(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
14. Of the Each Dubh
THEY WERE WALKING now, walking through the Night. Summer had come round again, cool and belated, but an end to the snow at least. There was a stillness swallowing the Night-land, and only their steps on the road were cracking, loudly, like grain brayed in a mortar.
‘Och, this silence!’ cried Agatha one moon. ‘It’s mad it’s driving me, the way only my mad thoughts are filling it, all about Aengus, and madness, and death. Sing, Mielusine, will you please?’
‘What could I be singing, against this great high ceiling of stars and black clouds?’ asked the Maid.
‘It matters nothing, as to that: only sing. Sing a cradle song, sing something, sing nonsense sounds, so you sing away this crying in my self!’
Then Maid Mielusine took pity on her friend; she lowered her head, and thought; and after a moment, along with the crunch of their footsteps, the maid’s voice, wavering as a child’s, went out into that airy vastness. She sang songs she had learned of her mother at the cradle, she sang songs for washing and for work, and for resting by the evening fire.
That would have been Midsummer Eve in Day, and they wandering through a county burning with bonfires and the laughing of gentle folk. Overhead the sky drew across itself a covering in a muslin of cloud, breaking at times, showing the Moon. A chaplet of primroses wreathed the Moon, shivering like Mielusine’s voice.
THE NEXT MOONRISE they found a post-house beside a bank of rowans. Abandoned it seemed, but for a dim glow in the window.
An old man was waiting inside. He welcomed them in with a fine fialte; his name he gave as Connor; and he was so quaint and foolish-wise, Mielusine soon loved him. ‘No questions now,’ said he: ‘Eat, drink, be warm by my fire! Mary bless such travelers as you, to fill the empty hours!’
‘We are looking for a Breton, must have passed this way,’ said Lady Agatha. ‘Do you know what way he took? He was bound for the abbey of Arianna, wherever that may be.’
‘Is that where he’s headed now? Aye, I know him,’ said Connor. ‘Was in a fearful hurry he was. But he took the long road to be going to the mist. If he’d deigned to speak with a man, I might have set him right.’
‘Which way? We must be catching him.’
‘Ah, settle yourself, girl!’ he said.
He bent over the fire, reddening the tobacco in his dudeen. ‘I can set you on a way, will have you there in half the time he’ll take. I’ll even lend you a horse to be beating him. But for this you must be paying me – no coins, now! For it’s the love I have of travelers’ tales, and now that I alone am running the place, with no interference of others, it’s the only currency I’ll take!’
‘Then it’s a grand tale I’ll be giving you,’ Lady Agatha said. And then and there she set out a tale of how she and Mielusine had come to the post-house; a tale full of lost loves, duels and perilous flights: a tale worthy of her beloved novel, and not a word of it true. Maid Mielusine sat agape at it, but Connor listened with not a blink of his eye.
‘Well,’ he said at last, puffing on his dudeen. ‘Well, well! Girl, this is the fanciest tale I ever yet heard. And are you sure you’ve got it all straight, now?’
And he laughed, and Agatha joined him.
‘So you’ve told me one,’ he said, ‘let me tell you another! Did you ever hear of the Man Who Should Have Slept?’
He smiled at their frowns, and spat into the fire.
‘Och, ’tis the strangest tale! It was himself, sitting there across from me at this very table, told me the tale! He came from a far kingdom across the seas, and in the last evenings of the Day, he alone saw the spot growing on the face of the Sun, and knew what that betokened.
‘He knew, you see, the Night was coming, and he knew, too, that he was meant to be one of the Sleepers. But he knew how to fight against the Sleep, and he willed himself awake. And he alone, out of all the Sleepers, stayed awake in the Night, though at a cost – a dear cost, I can tell you, having seen the grisly grim eye in his dead gray face. I could have reached out and touched it myself, the man was as close to me as that!
‘Tell me,’ said Connor, leaning over the table and lowering his voice, though no one was about: ‘Did you never wonder, why was it we woke, while so many others are Sleeping? I’ll tell you. We are all of a kind, we Wakeful. Unspoken words, more secret even than the freemasons’, bind us all as one.’
‘Ah, it was an accident, sure, and no more than that,’ Lady Agatha said. ‘Listen, stage-keeper, if you like tales so much. Do you want to know why the Night fell, and what man brought all this on our heads?’
‘Och, you’ll not be telling me the old tale of our Master Aengus and his lady, will you girl? There are half a dozen stories more amusing than his. Everyone’s heard of him; but who can tell where he ended, and where his lady is? And what’s the good of a tale without a proper ending?’
She stared at him.
‘Oh, I’ve heard many a better tale,’ he went on. ‘And here’s the one I like best. It was no one man woke the Unappeasable Host, as what one man could? – but it was the groaning and the prayers of us all – all us Wakeful, now. We in our hearts, beaten down with taxes, press-gangs, and the heaping-up of laws, we all were calling them out. And now we’ve only so much Night to cut loose the reins of the world, ere the blessed dawn break and all the Sleepers wake! It’s them are sleeping, but us dreaming the new world up over their heads, and before they waken, why it’ll be done!’
‘What will the new world be like, Mr Connor?’ asked Mielusine.
‘Ah. Ah, now. ’Twill be a world,’ he answered, puffing with all solemnity, ‘where the past will be dead, clean uprooted from the earth. It will be a world where what a fellow holds in his hand and what he holds in his head will not be the same, but what’s in his head will be worth more! It will be the world of all Desiring, and Reaching, and Pleasure. ’Twill be the world of our own making, Miss. We’ve but to dream for it.’
Mielusine said, ‘Someone’s spying on us.’
‘Ah, now,’ said Connor, ‘Here’s Siobhan.’
A young woman emerged from the shadows at the back of the house.
She was dark and graceful, and pretty, the way she was biting her lip. She wore a dark woolen dress with a long dark shawl, and her black hair was spilling out in a mass of unruly ringlets halfway down to her knees. Her eyes were dark, narrow, and odd.
‘Let her bless you,’ she whispered.
‘Wasn’t I telling you?’ Connor asked with a snort of a laugh. ‘Where else but in the Night would a wild young maid be burning up her time with an old gentleman such as myself?’
She took his hand and kissed it. ‘It’s that you tell the grandest tales,’ she murmured.
Mielusine reached out and laid the palm of her hand across the woman’s lower belly. Siobhan held Mielusine’s hand there, and laughed.
‘Isn’t it grand?’ she asked, shaking her head and looking sideways at Connor. ‘It was during this Night he was conceived.’
COME MOONRISE Connor took them to the stable, and brought them out a horse.
And black was that horse; tall, great of body, too. Only his eyes could be properly seen, gleaming red, and the splash of a star on his forehead, moving against the clouds.
‘Here is my joy,’ breathed Connor.
‘He is a miracle,’ murmured Agatha. ‘How comes it that you, in this post-house, keep a horse worthy of a sultan?’
‘Did I not tell you, we’ve only to dream? It was Porter found me as much as ever I did him. Steady, girl! You both must ride him, for no other horse could match him! He’ll take no saddle nor bridle, but if you hang on, and whisper in his ear, he’ll bear you smooth as a Lughnasadh wind.’
Lady Agatha climbed on the each dubh easily, but the Maid hung back. ‘He’s wild, I’ll fall and die,’ she whispered.
‘Let you take hold of my arm and climb up,’ commanded Lady Agatha. ‘Mr Connor, help her – put up your skirts, Mielusine, grip him with your ankles and your knees. Wreathe your arms about my waist; I’ve a mind to see how fast he is!’
‘Moy-rua, let him choose his own pace,’ said Connor. ‘But you now, it’s a deoch an dorrus you must be drinking, to speed you on your way. Here’s the corna now, and be drinking down to its bottom. Isn’t it my own poteen, that warmer than porter, that warmer than mead?’
Lady Agatha swallowed down the burning hot liquor, and the three of them, Agatha, Connor, and Siobhan, made Mielusine empty the corna too, though she was unwilling.
‘And when,’ said Connor, ‘you’ve reached the place you want to be, let him be fed and leave him, and he’ll find his way back here to me, if it’s here he’s a mind to be. Now farewell, and Mary watch over you!’
Lady Agatha hugged the bony neck to her breast, burning from the white poteen.
‘Go where I’m going, Porter!’ she breathed. ‘Go!’
Porter took a turn about the yard, tossing his head and whinnying to his mares in the stable. Then he surged straight for the hedge across the road, knowing the way without telling, and he leapt into the field beyond: and they were off, and the post-house already far behind.
Oh, but what a ride that was!
They were crossing fields, streams and fences as fast as memory. In the county of bogs Porter was dashing and darting beneath quarried cliffs of peat, fragrant with roots and all the buried past. Mud and spray were drenching the women’s legs, and they must be closing their eyes and averting their faces.
‘Oh, can you go no faster?’ whispered Agatha in his ear.
Faster than the Moon they were moving, and the wind sweeping back the mane of the each dubh, and the women’s hair streaming back like banners black and reddish-bronze.
The horse’s flanks were shivering now. It was harder to be holding on. And dimly in the distance, in the last light of the Moon, a glimmering lit the edge of the world.
That was the ridge of Connor’s warning to them: beyond it lay the county of mist, and in the middle of the mist they’d be finding the lough, the crannog, and the abbey of the Lady.
And far far ahead, they spied a fluttering, of a starling on the wing. And Agatha whispered:
‘Let you catch me that starling, and pass her before she cross the ridge.’
Violence shuddered through the steed. The wind was snapping the women’s dresses like sails, fraying and rending.
Mielusine was laughing, she was so scared, shutting her eyes. Agatha’s eyes were narrow as a Russian girl’s. Grand was Connor’s poteen, the way they would have been thrown into a ditch long before then, but for the fire of it searing their arms and their limbs and helping them hold on.
Now the starling was a quarter mile ahead, a stone’s cast off the ridge. Porter was laboring up the long slope. And the Moon slipped behind the dark rise to the left.
The foam boiled off the stallion’s neck, stinging and burning Lady Agatha’s eyes. She rubbed them on her shoulder and looked back in time to see the starling, bobbing in the air, fall behind them as they shot past. And beyond the ridge stretched a lake, bright as a mirror, as far as the eye could see.
Over the ridge, across the road raced the each dubh, helpless to stop: they fell into the water with a stinging great splash, even as Agatha cried out her exultation.
But strangely, they plunged into the lake without being wet; and it was not water, but mist, so thick its surface cast back the moonlight like waves.
And all that darkness until moonrise they were descending the inner slope, walking and leading the horse. They had to, the mist was so thick in that county. Mielusine was lying moaning on Porter, and he in a muck sweat, his sides bleeding, near dead with the racing.
‘Oh, my poor darling, my Porter,’ moaned Mielusine, ‘will you be well again? Oh, I’m all sore and shaking, Agatha, why did you bid him to go so fast?’
Lady Agatha led the way. She paid the Maid no mind. Only one thought she was thinking, and that was this, how far a lead Eudemarec had, and where was he now?
Heavier and heavier weighed Aengus in her mind.
The fury of the ride had been a respite, but the poteen was burned out of her now. ‘So comes the prisoner home into his jail,’ she was murmuring. ‘Not hopefully and not defiantly, but merely because he must. Because in truth he never left.’
It was not that she was wanting to see Aengus again. She was dreading it. She was hoping he would have gone away, no man knew where. She had no trust in herself, in what she would do when she saw him. And she was hating herself for it.
Three times the Moon rose, and three times she fell; in the county of mist the mist was brightening a bit when as the Moon was rising, and the mist was darkening a bit when as the Moon was hid. The women went on, now leading the horse, now riding Porter, slowly now in that treacherous land.
Maid Mielusine never knew that in the darkness while she lay resting, Lady Agatha would be rising, and twisting grass-stalks in her fingers, and walking about in the black mist, that like a thousand dewy mouths was tormenting her, gnawing at her face and hair and hands.
Agatha would not eat, lest the comfort let her rest. She fled from her dreams, that were still betraying her.
‘How long since I slept last, I wonder?’ she would ask herself, and be counting and reckoning up the moons as a distraction.
‘Agatha, is it time to be going again?’ murmured the Maid sleepily from her blankets on the grass.
‘Hush now, and be sleeping again, my puss,’ said Agatha, and passing her palm over the Maid’s brow; Mielusine’s eyes lowered, and the easy peace of sleep returned over her face. Then Agatha took up her pacing again, pacing up and down, to and fro, back and forth, in a rut of seventeen paces, even as once he had, long ago in the world of the Sun.
DEEP IN THE COUNTY of mist they climbed across a hillside, that was like a huge barrow or tomb-yard of ancient kings and warriors from the Five Kingdoms. From the top of that barrow they were looking down on a cluster of folk. The folk were leaving, and Lady Agatha led the way down to where those others had been. By the path was the Lady’s Well caught in a circle of stones.
‘I know of this place,’ said Agatha, wondering. ‘But it’s not here this place should be; or am I all turned about again?’
It was the way of the Night-land, that no map was solid and safe, but all the places shifted and slid about, and a body never knew what place would appear on the road ahead.
‘What is the name of it?’ asked Mielusine.
‘And I drank of the water of this well,’ said Agatha. ‘I was that young and proud, and it wasn’t the country-boy courting me I was wanting, but a man of some estate, wealthy and of power.’
She lifted out some water from the well, holding it cupped in her hands. ‘Drink it, now,’ she said to Mielusine. ‘Drink, and think on Master Aengus.’
‘Yes, I’ll do that,’ answered the maid. And she lapped the water out of the lady’s hands. But the each dubh would not drink out of that well.
Now, as soon as Agatha dipped her hands in the water of the well, it started to rise. It rose up to the lip of the circle of stones holding it, and overflowed, and ran down in a little stream between the slopes.
‘Come along,’ said Agatha. She took Maid Mielusine by the hand, and they followed the stream.
Down they traveled, deeper in that mist, the land rising and falling, and on the hillsides hundreds of fruit trees, wild apple, quince and pear. The little stream was running between the hills, snaking between the trees, and the women were following it.
And the deeper into that vale they went, the deeper came a sleepiness into Agatha, so that she could scarcely stay awake.
How long since I slept last, I wonder? she was asking herself, but that answer did not come.
They passed one thousand tents and wagons, filled with dangerous wild-looking folk; and the gleams in the eyes of those men caused the Maid to shrink closer to Agatha for safety. Glad she was, when they came out from the midst of that encampment!
The Moon was falling. That was the Lughnasadh Moon, Lammas in the old calendar of Day. And from ahead a rich smell of rotting reached them, and the lapping of little waves.
‘Is it the lough? Can we stop now?’ asked Mielusine. She was so tired she was almost falling.
But tired as the Maid was, the lady was worn by an even deeper fatigue. She had drunk none of the water of the Lady’s Well, and now an utter sleepiness was overtaking her.
How long since I slept last, I, I cannot – ‘oh! I cannot go on!’ sighed Agatha. She pulled the Maid forward, almost falling on her.
‘Mielusine,’ she whispered into the Maid’s ear, ‘over that rise now, the lough is surely lying. Listen! Do you not hear that clanging of iron upon iron, like a bitter bell? Mielusine, let you go on before me. Go on and call back to me, tell me what you’re seeing!’
Mielusine, impelled by her friend, went after the stream up between the apple trees. Soon she was vanished in the mist beyond. The beating of the iron bell rolled across the unseen water.
Agatha knelt down on the moss beside the little stream. Sleepiness conquering her, and she scarce able to keep her eyes open. Into the stream she murmured,
‘Mielusine, I cannot see! What is it you’re seeing?’
The Maid’s little voice came back along with the ripples, answering. ‘Yes, it is the lough! I see dim yellow lights to the left, of a small village. And out in the lough the mist is a white cloud, and other lights are gleaming like witch-lights over marshes.’
Agatha crept closer to the stream to hear better over the rushing of her sleepiness, and whispered into the water, ‘Mielusine, I cannot see! What is it you’re seeing?’
Faintly the Maid’s voice sprang up out of the ripples. ‘I see another light close to hand. Three torches burn at the water’s edge. Two men are there in silver and scarlet coats, and one ringing an iron bell upon a pole.’
Agatha let close her eyes. So sweet, so sweet some bit of sleep would be! She wormed yet closer over the water, put her lips down just over it and breathed, ‘Mielusine, I cannot see! What is it you’re seeing?’
But no answer was coming from the stream. The Maid was stricken silent.
For in the water of the lough was a swanlike barge, and on it stood a woman. It was tall she was, masked, and enfolded in a rich enormous cloak, that was black and chased with silver.
And on the mud where the stream ran laughing in the lough, two men were walking. They took another step apart with every peal of the bell. They held pistols in their hands, gleaming white and cold. And they were in the midst of a pistol-duel, those two.
One man was a stranger to the maid; the other was Eudemarec.
‘Eudemarec! Eudemarec, it’s me, it’s Maid Mielusine!’ she called. But the Breton paid her no mind. He had thoughts only on his duel, and the killing of his enemy.
In the misty torchlight Maid Mielusine could barely make the stranger out. But there was something wrong with his leg, the way he was limping.
Back in the mist, by the edge of the stream, Agatha’s head was nodding; her eyes they were closing in sleep, and her breath was heavy, deep, and slow. She was hearing her breathing, and nothing else, and no voice reaching her from the duel by the lough.
‘Eudemarec, let you be stopping,’ Mielusine cried.
From the lough the tall lady lifted her eyes and held the Maid’s gaze. And in that stare Mielusine felt a great fear, and found she could not speak, nor move, nor think.
And the lady spoke to her and told her, chill as mist, ‘Girl, be still: you will spoil the game.’
Then the bell rang, one last time; the shivers of iron ran out and back across the waters of the lough; and the two men turned to face each other, across a gulf of thirteen paces.
Agatha sighed, and fell into sleep; her head nodded down, and her lips touched the water of the stream coming from the Lady’s Well.
Eudemarec was standing very still, and the stranger was raising his pistol. The stranger took aim and fired. That shot boomed like cannon-fire across the quiet lough. But the stranger’s aim was careless, and the recoil all but threw him down, leaving the Breton unscathed.
And a drop of the water of the well wetted Agatha’s lips, so she tasted it, and drank; then all at once the weariness was leaving her, and she jerked back her head, and looked about her: Where was she, and what was that crash she had heard, like thunder?
Eudemarec smiled.
‘Now, Master Aengus, you devil, you monster, you hell-spawn,’ he uttered, ‘I have you now.’
He leveled his pistol. Calmly he drew back the hammer with his thumb, and tightened his finger over the trigger. The hammer fell; the muzzle roared; white flame burst from it.
Agatha staggered to her feet, and looked about.
In that roar the stranger fell.
Aengus! her heart was crying. Aengus!
Eudemarec crossed the stream and strode over to the body.
The stranger moaned on the wet mud, and stirred a bit.
‘What,’ muttered the Breton, ‘still alive, after that? You take a deal of killing, sir.’ He drew a second pistol from his belt.
‘Hold,’ said the lady, raising her black-gloved hand.
Eudemarec brought the muzzle of the pistol down against the stranger’s head. ‘No,’ muttered Eudemarec. ‘I’ll not hold. Not if it cost me my life.’
‘It will cost you more than that.’
‘He robbed me of my love, and she was all I valued more.’
‘You’ll find yourself another love. Besides, your job is done. Your man is dead. Isn’t that right, girl?’
Agatha let her feet follow the stream, the way the sound of those shots seemed to be coming from that way. The grass beneath her feet turned wet and muddy, and she saw dim yellow lights to the left, of a small village. And out in the lough the mist was a white cloud, and other lights were gleaming like witch-lights over marshes, even as the Maid had said.
Mielusine came down to the lakeside. She turned the heavy woolen clad shoulders of the fallen man, and laid the head of him into her lap. Brushing back his hair she was looking on him, wondering, Was this truly Master Aengus?
The cheek of him was rough, and marks of torment were traced about the closed eyes. His flesh was waxen, bloodless. The Maid was stroking his closed, bent face, smoothing the lines, until a sort of peacefulness was coming over it. Calm was he seeming, calm and cold as death itself.
She felt the man’s throat. There was no movement there.
Hot tears stung her eyes. ‘It is true,’ she groaned. ‘He is dead now.’
Agatha heard faint voices by the water’s edge, and she wandered on as though she still dreamed. It was against herself her feet were fighting, as though they were knowing what she’d find ahead, and wishing to spare her the sight and the knowing of it. But she went on. She could see another light close to hand. Three torches burned at the water’s edge. Two men were standing there in silver and scarlet coats, and one holding the pull-rope to an iron bell upon a pole.
Eudemarec looked down on the body of the unknown foreigner he had sworn to murder. It was far away now that oath seemed to him, buried behind ramparts of thorn in the Broceliande.
‘But if he is dead,’ he wondered, ‘why is it still Night?’
‘It’s the wrong tales you’ve been heeding,’ answered the lady ironically. ‘It was only that man there, could have brought back the Sun. Now he’s dead, and the Sun will never shine again. Mary bless you for it!’
Agatha stopped, staring at the two men by the bell. The boatmen left the bell, heeding a gesture of the lady; they went down the mud-flats by the ripples of the lough and gathered up the body of the dead man. And they bore the body up the slope away from the water. In the grass at the edge of the orchards they buried it. Their spades crunched into the pebbly earth; and when the men beat down the filled-in soil, the sounds resounded over the glimmering lough like the strokes of hammers.
Every blow of those spades upon the Earth beat heavy on the heart of Agatha, as though it was herself they had buried, and were sealing away from life in the Earth.
The lady stood at the head of the little grave. She crushed and sprinkled a few leaves over the black mound. A smell of peppermint filled the air. The lady stooped and whispered to the Earth, while the Maid wept and sniveled.
Agatha from a distance was looking on, amazed. It isn’t truth, she was thinking. This is some foul theater-piece, it cannot be real.
The lady stood, and looked to the Breton. He was staring at the grave.
What thoughts and dreams scattered themselves through the brain of him, seeing it done, and the end of his long quest?
For many moons Eudemarec had searched for the man, the legendary Aengus who had unbound the girdle of light. Now he’d accomplished his oath. And now, because of that, the Sun would never be rising again. And now, because of that, Mablaith would sleep until the end of the world. It was Mablaith Eudemarec had killed this hour.
‘You fought with style,’ said the lady, passing to the water’s edge. ‘You will come with us into the abbey.’
‘I want to go also,’ said Mielusine.
Agatha made her feet move forward. She came near to the grave.
‘Let you come then,’ allowed the lady. ‘You are delicate as the heather of this land. It’s one of my wards you’ll be, and a dancer in the casino.’
‘And Agatha,’ added Mielusine.
Agatha knelt at the side of the grave. She gripped the dirt in her fingers. Now tears were welling in her eyes, but she spoke no word. Only a little mewing came out, like a cat’s.
‘Not her,’ said the lady. ‘She’s the last of all I’ll be letting in. Well, girl? Are you coming?’
‘Agatha,’ Mielusine said softly. She got no answer. She looked to the barge, to the lady waiting there. She was so glamorous that Mielusine went to join her.
With an unhasty pace the boatmen poled the Swan barge out upon the lough, toward the white buildings of the abbey emerging from the silver mist.
DRINKING AT THE WATER’S EDGE, Porter was watching them go. When the ferry at length was dissolving in the mist the horse tossed his head. He nudged the huddled woman by the grave, but got only a mew for answer.
The each dubh trotted up the path, and a dark man stepped out in his way, took hold of his reins, and leapt upon his back.
The man straightened his dark gray cóta mór, and bent over Porter’s neck, and whispered these words into his ears:
‘Go where I’m going, Porter! Go!’
In the glow of the Moon rising beyond the mist, the Each Dubh gathered speed, and bore the dark man away over the hills beyond the wild orchards.
