(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
17. Of the Lady of the Lough
‘BUT HOW can this be? Who is doing this?’ Agnes moaned.
‘I can tell you, Miss,’ said a voice.
Agnes turned. A bit of a smile hung on her lips.
The man that was standing there was lean and tall and old, and he was no stranger to her, the way he was Mac Bride, the old servant of the manor.
‘Well, Mac Bridey. Of course you are here.’
The old cottager bowed, and gave her back a grin. ‘Will your ladyship come with me now, and let an old countryman enlighten a lady?’
‘Please, do not be calling me “lady” here, Mac Bride, I’ve no heart left for such ironies.’
He led her across to a little room in a wall. Old tools and broken buckets were covered in dust in the corners. ‘Here you must abide me when your work is done, at moonfall. I will bring you your dinner and show you a thing.’
At the end of her working, she put away rags and buckets and brushes, and met Mac Bride at the closet. Soon they were settling in the dark, and only some light entering through a crack in the door panel, where Agnes put her eye.
She saw men in scarlet and silver climbing through the witchlights swimming up the stairs.
‘Soon they will be coming,’ Mac Bride said.
‘Who?’ she asked.
‘Look, and see for yourself.’
From the landing high above, a strange procession was descending. Foremost came the lady’s servants dressed like maids and pages of years long gone. After them came the hundred robbers of the lough, the jades and rogues, minxes and bandits, each belted with sword or pistols; and the wenches wore each a scian at her belt. They wore cloaks of scarlet embroidered with the letter A in black, or cloaks of black with the letter A in scarlet; and on the heels of their boots silver spurs, the like of which she had seen before.
‘And out of all these desperadoes,’ said Mac Bride, ‘she will choose one to be her champion, for a darkness, a Moon, or a year, as she please. She has a crescent silver ring. When she chooses a champion she places this ring on his little finger, pressing the finger back. But when she tires of him, then the lady takes back the ring while he is sleeping, and – and the rest I will not tell you.’
After the robbers came a most splendid lady. Her hair was firelike in the glow of the enchanted fish; her eyes were green, and she wore a crimson purple gown. She was tall and slender, and so regal in her bearing that Agnes had to exclaim, ‘Is it Arianna, now?’
‘Nay,’ answered Mac Bride, taking for a moment her place at the crack. ‘But it is only Maid Niam, one of her wards.’
Agnes looked again. ‘You are right,’ she said. ‘For her bearing is not proud enough. But this one, now: she is the lady for a truth!’
‘Tell me her features, the way I’m sure you’re wrong again.’
‘Her hair is brown, lighter than chestnut, gleaming as with diamonds. She has the longest, loveliest throat I’ve ever seen. She carries a fan of gold, and her gown is dark and rich as the finest chocolate from the new world.’
‘Ah: that is Maid Buan, another of her wards; she’s proud enough for two.’
‘Now there is a man dressed like an admiral. He is tall and beautiful, and well he knows it, too! He walks with the swagger of a lion.’
‘That is Gwangior, the lady’s champion,’ Mac Bride said. ‘And after him you will see another of her wards, and she the newest and fairest: it’s said you know her.’
‘Yes,’ answered Agnes quietly.
It was Maid Mielusine in her white gown; and though she may have walked less boldly than the others, she surpassed them in the delicacy of her movements, the fineness of her features, and the openness of her eyes.
Seeing the Maid, Agnes felt all at once her own ugliness, and how far she had fallen. When she could look again, the landing above the stair was empty – save for one.
‘Arianna.’
She breathed the word, the way she could not speak above a whisper.
Mac Bride nodded.
‘Now you have seen her. Tell me the way of her, then.’
Agnes parted her lips, and after a moment closed them.
There was no way to describe that one. There was only height, and slenderness quick as moonlight, and eyes like arrows. Of colors, there was none, the way there gleamed from her only a thick, resplendent whiteness, like the braiding together of all colors. And there was pride, desire, sultriness, and danger, the way she was the body of that unending Night.
‘I cannot say,’ whispered Agnes. ‘But she descends the stair as if she were walking down the sky.’
Then Agnes could look no more upon the lady, but lowered her eye to the human face of Mielusine. Then she saw at Mielusine’s side another: Eudemarec. His look was that of a man whose thoughts are far away.
Arianna raised her arm. Agnes heard the opening of the great doors of the abbey onto the Night.
‘You know your tasks,’ Arianna called out to her bandits: ‘Now go!’
And with a wild whooping and a clattering of swords and spurs, the robbers went into the night. Where the Swan Boats waited to ferry them over, nine at a turn.
Agnes fell back into the gloom of the closet. A greenish, yellowish, bluish anti-image of the scene was burning in her eyes, filled by the lady of the lough.
‘So that is my enemy,’ she murmured.
‘It is for her sake your work is undone,’ Mac Bride said. ‘Each darkness Arianna is sending her bandits across the lough to fulfill her wild kailees. And when they return from their kailees, their boots are black with mud from the bogs, and they dirty the steps worse than they did the time before, the way it is their great delight to outdo themselves incessantly.’
‘But what is this Arianna, and how did she win such power? Why do they follow her?’
The countryman laughed. ‘Ah now, as to that, there are as many different tales as you could waste your time in counting! But Miss, this is the Night-land, and you must learn to think as do the Night-folk. These men and ladies come into Arianna’s service because she is ours. It’s her beauty has drawn us here – and by that word you must understand more than any eye could see. Why, do you ask? Because it pleases her.’
‘I do not understand,’ she said.
‘When you do, it’s free of this place you’ll be,’ he answered her.
It was late when the countryman led Agnes back to her bed to rest. ‘You’ll be finding me where the lamps are burning,’ he told her. ‘It’s in charge of the fires I am.’ Then he let her be.
In the dark, low hall, half-buried in the crannog, Agnes undressed to her shift and crept into her cot just inside the door. She listened for awhile to the sounds of the girls filling the hall with their unspeakable dreams. From far away, through the windows set under the ceiling like milky eyes, the music of the abbey and the beat of dancing feet was reaching her.
Agnes fell a-dreaming of the procession, the maids, and the unutterable lady of the lough. Toward the darkness’ end she was turning in the cot, her hair streaming from one side to the other. And once she whispered a name aloud: ‘Aengus!’
