(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
15. How She Lingered by the Lough
ROUND THE LOUGH away from the tents where the bandits dwelt, those that would be going over to the abbey, there stood an old village, left over from the day; and the villagers came out of their doors only when the Moon was gleaming through the mist, and the lights of the crannog were snuffed.
The crannog in the lough had been there since before St. Patrick. With hundreds of timbers and thousands of stones as big as men’s heads, ancient hands had built up the island in the lough. There the abbey had stood safe from the raiders, the chieftains, the warriors and the Northmen. For hundreds of years since then it had gone abandoned, left for boys to go fishing from in day, for birds to be nesting on in night.
In the last day the fires had rained in a great ring around that county, until sheets of mist and darkness swallowed them all.
It was only afterward that the villagers first glimpsed witchlights out on the lough. The villagers learned the abbey was rebuilding on the crannog. And they found that if their cows ate of the sedge over the lough in the Night, no butter would be coming from their cream. After that it was out of nearby streams the villagers were drawing their water, and never the lough itself.
In the village they were telling how the lough was tainted, and lured folk into sinning. They all came to that place, all wives whose husbands were Sleeping, and all husbands whose wives were Sleeping. They brought the money of their spouses to the abbey, and spent it on their lovers.
In the village they were telling of wayward children playing too near the lough in the white moons of summer. How they fell drowsy in the sedge, covered with mist while lights danced on the water. And how, come moonrise, anxious mothers found them curled up at the water’s edge, seeming asleep, smiling sweetly. But they were dead.
Some in the village were telling how those children were not dead at all, but stolen away to serve in the abbey, where they never got older. It was only models of clay left at the water’s edge, so true to life they were fooling even the little ones’ own mothers.
And they were telling how, if a girl’s love could not be, for the anger of her father or the enmity of kin, then she would go to the abbey and drown her heartsickness in laughter and lust; else she would go in darkness to the water, and clothed round with wildflowers she would surrender herself to the lough bubbling up around her. And she would be lying on the dark bed of the lough, among the deep reeds dead.
You might even be catching such a one if you flung a net into the deep. But it was ill-luck and accurst to wake her, if you were not meant to charm her sore heart and be her lover. So none of the village lads tried, though some of the abbey-folk, as it was said, had done.
In the bright of the Lammas Moon the villagers ventured out, and found the woman by the grave. She was rocking on her haunches, back and forth, mewing. Not a word would she speak to any of their questions or remarks. In the end they took her in and tended to her. They were thinking she had lost her reason.
She was drinking the broth they were giving her, and eying them suspiciously. One of the men stood over her, and looked her in the eye.
‘Did you run into folk from the abbey, child?’ he asked. ‘Is that what happened? What were they doing now, that it left yourself in such a state?’
‘Mary bless you,’ said an elder woman of them, ‘I’ll tell you. ’Twas the tall hero, came first to the water. He shouts his challenge across the lough, and it echoing back answerless. Only at moonfall, the ferry comes gliding out, and the two men fight for the sake of the beautiful young miss, and the lady of the lough presiding over it all. It’s back to the crannog they went.’
The woman opened her mouth and said, ‘The crannog?’
‘Oh, but you mustn’t think of going there, shivering and half naked as you are. ’Twould be the death of you.’
The stranger woman pushed the older one back and went out into the lane. Children were playing there, and the eyes of men and women upon her.
‘She has the mark on her now, and it’s the greatest shame,’ whispered one.
‘I warrant she was fair, one time,’ answered another.
‘Fair, aye: a magistrate’s darling, forsaken when the day died.’
She turned on them.
‘How will I be crossing to the crannog?’
They stared at her. None of them were answering her at first.
‘Moy-rua, none of us will row you there,’ said a man at last. ‘The ferry’s the only way. And it only goes after moonfall; and they’re choosy who they take.’
That was all the answer she got.
MUDDY SEDGE skirted the lough away from the village. The stranger woman scooped up water and drank from her black-marked palm. It was warm, that water, running in her belly with secret life.
All that moon, she stayed by Aengus’ grave.
All her bitterness was burnt out of her now. He was punished and dead, the way she would never be seeing him again. But the memory of him was yet alive. She missed him.
All that moon, there was one small break in the cloud of mist. A ray of moonlight was falling onto Master Aengus’ grave and the woman kneeling there keening her grief.
The keening went on long after the moonlight failed. But at last the woman’s voice broke, and she slumped on the dirt.
LATE IN THE DARK of the moon, one of those Swan boats was poled over to land from the crannog. From the boat stepped the lady in the silver cloak. She ignored the grave and the sleeping woman, and walked about the lanes of the village. Her quick, light step passed among the cottages where the grownups of the villagers were lying abed dreaming. As she went, the lady hummed to herself a sprightly tune.
The children of the villagers, now, hearing the humming, rose and went to her. They crowded round her in their nightshirts, clamoring softly, ‘Take me with you! Take me! Take me!’
The lady smiled on them, and handed them all little sweets and candies and drops wrapped in silver-paper. And she sent them back into their homes, and they were chewing and sucking on the sweets for the rest of the darkness, until they fell into their beds dreaming. And ever thereafter those children stayed up when the Moon went down, and dreamed when the moonlight flooded their little rooms, and talked back to their parents; and it was a trouble to their parents to be rousing them when the Moon rose.
The lady passed back into the ferry, and let herself be taken back into the crannog. But from up in the land hoofbeats echoed across the waters, and the great each dubh Porter showed himself on the crest of the hill thorned with the wild low trees. A man in a dark gray cóta mór stepped off the steed, gave him sweets, and sent him back to his master. Meantime the dark man stood on the top of the hill looking down over the lough. He dug his hands into the deep pockets of his coat, and pulled out a bag full of hand-small stones. Those he scattered in a circle in the grass about him, and sat down on his haunches.
Silently the dark man buried himself in his cóta mór gazing down over the mist on the water, waiting.
Lights were burning on the lough that darkness, but no more Swan boats crossed. Only, just before moonrise, one was softly poled to shore. The two ferrymen, muffled in great cloaks, climbed the slope. One bore a lantern, its iron panels shut so that only a thin beam licked the ground.
They put the lantern down by the grave, and set to digging furtively. They took care not to waken the woman curled at their feet.
On the top of the slope the man in the dark gray cloak watched them, and he touched the peak of his tricorn hat to the grave of Master Aengus; but it seemed the ferrymen didn’t notice the man, hidden as he was behind the circle of his stones. They ended their work, and took back to the abbey that thing they had been sent to fetch. It was only just in time they were: the Moon was already burning at the edges of the mist, when their poles sent back their ripples to the shore.
The rising Moon woke the mourner, and she went down to drink once more. She sat by the grave in the patch of moonlight. She did not guess what they had done, while she had lain sleeping; she did not guess what things befell in the abbey on the crannog across the water, deep in the whiteness of the mist.
WHEN DARKNESS came again, the ferrymen poled the Swan boat across and back again, as their business bade them. From the encampment people were coming, leaving their tents and wagons and carriages, and themselves going over to the abbey.
They were an odd blend. Some gentle men and gentle ladies, others marked like tinkers; wenches and rogues, minxes and bandits, jades and rascals; farmers and fishermen; these rushing, and those laughing wickedly; the others fingering the hilts of their scians or the pommels of their pistols.
And some were stopped along the way by a sad-eyed creature in rags, calling to them from the sedge,
‘Take me across with you, Sir!’
But they were shaking their heads. ‘It’s no place for you, girl. Go back to your village and marry. It’s still being done, you know, for all that it is Night.’
And the creature went to the mooring-pole, asking the boatmen to carry her across.
‘What will you be paying?’ they asked.
‘I will pay you after,’ answered the creature.
‘If you lack courage, you cannot cross.’
‘I am Lady Agatha. Is that courage enough for you?’
The ferrymen looked each other in the eye. ‘You are the Lady Agatha? It was for you the Irishman sank the sun? Then you will never cross, the way you are the lady’s enemy.’
And once more the stars wheeled round to touch the Samhain mark, when all souls and dreams are loosed. And for four and twenty hours the Moon did not rise nor shine.
When the Moon returned, and the lights across the lough faded again, and the creature was left behind. From over the rise the village waked again, and some of the village women were pitying the creature sitting in the sedge, and leaving her baskets of food.
Now some hours passed, and the Moon was after falling, and a group of girls came sneaking out of the village, nervous as geese, passing the creature on the way to the mooring-pole.
‘Where are you bound?’ she asked them.
‘Surely we’re for the abbey,’ they answered her, ‘to enter the lady’s service.’
‘What will you be doing there?’
‘Clean and cook, and serve and sew and all. And we’ll be learning to be like them, and after nine Moons they will be giving us each for a duais a brand-new chest, and bright pretty gowns, plates and cups, and all we need to be winning our loves.’
‘Let me be going with you.’
‘But she only sent for seven! If you go, one of us must stay behind.’
Then in her need the creature drew out the last of her belongings. Gold its chain, the emerald bright as her eyes had been in day.
‘Now what one of you will be taking this for her dress, and the right to go across with you?’
The girls were eying one another, but hung back.
‘Please,’ she breathed, ‘it’s all I have, and I must cross.’
‘Lady, you may have my place,’ said one. ‘I will cross another time. But keep your jewel, the way I wouldn’t know what to do with it.’
‘Hold it for surety then, or sell it for a house full of plate and linen, the way it is worth ten times that.’
Still the girl wavered, shaking her head. But it fell out that an old woman from the village was passing, and she scolded the girl something terrible for being so foolish, and talked her over to taking the jewel.
Then in the lake water the girls washed the mud from the poor sad creature, and were drying her with their aprons and hiding her from prying eyes while she drew on the homespun dress, even while the boatmen came, and tied up the Swan boat on the mooring-poles.
The girls went in a flock to the mooring-pole and into the boat. The stranger woman was shivering with damp and fever, bent low in the middle of the girls lest the boatmen notice her.
The boatmen hardly looked upon one out of yet another group of girls lured by the glamour of the witchlights into running away from their homes and risking themselves in the abbey. Where some would be finding their fortune, and others their ruin, but all alike in this, that they would never be able to go back into their village and take up the life they had known before.
And the lantern at the ferry’s prow was burning in their eyes, and the lantern at the mooring-pole fading away, and with it the shore, the village, and the land. In darkness they were gliding across the whispering water, and in their ears were growing the sounds of revelry, the closer they were to the crannog in the lough, and the white walls of the abbey emerging from the mist.
