(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
19. How Arianna Hunted
THEREAFTER, when the maids went to the orchards, Mielusine went with them. She did not go to tend to the trees, the way she was a dancer. But she stopped at the edge of the apple trees, by a little mound of fresh-turned earth; and she was singing little songs over it, and tending the grave of Master Aengus.
She planted an apple there, so that his soul should grow up into that tree, and in after years she might talk to him in the branches.
Once in the village she asked after Lady Agatha. ‘The mad creature? Surely she pined away for grief, poor thing. Och, ’tis evil, this Night!’
The girl who’d given Agatha her place in the Swan Boat Mielusine did not meet, the way that one had not returned to the village, but had met with one of the robbers, and ridden away with him over the hills; he returned to the abbey with the emerald in his glove, but without the girl.
Mielusine passed only an hour under the orchards; then she went to the dancing-masters, to her lessons. She wondered when she should again see Vasquez. Ino had told her this much, that ‘the rascal ran overmuch into debt, and is in hiding till he pay enough not to get his throat cut on sight!’
Mielusine hoped she might be seeing him soon. When she lay in her bed she thought of him, and of what he looked like beneath his ugly mask.
AGNES WENT to the stairs before the moon rose. Soon the witchlights dimmed, and the bandits were in bed, and the Hundred Steps and a Step blacker than the moon before.
Agnes sighed, kneeled before the first step, spilled soap and water across it, and set to scrubbing.
A few passed her on the stair, servants, lovers, and gamesters keeping all hours. At first Agnes had stared at them, as if her look might have made their heels less dirty; now she didn’t glance up, even when one stopped and lingered.
She went on working, eying the muddy shoes out of the corner of her eye. Let him gape! Her skin had thickened by now.
‘Agatha?’ was asked.
The brushes halted in her hand. A sort of shiver ran up her arm. Her heart was beating very fast, and she had no wish other than to be hiding in some dark place. Then she sighed, shook back her dank locks, and looked him in the eye.
‘Yes, Eudemarec. It’s me you’re seeing here.’
‘My lady, what are you doing?’
She smiled wearily at the outrage in his voice. ‘Cleaning the steps, to be sure. Or trying to.’
‘But why?’ He stooped to offer her his hand, but she hid her hands in her skirts.
‘It’s here I was directed,’ she answered. ‘It’s my task.’
‘I will put an end to this,’ he said.
‘Please do not. I will finish this! And if they learn who I was, it’s out from the isle they’ll put me.’
He sat on the step above her, laying his arms out on his knees. He regarded her closely. Then he laughed, gloomily, shaking his head. ‘Is there nothing I can do for you, then?’
‘No, nought beyond giving me the pleasure of your speech for a moment, and telling me how you are,’ she said, stooping once more to her duty.
‘Ah, as for me now, what should I tell you? This is my nature, to be laughing when the outlook’s bleakest, and to be saddest when all goes well. But tell me now: will you forgive me for the deed I did?’
She looked gravely into his sea-gray eyes.
‘Aye,’ she was murmuring. ‘He was meant to die here. And ’twas my doing more than yours. You were no more than an arrow I loosed at him.’
‘I am sorry for it now. It was a fool’s errand. Do you miss him very much?’
She bent over the brush again, scrubbing hard. ‘Enough.’
For a long time silence went between them, and only the sound of the bristles chafing at the bandits’ dirt. Then he said, softly, ‘I killed Mablaith with the same shot. It was only your Aengus could have brought back the Sun. Now none of the Sleepers will ever be waking.
‘Already Mablaith seems dim to me, as if she had been someone in a tale I heard. And—’ he reached out for the post of the rail, and grasped it. ‘And my heart goes out to Arianna.’
Agnes took hold of the Breton’s knee. ‘Beware of that one.’
A bit of a smile haunted his lips. ‘I’m a gambler at heart, Agatha. And the dream of any gambler is to set a copper against a fortune in gold, and win.’
‘She is cold and cruel,’ said Agnes.
‘She is as beautiful as a snowfall in the Moon,’ he answered. ‘Her body has the strength of the brightest scian. What does it matter that I am an apostate, a very atheist, since I forsook my father and loved Mablaith in the wood? The game on the tables no longer appeases me. I would wager all I have, against the highest good Night can offer.
‘For now, the highwayman Gwangior is her champion; but ’tis said she’s tiring of him, and casting about for her next love. I will win her favor, or else I care not what befalls me.
‘Oh, Agatha,’ he went on, softly, for the pleasure of speaking his secret: ‘Every darkness I venture forth to be the one whose tale entertains her the most. Every darkness she’s asking me: “Eudemarec, what have you to say now?” And I hang my head and answer, “I’ve nothing at all to say.” “Faith, the honor of Brittany is lagging!” she says then, and all the robbers, gentlemen and ladies, laugh.
‘And for all that, I swear there is a twinkle in her look, meant only for my eyes. She is starting to love me, Agatha: and her love for me will not end as all her other loves have ended, but it will outlast the Night.’
Agnes did not answer. She went on brushing and washing the step. After a long while, he was taking his leave of her, promising to come speak with her again.
Agnes looked up after him, watching him go out by the little servants’ door, the way the main doors were shut and locked while the moon shone.
There was a great pity in her eyes.
WHEN THE MOON ROSE, the crannog was quiet, save for the clink of coins from the gamblers in their house, and the whispering of the serving girls. The dark man in the cóta mór strode about the grounds, walking from shadow to shadow, pausing now and again and standing still, as though he were listening or looking for something. But whenever he heard steps coming near him, the dark man slipped back into a shadow.
That moon a lady came to the abbey.
She walked up the way the moonglow was shining for her, through the mist, to the main doors. Now, it happened that on that moonrise someone had forgotten to close the main doors to the abbey. There they were, standing wide open, and the lady walked up into the entranceway.
She wore a long black dress that covered her up, arms and all, in black, and left only her bosom bare. Over her head she wore a long black veil, tucked under her chin, wound round her throat and trailing down behind her. Her hands were covered in black gloves. At her side came a man, and a fine bravo he was, swaggering in with a saber at his side.
Agnes paused in her washing of the steps, and watched the lady at the entranceway. After a time some rogues and wenches appeared from the gaming hall, and greeted the lady with many fine words and flourishes. ‘Lady Ann!’ they were saying. ‘Lady Ann, welcome back to you, won’t you be joining us?’
The lady nodded lazily, and followed the robbers and trollops out. As she passed the steps, Lady Ann’s eye fell on Agnes, and Agnes met her gaze stare for stare; then the lady was gone, and her bravo’s boots were echoing down the passage after her.
It seemed to Agnes she had seen the lady once before, but she couldn’t remember where.
MAID MIELUSINE was walking about the abbey in the moonlight, going into the untrod places, pausing before the shadowy corners, and she would never have told herself that it was the rogue Vasquez she was hoping to be encountering. But when she saw him, then all at once she knew it.
He bowed to her in an overdone sweep, and put back his tricorn over the top of his grinning mask and silver hair. ‘Delighted,’ he said, ‘to find you again, Maid Snowflake. Will you walk a ways with me?’ Not waiting for an answer, he took her arm and started forward.
Along the way she was thinking of what she should be saying to him, when he cast a look back over his shoulder, and unthinking Mielusine asked, ‘What’s there, Mr Vasquez?’
He answered, ‘Oh, I only caught sight of a few of my creditors a while back, and I’d be just as happy not to have any words with them just now. Beside of which, I’m glad for the chance to talk with yourself, Maid Snowflake. You’ve been on my mind,’ he said.
‘Have I, Mr Vasquez?’
Her breathing was troubled, her face hot and cold by turns, and it seemed to her that her steps were awkward and ill-placed with every step.
Side by side they were walking, and all at once she noticed that he was holding her hand in his; and it was done so smoothly, and felt so natural, that she hadn’t even been aware of the moment when the thing was done, and had it been him taking her hand, or her taking hold of his? This thought made her burn, and she envied him the safety of his mask, and she was looking away across the water and feeling she ought to be saying something and that they ought to be speaking, the way their silence was too eloquent of itself.
So ‘From what part of Spain are you from, Mr Vasquez?’ she asked him; to which he laughed and answered, ‘From no part of it at all, Maid Snowflake, but it was this blessed bit of an island saw me born and raised. And my name isn’t Vasquez at all, but of my true name I’ve no more of a notion than yourself, the way my natural parents didn’t see fit to own me. They gave me up at birth, and I was a foundling child, not so very far from here as things go.’
Then he was asking after her birth and upbringing. To such questions the maid had prepared many a glamorous answer, but to this man she could only tell him the truth of herself, little Sini, and her sisters Grisalta and Merrwyn.
‘Ah,’ he answered, ‘I’d have liked to have known your sisters, you make them sound so appealing,’ and Mielusine bit her lip, thinking he was right to say so, and that her sisters were beautiful, and put her to shame even to be speaking of them.
‘Faith, my own home life was no finer,’ he said lazily, seeming unaware of her confusion. ‘The way my foster father was only a countryman, but a farmer of his own land at least, and never a tenant on an English lord’s lands.’
‘But how is it everyone calls you with a Spanish name?’ she asked.
He paused in his step, and tossed a stone out into the lough, and gestured across it with a cípín to the village lights across the way. ‘It happened out there, outside of the mists, in Ireland,’ he said. And for the first time she heard pain and anger back of the laughter in his voice.
‘My foster father went to war against the English at Boyne, like all proper men of blood and fire – not that they were victorious for all that, or for all that their cause was the just one of their own freedom and homeland. And ever after,’ said Vasquez, ‘I held it hard against the English, the way I was sure that my own father had fought against them and fallen, and that, lacking their taxes and rents and takings of land to feed their King’s men’s appetites, my own father and mother would have been glad to keep me and raise me in comfort and honor. Instead I was bred up like an alien child in a drafty poor farmhouse, and saw my foster father old and broken after his defeat, and not even brave enough to flee. And my foster brother was not much better, studying all night like a priest, and not daring to raise his eyes against the English lords.
‘But myself now,’ he said, ‘I minded me of my true parentage, and I raised my eyes against the lords, and more than my eyes, and I was fighting them at every turn, until in the end the King’s law hounded me, and I had to flee across the sea. First I went into France, where so many of the princes of Ireland had gone to after Boyne; but I drifted farther away, hating even to be looking on the sea that lapped the English shores. I went into Spain, and took to calling myself Vasquez, though it wasn’t until this Night that anyone was believing I was Vasquez, though I am, as yourself can plainly see, one of the Black Irish, and dark as any man from Granada. And my blood,’ he said with a rueful little laugh, ‘runs as hot.’
And as if to prove it was so, he stretched his arm out over the water, and caught a snowflake in his weather-strong palm; and straight away the snowflake burned to water on his dark skin.
There followed a silence. At length Maid Mielusine put her hand out and let it rest on his shoulder. She was feeling a longing to be alongside him, and comfort him for all his pains and dreadful, manly hatreds burning away in him and disfiguring him underneath his laughter and jests.
He rose of a sudden, cast aside the cípín, and led her away. Before them the ground of the crannog stretched to its farthest point, where the lady’s garden was, and the byre of her hunting hounds. Vasquez stopped of a sudden, and looked back. She stopped along with him.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He wasn’t answering at first, but still stared back. The Moon was almost fallen, and much of the abbey was sunk in gloom, and the first of the witchlights, floating about the abbey’s walls, were sparking and starting to glow, but not lighting the shadows much.
‘I thought I saw someone.’
He turned back to her. And then the eyes in his mask fell on her as if they saw her for the first time, and she swayed slightly forward, closer into his body, so that she could feel the warmth of his chest in its nearness to her breast, and she bit her lip, and right away stopped that, the way he was looking now at her lips and her mouth, and she didn’t know whether to close it or smile with it, only it felt suddenly huge and ungainly spread across the lower half of her face; all of Lady Agatha’s lessons were lost to her then; she found herself leaning forward even more, and he was bending and inclining towards her, and she saw his firm full mouth, and resolute chin, under the shadow of his mask. He turned his head and looked away.
‘Who’s there?’ he muttered, and she heard a note of danger in his voice.
He took a step back and drew his cloak across his shoulders. Mielusine looked.
‘It’s no one at all,’ she answered, but he was gone, and already swiftly striding through the mists at the end of the crannog, and turning beyond the lady’s garden past the byre.
Then she was ashamed, and for a moment she wanted to run after him, only her feet wouldn’t move at all, and she looked back in terror at the abbey. She saw a dark, tall, and lean shape emerging out of the gloom, attended by seven of the swimming witch fires.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘It’s only Mr Mac Bride, who has charge of all the fires and candles here. He’s not a creditor of anyone.’
But the sight of him, and the thought of herself white and nearly naked, alone on the ground by the water’s edge, shamed her and shamed her for what she’d been desiring, and she went back into the abbey, and didn’t follow after Mr Vasquez. And it was a long time, she was feeling guiltily, before she’d be seeing him again.
BUT IT WAS NOT Mac Bride alone. For the way of it was, an hour earlier, in Arianna’s bedchamber at the top of the tower, Gwangior, her champion, awoke. And he reached for the lady, but she was not there in that room. And he found his hand bare: there was no ring upon his finger.
Then he knew that she had cast him off.
And all at once fear took hold of Gwangior, who had never known fear in all his thieving life; and he shuddered and shook, and threw on clothing and fled down the Hundred Steps and a Step, and out into the mists; it was his frantic footsteps Vasquez heard.
And Gwangior found a Swan barge waiting, and a ferryman at the ready for him, despite the hour. Gwangior searched the boatman’s face; there was nought but stone to see there, and never any feeling at all. It was as though the man saw nothing before him other than a dead man, and a set of bones.
Gwangior shook all over, as if with ague.
But in the heights of the tower, Arianna let clothe herself, and she clothed herself in soft-tanned leather, with a jaunty cocked cap; and she took up a bow, and arrows.
And Arianna went down to her pen, to her hounds. There she let drop a shirt that she had herself stripped from Gwangior’s chest whenas they twined together: all stained with his sweat and his scent it was.
‘There, my darlings, you know what you are to do now, do you not?’ she purred; and all the hounds leapt at her skirts. And the lady Arianna passed with her hounds across the lough, and in the darkness of the mists somewhere in the orchards, amidst the wild apples, pears and quinces, there were dark doings and the sound of a man screaming, screaming without end, full of bloody horror and pain, until at last it fell stop, and was drowned in the howling of ferocious hounds.
And all dainty and trim, Arianna returned to the crannog, and behind her the ferryman poled the Swan barge, bringing back the torn and mangled body of Gwangior. In the boat before, Arianna sat calmly, and daubed with her kerchief at her tears.
