(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
13. How the Trees Were Stilled
LATE IN THE DARKNESS of that moon, at last, Maid Mielusine ladled out her cooking to her trees. Herself, she ate no part of it.
She sat in the hob seat in the hearth and looked into the embers burning out. Maid Mielusine fell quiet, bending in upon herself. They are gone now, she saying to herself, over and over and over again. Prince Eudemarec has taken Lady Agatha away, and they two are gone now beyond the hedge out of this wood, out into the Night-land broad.
The trees grew louder and coarser than ever, if that was possible. They weren’t sorry at all those two had gone. Mielusine was theirs again, and no one else would claim her: no!
And they fell to boasting amongst themselves, who of them would prove her best guardsman.
‘It’s me!’ shouted Neil. ‘I’ll be her best protector!’
‘I’ll be letting nobody near her!’ shouted Sean.
And Griff and Sean and Neil they were towering out from the benches, and butting crowns amongst the rafters, knocking up a frightful din, the others shouting them on, shoving forward and back.
Maid Mielusine on the hob by the hearth bent her head, glaring at them. The trees weren’t looking often her way, the way her looks for them were so very mad.
All at once she leapt up: caught a firebrand from the hearth, swinging it, shouting ‘Leave! Leave! Leave!’
Mielusine flung the door shut on them; she was tearing off the white gown, digging in her chest for her homespun clothes. But her eyes were falling on the slumbering red gown, and she was feeling how unfair all of it was.
Again and again she was regretting being shy with Eudemarec. Again and again she was taken with thoughts of how pleasant it would have been to have been kissed by him: to be kissed by any man at all! The thought of it started something burning up in her, dreadful and fine. And all alone she was curling up on the hearthstones in the glow of the fire, and wishing in her misery to be sleeping endlessly, ignorant of the world.
I must be rising soon, she was dreaming in herself at last. The way it must be moonrise already, and my animals in the byre hungry and lone. But she did not move.
At last she was hearing a sound at the door, and Mielusine saw someone standing there, half shadow, shining through the damp veil of her tears.
‘Am I dreaming now,’ Mielusine was whispering, ‘or is it truly you?’
The figure reached out its arms, beckoning.
‘Mielusine!’ the figure called.
‘Mielusine, Eudemarec is gone, he bore me to the hedge at the edge of the wood but I couldn’t go farther with him. He knows where Master Aengus is now, Mielusine, and is gone to kill him. It was I told him where to find him!
‘And now I cannot keep away, but it draws me like adamant, I must be going there, but my thoughts are running, round and round – Mielusine, it’s that you must be coming with me, or I will be falling dead in a ditch along the road even if I could be getting out of here. Will you, Mielusine? Will you come with me after Eudemarec, and keep him from killing Master Aengus?’
The Maid crawled to her feet. She was leaning back against the hearth, her hand half raised. In her belly it was hollow, as though she had been struck there. The tips of her breasts against the coarse wool of her kirtle were burning, burning. Then she answered,
‘Surely I’ll go with you, Agatha. Weren’t we planning it all along? He’s going to Master Aengus? Take me along with you.’
And Lady Agatha filled a corna with goat’s cream and drank of it, and offered it to the maid.
‘Drink,’ she said, ‘and finish it.’
Mielusine turned the corna round, to the white kiss on the rim where the lady had drank, and pressed her lips to the very spot, drinking and feeling the lady’s eyes looking that deep into hers.
Outside the Honey Hall, the moon and her Night-land they were beckoning them. And they went out of the hall, those women, and slipped away into the Night.
AS TO THE TREES, they were hiding themselves out of shame and suffering in the dug-up glade where Conn killed Owen. They were standing there, bent over among the lifeless trees. And their thoughts were running in the same stream-bed, and it’s sad and lonely they were, and worried for the maid.
And their branches were creaking in the chill night’s wind.
What is wrong with Maid Mielusine? creaked the branches of this one. Why don’t she come deck us with flowers and straw rings as she used?
It’s all Agatha’s fault, creaked the branches of that one. She’s ugly. I hate her! How did we ever take her for a lady, now?
Mielusine loves her. And besides, she made her the lovely white gown, and transfigured her.
They all were sighing the same sad song, twisting back toward the hall where herself, as they thought, lay dreaming.
You knot-heads, let her char you all! What’s the matter with you now? broke in one sharply as the snapping of a limb. It’s not with you she’s wanting to play! Moy-rua, can’t you see Miss Mielusine’s a lady now herself?
There was stillness in the glade after that. Only the chill wind soughing and sighing in the branches of the dead trees. The eight friends waited, but it was in vain, the way Maid Mielusine wasn’t coming round to find them and shoo them all home for a good hot meal. Come the next darkness they crept back to the hall – they had to.
They reached the clearing. They looked squinting across to the hall. The door was open wide, and the gate of the byre was open too, and Mielusine’s pets were gone. It was dark in the hall, and still.
The trees crept closer. There was no sound within, and fear was all but curling up their rooty toes.
Inside the hall they found it empty and cold, and bed-clothes and cups scattered about, all tri-na-chiele. But in the dirt outside the door, in a curve round the base of the bird-pool they eight had made, white stones spelled the words,
FARE
WELL
They stared at those stones, at those marks left in the dirt. But long as they stared, the words would not be transforming themselves into any better news than that.
‘She’s gone, she is,’ groaned Griff, after a good long while. ‘Maid Mielusine is gone.’
‘Will she be returning, now,’ wondered Neil.
‘It was Conn drove her away,’ said Ted. That was the start of another quarrel between them, the worst one yet, and it ended when they all broke away, and trudged down the hill on different paths. But each in his own path was slowing and stiffening.
It was Maid Mielusine had charmed them into life. Now Mielusine was gone.
And in the end they stopped altogether, near the hedge at the ends of the wood. Separately they closed their knotty eyes, bending back their arms in the most comfortable way. Their faces were blending back into bark. Their toes were sinking into the warm ground, holding them in place. Drowsy they were, and falling asleep, sleep such as trees know that live hundreds of years, the unquick life of trees.
But just before he stopped entirely, and the wood in him stiffened into its old hardness forever, and the rough bark crusted over the features of his face, then at that moment every tree sighed, a sigh as soft and plaintive as the old wind through the branches of the naked midwinter twilight. And he prayed in his last sigh, ‘Do not lose sight of me utterly, Maid Mielusine, but remember me from time to time.’
‘Remember me,’ sighed Barry, and
‘Remember me,’ sighed Griff.
‘Remember me,’ sighed Neil, while far away across the wood,
‘Remember me,’ sighed Will, and
‘Remember me,’ sighed Ted, while Tadgh sighed far away,
‘Remember me.’
‘Remember me,’ sighed How.
‘Remember me,’ sighed Conn.
Conn was the last of them, the last of them still quick in their slow woody way, and Conn’s sighing was the last of all their magic, dying in a wide ring round the half-burnt wood. They moved no more, nor spoke, nor sang, nor dug, nor drank. They were no more than trees. Do trees drink or dance?
And from then onward there was nothing to tell them from their burned brethren, but the one thing:
From the splinters of his crown, from the knot once a nose, from onetime fingertips, each of those eight was sprouting tender shoots, so pale in the moonlight they might have been gold.
MAID MIELUSINE was walking alongside Lady Agatha down the path.
And Lady Agatha was saying, ‘It was at the pond I told him. “Is it true?” he asks me. His horse is nearby; in an instant he’s mounted, and drawing me up behind him. And we’re riding, and the branches shooting past, down this very path. But at the wood’s edge we reach the hole in the hedge, when all of a sudden the hedge-claws push against me, and light me down on the moss. Eudemarec rides on through, stops his steed and whirls it round.
‘And he calls, “Come on, Agatha! Come riding with me!”
‘I leap after him, but again the hedge won’t let me pass. Oh, for the curse of too much wisdom! My own cleverness defeating me, the way I was casting a spell across the hedge not to be letting you leave without me, lest the Breton carry you off; but the hedge loves you, and won’t let me go alone either, lest you be trapped in the wood behind.
‘I groan and call to him, “I cannot go farther, man!” ’
‘ “No?” he asks me. Och, you should have seen the man! There’s a mad gleaming in his eye, and he making his horse to dance. Holiness is taking hold of him, the purity of vengeance, and he handsome as never before.
Again he asks me: “No? Then bide you here, my sweetest, grimmest Agatha: and I’ll bring you Master Aengus’ head in a basket!” And he rides away. He rides so fast, he must be halfway to the Sea by now!’
‘He will not really hurt Master Aengus?’ asked Mielusine after a bit.
‘Wasn’t he a cut-throat now, on the edge of Broceliande? Didn’t he learn of sword-cutting and pistol-shot from the finest dueling-masters in Nantes? Master Aengus is no soldier, Mielusine.’
The path was widening, the starry fields shining through. Already they could see the dense wall of the hedge, broken at the path’s end in the way of a gate.
Mielusine slowed her step.
‘Come on, now,’ urged Lady Agatha.
Mielusine was looking back. She wasn’t wanting to be leaving. Too soon it was coming, the moment she must be bidding farewell to this place.
She looked up, about and back again. The black trees were so comforting! A sudden pang was striking her: My trees now, where are they, what will they do?
‘Come along, we must be hurrying,’ said Agatha. Mielusine looked down, at the claw of the lady, pulling on her arm.
And ahead through the fine weave of the hedge and blackened branches was shining the tip of the arc of the Moon: dreamlike it was, and reminding her somehow of Aengus.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, ‘you are right. We must be hurrying.’
And the two women slipped out through the hedge, and on the gleaming road took up Eudemarec’s trail into the heart of Ireland.
