(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
23. How He Met the White Hind
AGNES did not want her masquerade to end. Upon shining lawns beneath the dimming witchlights she danced on, wild-souled, surrounded by a dozen bandits. But even they at the latter end left her, despairing that she should ever reveal herself as the lady. Alone she danced on, her skyblack skirts swirling.
An odd mist hung over the ground, just about the feet. Mac Bride’s nine girls were killing the abbey’s candles and fires; across the lough, lights were winking on; through the upper airs the glow of the young Moon was gleaming, and cutting through the mist.
Agnes stopped, and her skirt swirled to embrace her. ‘For luck,’ she whispered, drawing off the emerald and casting it into the lough.
It splashed there softly and sank, drifting down the syrup of the waters. It came to a rest beside the sleeping maiden drowning in her hair, and Agnes never saw that gem again.
She walked about the crannog through the snow, her spirits cooling, the mist making her cough. Every room below was still and dark; only through the upper windows gleams of candles reddened the mist. Even the gambling had ceased. For a time Agnes stood quietly in the shadow of the broken basilica, under the bell-tower. At length, alone, she turned back to her cot.
She found someone already there, and that was Mielusine.
‘Master Aengus was following me,’ the Maid told her, ‘and I feeling sorry for him. It wasn’t that way I wanted to be meeting him. You told me he was dangerous, but he seemed a lost little boy. This hall seemed the best hiding place, so I asked after your bed.’
‘Do not go,’ breathed Agnes. ‘The other girls must be about their duties, but let us rest together as we did before, the way I’m so lonely. I also was thinking of him, and the pain of it lingers, it lingers in me. Sweet Mielusine, will you forgive me for goading you to what I would have had you do?’
‘Dearest Agnes, I missed you.’ They hugged each other, and then, still in their fine gowns white by black they lay together in the little cot, holding tight.
‘Mielusine, would you be going from here?’ whispered Agnes. ‘I am going, but you may stay if you like.’
‘No, I’m going. But we cannot leave Master Aengus.’
‘No. Eudemarec will help us rescue him.’
But they neither of them saw the Breton in the darknesses that followed. He was the lady’s champion, and she hardly let him leave her apartments; he wasn’t eager to go, either.
At length Arianna had herself arrayed: paraded Eudemarec down the crescent stair, and in front of all put on his finger the moon ring, pressing back his finger. Then Mielusine drew him aside, where he spoke with them both in private.
‘Is he alive, now,’ said he, ‘and I didn’t kill him? But that’s the finest news! Surely I’ll help you!’ He was too happy to deny them anything. He even agreed to say nothing to Arianna.
So it fell out, that on the brightness of the Moon, when Arianna lay dreaming the deepest of dreams, Eudemarec dressed himself, kissed her hand, and tiptoed down the stair.
But Agnes couldn’t help herself, and she was drawn back into Maid Buan’s chambers, using the key she had made. She had to look one last time into the glass on the wall there.
It was quiet in those rooms. Agnes stepped up to the wall and drew back the black velvet hangings, uncovering the ornate carvings of the frame and the dim silvery shine of the glass. She looked deeply within. And after a time she was whispering to herself old words out of the deep of her soul:
…set all the eyes
Of court a-fire, like a burning glass,
And work them into cinders, when the jewels
Of twenty states adorn thee, and the light
Strikes out the stars!
She stopped then, the way she felt another presence: cast her look about, and saw Maid Buan standing in the door naked in her bedshift.
Agnes let the hangings fall, but the maid caught them and took her hand and kissed it.
‘Is it true, now?’ asked Maid Buan in a whisper. ‘Was it the same sight I saw in the glass, as yourself were seeing?’
‘What sight did you see?’ asked Agnes.
‘I saw – but it couldn’t be you! But it’s truth and nothing else this glass will show! Here now, let me look, and you look also, and tell me what you see of me!’ And she cast up the hangings and stood before the glass. Agnes looked there with her.
She saw there a face, and it was like the maid’s face.
It was a face like the maid’s face, only stuffed and swollen up with pride and daunting haughtiness, cold and repellent. Agnes for shame looked away, and Maid Buan let the hangings fall.
‘But you, in the mirror, now,’ the maid was murmuring, ‘you were so – so beautiful! Are you truly so fine and so flawless as that?’
‘No, it’s only the artistry of the glass, and I’m no more than you’re seeing now before you.’
The maid was shaking her head. ‘This,’ she answered, ‘is the artistry of the glass, that it shows back what’s more true than the eye can see. And every moonrise I’m gazing into it, and looking for some betterment, but every moonrise it shows me the truth of myself, and how vain and empty a showhorse I am. Tell me now, seamstress, what are you, that you are unparalleled in the glass, and yet you toil here as a servant? How is it you achieved such beauty, and can you not help me to be overcoming that thing, that thing, now – what you saw there in the glass?’
Agnes was silent, turning it over in her mind. Then she smiled kindly and said, ‘I’ll do what I can do for you, and the rest you must be doing for yourself. All right?’
‘Yes, yes,’ answered Maid Buan.
Agnes took the maid by the hand. ‘Come,’ she said.
And she led the maid into her bedchamber, and led her into her bed. The moon glow was falling strongly through the windows, the way the maid’s rooms were high up in the tower, and near to the thinnest layer of the mist.
Right away Maid Buan’s eyes closed in the moonlight, and her face lost its lines of troubling, and her breathing grew slower and deeper. Agnes sat on a stool beside the bed, and she lay three flowers alongside the maid’s head, of the rose that blooms in the night, and the hidden rose, and the Lady’s rose. And she stroked the maid’s hand, and breathed along with her breath for breath. The perfume of the roses lay thick about the bed, but Agnes could see, that though the maid rested deeply, she wasn’t dreaming. Agnes leaned in over the maid’s face, deep into the pillow of scent of the roses, and she whispered three words in Maid Buan’s ear, softly like a secret: ‘You may remember.’
The maid’s hand clutched Agnes’ tightly, and her breathing stopped and started. Agnes could see her in dreaming, and softly she let go the maid’s hand and slipped out of the chamber.
NOW IN THE MIDDLE of that moon Maid Buan’s eyes open, and she rises up out of her bed and summons her serving-girl. She orders the girl to put over her Maid Buan’s cloak, the dark one, heavy and hooded.
Then she takes her mask and goes out of her chambers, and steps down the Hundred Steps and a Step, and no one is there to meet her.
Maid Buan goes out through the great doors, that are hanging open, and that is strange, the way they are never open when the lady lies resting, and her abbey sleeps. But now they are.
And Maid Buan walks out to the landing, where a Swan boat is standing waiting, with a boatman, and his head is bowed, and his face is muffled, so naught of his features are to be seen. Maid Buan steps into the Swan boat, and the boatman shifts with his pole, and the Swan boat slips from the shore of the crannog in the mist.
Around the lough the boatman guides the Swan boat. Maid Buan lifts her head, and she sees the abbey all white in the mist, turning about before her eyes. Three times they go about the abbey, soft, stealthy, smooth, and there is no person at all to be seen on the shore, only the white buildings of the abbey turning in the mist.
And never has it shone so beautifully in the maid’s eyes before now, the way her breath catches in her throat.
Now after the third time round the shore the boatman guides the Swan boat to the landing, and Maid Buan steps up ashore again.
She walks up to the great doors of the abbey, and now they are shut before her. There is a serving-girl there working, cleaning the bronze and carvings. And this girl is the first soul Maid Buan has seen since leaving her chambers.
Maid Buan, she goes up to the girl, and hands her her mask, and says to her,
‘Now let you be the Maid, and let me be taking your place.’
The girl says not a word, but she takes the mask, and Maid Buan’s heavy cloak, and the maid puts on the girl’s homespun dress.
The girl she goes away, and Maid Buan now is all alone, and a Maid about the place no longer. And she takes the rags in her hand, and she touches them to the bronze and the carvings of the great doors, and she sets herself to cleaning them.
AND WHEN THE MOON rose next, and the light of the Moon glowed in the mist again, Buan was done with her work for that darkness, and she went to where she knew the serving-girls slept, and she found the cot of that girl who wore the mask of Maid Buan in the chambers high above. Buan lay herself down and rested, and when the Moon sank again she rose up and went to the great doors, and she cleaned them again.
There was a carving in the door, and it a girl’s head, very lovely, but made green and dark by the mists of the lough. Each darkness Buan was cleaning that carving, and it coming lighter and more burnished under the touch of her hand, and that work did Buan’s soul good, and was setting her at peace with her heart. She loved that carving and that face, and the great doors, and what she did with them.
NOW AS TO THE BACACH, he had shut himself up in his rooms those darknesses, and was searching the stars in his telescope. His ate little but drank deeply, of the rainwater that fell in buckets on the bell-tower roof. But sometimes when the Moon was brightest, he crept about the forsaken lawns, looking for the hind.
Servants came and left him food. They came in silence and darkness, the way they were not disturbing him. The Bacach hardly noticed them. But when one of them opened the door loudly, and held a glaring candle before her, the candle burned his eyes; he cursed her and bade her begone.
‘I will begone, and you will be gone along with me,’ she answered. ‘Master Aengus, come.’
She was in white, and she wore the body of a woman, but she was the White Hind.
He climbed down out of the sky, slowly.
‘You are here,’ he said. ‘You are real.’
She held out her hand to him. He took it: there was no substance in it. His frozen, nerveless fingers felt nothing.
They went down onto the lawn. Agnes was waiting there.
‘How is he?’ she asked. ‘Aengus, how goes it with you?’
‘I’m numb,’ he answered, looking on his White Hind.
‘Here is Eudemarec,’ whispered Mielusine.
The Breton stopped short at the sight of Agnes. ‘Why, what new metamorphosis is this?’ he asked.
Agnes smiled and bowed to him. Her hair was clubbed in a queue, and she wore a tricorn hat, boots, breeches, and waistcoat beneath a cóta mór. ‘Don’t I make a pretty boy? I learned well enough how skirts and silks fare on the road.’
Eudemarec laughed.
‘You have a familiar look to me,’ said the Bacach.
‘Don’t you know me?’ asked Eudemarec.
‘No.’
‘I am the man who killed you.’
‘Ah,’ said the Bacach.
‘And are you really the love-mad Irish farmer, put out the sun? Are you Master Aengus, indeed?’
‘I am the Bacach. I draw the cards for Arianna.’
‘You must draw mine some time.’
The man reached into his pocket and drew out a card at hazard on his fingertips. The Breton turned it over: it showed a man walking the road, his belongings slung on his shoulder, a pup nipping at his heels. ‘Il Matto,’ Eudemarec read. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means, farewell,’ answered the Bacach.
Mielusine murmured, nervously, ‘Let us be going.’
They passed under the abbey in silence, to the mooring pole and Swan Boats.
‘One we will take, and the rest burn,’ Agnes said. ‘They’ll not soon be on our trail.’
‘That is not the way,’ spoke a voice from the darkness.
‘Who’s there?’ asked Eudemarec.
‘Let you not harm him, he is a friend,’ said Agnes.
He came out of the blackness north of the abbey, walking slowly, like a heron, he was so tall and lean. His smile was crooked as his legs.
‘Greetings, Miss,’ he said sardonically.
‘Mary bless you, Mac Bride,’ she answered. ‘And what brings you out under the fullness of the Moon?’
‘Ah, as to that,’ he murmured, in a sing song tone, with a long sideways look at the Bacach, ‘It was ever my pleasure to be strolling by the lakeside. But what have we here? Is it a war-party I’m looking on?’
‘We’re leaving, Mac Bride.’
‘Then have a fair voyage, Miss, and Mary speed you to your destination!’
‘Mac Bride, Master Aengus is going with us.’
At that the old countryman turned, looking from the face of the Bacach to Mielusine’s mask. ‘Is he, now?’ he muttered.
‘Don’t try to stop us, old man,’ warned Eudemarec. He put a pistol to Mac Bride’s breast. ‘It wouldn’t be worth the pain of it, you see.’
‘Stop it now, and put aside the gun!’ cried Agnes sharply. ‘Mac Bride, Aengus is a dead man here in this place. We’re taking him off to restore him to himself. Will you help us?’
‘You’d never be doing it this way,’ he told her. ‘The lady knows this scheme already; she had it in a dream. The fire will rouse them, and they’ll be on your trail before you lose sight of the crannog.’
‘It’s a gamble we’re ready to take,’ said the Breton.
‘Is there another way for it?’ asked Agnes.
The old countryman looked on her quietly, in the strangest way. He was on the very verge of speaking, and yet holding his tongue.
From one of the windows a light gleamed, and the casement swung out. In the candlelight Agnes knew the face of Old Meg, looking down on them all with an evil intent. For a moment she stared; then ducked away back into the hall.
‘Please, Mac Bride,’ pleaded Agnes. ‘We haven’t the time. You helped him once with a good heart. Can you stand by now, and be his jailer?’
He said, very gently, ‘Your heart has changed, Miss.’
‘You are lovely,’ said the Bacach to Mielusine. ‘You’ll not run from me again, will you?’
A door banged open in the servants’ building, and three burly men approached. They were Arianna’s ferrymen, roused by Meg. ‘What are you doing there?’ they demanded. At the sight of the Bacach they scowled. It was worth the worst of Arianna’s wrath to let the Bacach get away off the lough. Ever since he had been killed in the duel across the lough, this was her strictest command.
‘Be at ease,’ said Eudemarec calmly, showing them the ring. ‘I am her champion. She sends me to escort these three into the forest and show them the right path.’
‘Lady Arianna said he wasn’t to go. Only Arianna can say anything other than that.’
‘Oh, I think I can show you the fallacy in your argument,’ answered Eudemarec, and drew out a brace of pistols, leveled at their belts.
‘Now,’ he said coolly, ‘there are three of you, and I’ve but the two pistols; so if you have the blood of Turks, you may yet overpower me and fulfill your command, which I maintain is a false one, the way it’s herself is sending me here. But then two of you will die with balls in your bellies. Choose between you which, for ’tis a matter of indifference to me.’
The ferrymen stood glaring at him.
‘Well, then,’ said Eudemarec after a bit: ‘if you want to live, stand over by the mooring pole, and untie the boat.’
‘This is not the way,’ said Mac Bride. ‘Leave them and their boats, the way others will be coming to work on them, and the alarm will soon be sounding.’
‘Is there another way?’ asked Agnes.
The countryman nodded. ‘There is one.’
They trooped along the crannog, the countryman and Agnes, the ferrymen, Eudemarec, Mielusine and the Bacach. They passed the casino, the Lady Chapel, and the servants’ quarters. They rounded the basilica and went quietly past the byre, where the blood hounds whined and scratched the earth at the sight of Eudemarec. Close to Arianna’s garden, the lean old man stopped.
He sat on his heels over the water, and fished in it a little with his long, bony hand. It was the candle burning in the eyes of himself, was giving him the strangest look.
‘It was long ago, long,’ he told them. ‘When the crannog was built, we made a secret causeway, the way we would never be needing boats if we hadn’t any, if we had the wisdom. We piled up stones almost to the surface of the water, deep enough so as not to be seen by the eye, and following a tortuous path. My daughter used it once of a time,’ he said. Then he stretched out his arm and took her hand. ‘’Tis a path I know; feel it now, and don’t be forgetting.’
With his fingernail almost cutting her palm, Mac Bride traced in Agatha’s hand the twisting and the turning of the causeway out of the crannog. The flesh of her palm was streaked white like lightning, showing the path.
‘There’s no need for this, you know,’ she told him. ‘Come with us, Mac Bride. We’ll have use for you.’
But the old man shook his head. ‘I’ll not be such a traitor, Miss. And this is the way of it, if you want to win Aengus for yourself, it’s you must do the doing of it, not I. Go on then, and let her bless you! The boy was ever a soft point in my heart. It runs in the family, as you might say.’
‘Eudemarec, at least let you be coming with us,’ she begged. ‘Arianna will hold it against you.’
‘I will win her round, never fear,’ he said with a grin. ‘She is not evil. I would know evil in her. Neither is she good. She dwells with beauty, and beauty has its own law. She’ll not betray her love. And if she does … why, then I lose the wager! It would be worse to see her no more.’
‘If you are going, go now,’ said Mac Bride. ‘Look to the Moon, how high she is.’
With that, the old man left them, back into the abbey, and did there whatever it was that he did. Mac Bride kept his own accounts.
‘Bless you, old friend,’ called Agnes after him.
She dipped her booted foot into the lough, probing: found the causeway stones. She slogged forward, splashing; behind her came Mielusine, holding her skirts in one hand and Agnes’ hand in the other. The Bacach followed them awkwardly into the dark water.
Step after step, turning upon turning: they walked upon the water deeper and deeper into the lough, like three magicians.
‘Go with my love, Agnes,’ called Eudemarec after them softly, watching the three of them whitely blending into mist. ‘Win back the memory of your lover, the way he cannot know you but love you.’
He turned back to the ferrymen. He leaned against the wall of her garden, looking them up and down. ‘’Tis the brightness of the Moon,’ he said. ‘A long one. You’ve not by any chance got a pack of cards about you, do you?’
ALL THAT MOON Eudemarec held the three ferrymen captive; and Agnes and Mielusine led the Bacach past his grave up through the orchards. Along the way they passed a small ring of hand-small stones set in a vantage point. The paths were beaten bare through the white snow, and Agnes climbing easily and swiftly. But the man with his limp could go but haltingly, and the women had often to help him.
When the Moon set they took a bit of rest, then started on their way again. They went on after moonrise, while the brightness passed over their heads. They had climbed very high by then, and were close to the end of the mist.
But when the Moon sank, then the man fell on his knees for very weariness, clutching at his thigh.
‘Get up, come along,’ urged Agnes.
‘He cannot be going any more,’ answered Mielusine, ‘And we’ve not the strength to carry him.’
‘Do you not,’ said Agnes, ‘see that we are at the very edge of this county of mist? I can see stars over my head, where the mist is thin! – But what sound is that, now? Merciful Mary!’
THIS WAS THE WAY the Lady Arianna rose out of her dreams, with a rich slow stretching and coaxing of blood back into her limbs. She was smiling to be thinking of her new beloved; but she found the room empty beside herself.
Down she looked from her window to the Swan boats, and knew something was amiss.
Eudemarec met her at the casino door with the ferrymen at his back. He hid nothing from her, and confessed all.
‘Did I not deny you this already?’ she asked him coldly. He had broken his promise to Agnes, you see, and spoken of it to the lady after all. ‘Well, but I will forgive you the one naughtiness; after all, timid men are none to my liking. Your fault will be undone, though, the way I will be finding him and bringing him back to me; as for these women, now, I don’t care what befalls them, so long as it is none of it good. And what will you do now, Eudemarec, to make this up to me?’
He smiled, and kissed her palm. When the darkness was ending, they went up to her chambers, and were no more seen. She was very tender with him that time, and wept tears over him in her joy.
But when Eudemarec woke out of a dream by moonlight, he saw that Arianna’s ring was no longer his. His fingers were bare. Then an overmastering fear took him, and he left her side, even as Gwangior had done and fifty others before him, and he fled into the wild orchards after Agnes and Mielusine.
Behind the Breton a dark man covered in a tricorn and a dark gray cóta mór took another Swan boat and rowed himself across the lough. He stepped atop a hill into the ring of hand-small stones, and watched the Breton fleeing.
The Moon sank, and the darkness gleamed off the face of the waters of mist lapping the tall abbey. Arianna rose, and called her girls, and had them bring her hunting dress.
‘IT IS HER PACK,’ said the lame man, listening. ‘It is the lady’s blood hounds, and Arianna is hunting again.’
The sound gave back some strength to him, the way it was taking his thoughts away from his leg. He stood up, flanked by the woman and the White Hind on the hill side, looking back down into the mists. The baying and the howling of hounds were growing through the ghostly trees.
‘They are coming this way,’ whispered Mielusine through her mask. ‘Are they hunting us?’
‘It may be,’ said the man. ‘It may be the lady. She wants a new blood hound.’
‘Come on, then,’ begged Agnes, plucking at their sleeves.
They went on their way as best they could. Mielusine was leading the way, her strong thighs easily pushing away the ice. It was the man who stumbled, on nothing at all, at the very lip of the ridge, with the waves of mist breaking just over their heads. And ever behind them was swelling the baying of the hounds, to a frenzy.
And blending with the hounds’ cries another howling reached their ears: inhuman, from a human throat.
‘Eudemarec!’ moaned Agnes.
Mielusine was stilled, and the Bacach bent back his head, kneeling below her white skirts. But Agnes, weeping and cursing at her friend’s fate, plucked at their coats, and pulled them up and after her.
‘Let you be hurrying, let us go on,’ she said moaning, ‘we must go on out of this awful deadly mist.’
SO THEY FLED out of that county. And in the dark of the moon a hundred riders sallied forth, passing with wild whoops of joy beneath the branches of the orchards, out into the bare land on the lady’s greatest of all kailees, to hunt down and fetch back her Bacach, no matter how long it would be taking them. The moonbeams made a path for the robbers to be following, and there was only Grain’s shore where the lovers might be finding haven. But they had never heard of Grain as yet.
The man in the dark gray cóta mór saw Eudemarec’s end, and the pack of hounds scattering back down to the lough. He watched all that with a grim face, showing no more concern than a hanging judge.
Then he stood and slung the old quiver and bow across his shoulders, and took up the lovers’ trail.
