hidden tucked away neat as a puffin’s nest. He limped along the strand, over rocks and cobbles chased with ice. The waves curled round him silver in the Moon’s pale light, like the combed manes of petted ponies; and the end of the Sea seemed far away.
And from the waves Master Aengus heard the sea-morgans calling out to him and singing, and their song drew tears from his dark face, the way the morgans sang to him.
He found a curagh caught upon the strand, and over it one wrapt in a seaman’s woolen coat, a tricorn low on his brow. His head was big as a pumpkin, and the collar and his muffler concealed his face.
‘Is it your curagh?’ asked Master Aengus. ‘What will you take to let me sail it out upon the waves?’
That one turned his icy eyes on him, and all at once Aengus knew him.
The muffled figure answered him never a word. He raised his arm, and one long finger pointed to the sea.
Aengus kept his eye upon the muffled one, while he put his bundle in and took the curagh into the sea’s bright foam. At that the thing upon the shore turned and started pacing slowly back and forth, its black shoes breaking the ice upon the sand, crack-crunch, crack-crunch. Thirteen steps north and thirteen south, slowly, like a clock.
The wind blew the waves between the floes to dancing wild reels, but Master Aengus on the moonpath stood up in the curagh, pulling the sheet taut in his fingers, and the little boat shot forth as if out of a cannon, skipping across the waves.
The Imbolc Moon sank, and darkness swallowed up the little boat. Round about blind fishes came, souls of lost drowned girls, speaking girlishly:
‘What is this boat my hand is feeling? What man is here, so far from land?’
‘I am Master Aengus,’ he answered, defiantly: ‘Tell me the secret of the Sun. How may I do what I will do?’
‘We know, we know!’ said a second. ‘Let us help him now!’
‘Nay,’ said the third: ‘we are blind, now. What good would it do us, even if Aengus could do what he will?’
‘Go back then if you will, but we will help him on.’
And the blind girls caught the curagh with their cold slippery arms, two at the stern and one at the bow, lashing their long fantails with all their might, bounding forward faster than the wind.
Master Aengus heard their voices piping in the hiss-wash of the waves, and he thought of Agatha’s voice, the way she had been in the Sun.
Deep in the Western Sea the sightless fish-girls took the boat, to the island that was there.
‘Is this the end of my journey?’ asked Master Aengus.
‘Go ashore, and eat your fill!’ the fishes answered slyly. ‘Mind you don’t get burned!’ There west of all lands they left him, and swam back to the shallows.
AT MOONRISE Master Aengus stepped out on the shore.
On the island he found water and fruit, and it was warm there. He went up among the tall waving grasses, looking eastward for the way back: but the tidal waters came climbing after him, washing up to the trees.
Master Aengus climbed higher, but the waves climbed after him. Until he reached the top of the island and it all sank down beneath him, under the water, and Master Aengus with it.
The waters were boiling around Master Aengus’ head, bubbles bright as candles about his eyes. He sank straight down, holding his breath.
In the sea-light he could see plowed fields green with sea weeds, and the blue spires of lost churches, and folk working on the land.
Master Aengus felt warmth beneath his feet. The top of the hill was a ridge, and it rippled like a scallop’s shell. And through the cracks a light was streaming in thick golden ropes.
It was the Sun, buried in the seabed.
Master Aengus knelt and put his fingers to the ridge. With all his strength he strove to open the crack. But the heat burned his hands even in water; and the last of his strength went out of him like a drop of water on hot coals. Bubbles bursting from his lips, and he sinking on the ridge, and moving no more.
