(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
26. Of Their Quarreling
THEY WENT on their way, the two of them, the man and Agnes. They followed the dancer’s tracks in the snow.
‘Where is the White Hind?’ he was asking. And she answering, ‘Gone ahead, and left you this mask. We’re to follow.’
‘But why did she not take me along?’
‘The White Hind flies like the wind when she’s a mind to, and you are slow, and lame. Take care, or I’ll leave you too.’
They sat under a hedge. Above them three dark women went past against the stars, speaking Gaeilgte on a hill.
Aengus lay dreaming, and Agnes went apart and tried on the mask. But she couldn’t squeeze her face through the narrow opening.
From his dreams the man rose groaning, tears rolling down his cheek like ink.
‘I dreamt I saw the White Hind,’ he told her. ‘She was going down a lane, and mayflies swam in the light like gold dust. There was a dark man beside the Hind. He was leading her by a leash tied to her golden collar, and they were going away from me. They were beautiful together. O Man, I hate you. You have the White Hind, you alone of all, and you boast of it.’
‘Aengus, what befell when you tried to summon back the Sun?’
‘It was some place by the Sea. I was forbidden entrance. Oh, I cannot recall.’
‘Bring back the Sun, Aengus. You swore you would. I put that task on you.’
He did not answer.
ALONG THE WAY they came by the side of a curious house, tall and crooked. In the topmost window one light was burning, and Agnes was leading him away from that place, when the door creaked open, and someone came out after them, calling ‘Agnes! Agnes!’
She went back to the house. The doorway was dark, but the stars glinting off the snow showed a figure standing there, gathered up in black folds. The figure moved – it was a woman, after all: dressed all in black, veiled in black lace, and only her bosom bare.
‘Agnes,’ she called, ‘Agnes, girl, is it you?’
‘Yes,’ she answered.
Lady Ann the cottager once, the Lady-trollop now, took her aside and spoke quick words to her.
‘Agnes, you must go with soft steps. I’ve sent my man out to be finding you, and here you are on my doorstep! There’s someone tracking you, and he means you no good by the look of him. Only six moons past he was here, eating off my platters, and drinking my ale, and talking away. Be careful, now, he’s surely near here!’
‘Who is it?’ she asked.
‘Why,’ answered Lady Ann, ‘it’s the Man Who Should Have Slept, to be sure! Didn’t you know he was no friend to you and yours?’
‘No,’ she answered, ‘but I thank you for the warning.’
‘Let her bless you, my girl! If it weren’t for you I’d never been a lady!’ But already Lady Ann’s voice was softened by the snow, the way Agnes was hurrying back on her tracks, and thankfully finding the man still leaning upon the broken tree. She took his hand, and led him away as quickly as he might go.
THEY FOLLOWED the dancer’s tracks in the snow. In a valley, the footsteps were covered by the tracks of many horses; and on a stony hill where the wind had blown away the snow, they lost the trail.
‘I know where she has gone,’ said Agnes. But she led him away from where they had been following. Meek as a child he followed her.
‘Aengus,’ she called back to him.
‘Yes.’ It was no more than a whisper, that voice of his.
‘What day would it be, if we still had days?’
He looked up at the stars. ‘August the twenty seventh.’
‘And it’s winter, still?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is happening? What’s become of the world?’
‘It’s Night, and the Lady is pining for her Bacach.’
Mostly the snows they were light, but some were heavy and drifting. Trails vanished beneath them and the going was gallous heavy.
And little they knew of it, but wherever they went they were followed, and wherever they stopped they were watched from the hilltop behind them. The tall gaunt man buttoned up his cóta mór against the snows, and silently tracked the lovers.
ONE DARKNESS she left Aengus sleeping, and she went around a wood. She climbed a snow-clad wall, and looked across a rising of fields in a coat of silver and snow. Looked, and there beyond a hedge she saw the high stone manor house that she had left.
It was silent and dark beneath the snow. There were no lights, no scent of smoke. Inside, the rich men and their ladies, all of the Lady Agatha’s friends, were sleeping still in their beds. The thickness of their sleeping wrapt around the house and its grounds.
Round the grounds some riders were riding, and they wearing the black and scarlet cloaks of the county of mist. But she got past them, and slipped up the hedge alongside the snow-covered drive.
And she was thinking, no doubt, of the wood and dried peat Mac Bride had stacked there, all ready now for the burning. She was that tired now; cruelly, heavily tired. Her rests had turned deeper and sweeter in the cold. Her dreams had turned so beautiful…
Somehow she managed, by the merest crack, to open the servants’ door, and she slid into the shadowy interior. She was that thin after her long traveling. The door shut fast behind her.
Moonlight and starlight were shining off the snow and glowing through the ice-stained windows, with a still, soft, blueness, and she stepped quietly, with the grace of a girl going into church, painfully aware of the echo of every step she makes.
She walked through the downstairs hall, through the dining rooms and public rooms, and she thought of being there long ago, on her twenty-first birthday.
That, she thought, was years ago; and yet in days not very long ago; am I older now, or am I still only twenty-one? The Sun hasn’t gone round but half a year since then. But no, what am I thinking? The Sun hasn’t gone around at all.
So thinking, strangely, she climbed the servants’ stairs. Out into the upper hall she came. Where for a time she stood, looking on the door to the lord’s room. The great door bent half open, showing her a glimpse of the bed, where she had lain alongside Master Aengus.
The rest of the doors in the hall were closed and shut fast. A torpor like the fullness of sleeping after too heavy a meal on an early summer’s afternoon, that was weighing on her, slowing her steps and slowing her thoughts, like the dust slowly turning in the snow-glow through the windows. Once more out of habit, like a dream, she tried the doors to the Sleepers’ bedchambers: and now one doorlatch turned for her, and the door seemed almost ready to yield. She muttered over it words she learned from Master Aengus’ tables and parchments: pushed open the door and stepped in.
The door in her hand was drawing back to close itself, but, taken by a notion that if she let the door close on her she would be trapped there, and tumble down in sleeping till the end of the world, she held it firmly, while she bent forward and down over the figure wrapped up in sheets and bedclothes like a mummy.
‘Sir James! Sir James, can you hear me?’
And she murmured a bit of something else out of Master Aengus’ tables.
And the snow whirled up outside the window, and the door leapt to close itself, and almost snatched itself out of her hand, but she held it fast – and the Sleeper’s breast rose and fell in a sigh, and his lips parted, and one cheek twitched.
‘Sir James, what is it you’re seeing? Can you not see me?’
And a branch threw itself against the window in the wind, and the Sleeper’s eyelids twitched, and underneath them the balls of his eyes darted about.
‘Sir James, what is it you’re feeling? Can you not feel my hand?’
And she reached out and took hold of his thumb.
Then his eyes flew open, his nose snorted in a breath of cold air, his lips parted – his face was full of dread and horror at something – something in the room about him which she could not herself see – and his eyes rolled about, caught sight of her, and for a moment seemed to know her, and sought to warn her, of the dreadfulness of dreams, of the evil of the Night, of the emptiness of desire – when the door leapt back to its jamb, pulling her back, her hand wrenching away from him, and he lapsing at once into a deathlike mask of sleep. Until she fell out into the hall again.
She breathed there uneasily, and felt in the air about her the hostility of the Sleepers, meant for her.
It’s not, she thought to herself, waking they’re wanting – not so long as the Night lasts. How dreadful Night must appear to them, that are not used to it. And she thought, They are dreaming of Day, and let them dream on, without the hindrance of my meddling.
She descended the front steps and went out the main doors, and saw on the drive nine of Arianna’s rogues and jades awaiting her.
One laughed, and drew his silver pistol, and thumbed back the hammer of it.
Very still she stood there. But she would not go back into the house. So she stepped down to meet them.
‘You may take me,’ she told them, ‘and do your worst to me; but you’ll never win him back into that jail.’
One of the bandits jumping down off his horse strode to her, and knelt in the snow in front of her.
‘Lady,’ he said, ‘we’ve no wish to be hurting you. You may come along with us now, or go another way, as pleases yourself. It’s only the Bacach we’re seeking, to carry him back into the mist, and into the crannog. And that for his own welfare, the way there is many a danger for him out in this country. And most harmful of all is that place,’ he said, raising his arm at the house, ‘the way that place, if it find the Bacach again, will see him die and fall down into dust. Never let him come here! Never let him see its walls again!’
‘Thank you,’ she told him, ‘for your kindness. Only, why are you helping me? I’m no friend to the Night or any of you all!’
‘Lady, do not be wronging yourself so! You cleaned the Hundred Steps and a Step, did you not? And do you think any daughter of Day could be doing that?’
Down the long drive she walked, and along either hand of her the robbers and jades in their scarlet and black cloaks bowed, and took off their hats to her. But still in her heart she didn’t trust them, so she went first to the lake, the desolate lake. Where for a time she listened to the wind crying in the dead dry sedge along the ice, crying, ‘Always! Always!’
‘Ah, and we’ll see about that,’ she said, and when the Moon went down into the hill she gave the riders the slip and stole away back to him.
SHE LED the man down along the Bride. Bandits hidden in the village almost captured him, but knowing the lay of that land, Agnes eluded them, and she took the man away eastaways, across the Blackwater and across the Suir.
A flock of black birds, bigger than crows, flew over their heads, and Agnes felt ill at ease. Were birds not Arianna’s messengers?
‘I feel kinship with the birds,’ said the man, looking up after them. ‘I want to be free like them. Birds, let you be coming back for me!’
‘IT WAS EVER strange fancies taking your heart,’ she told him, walking in the moonshade of a hedgerow.
After a while he said, ‘What was I like, before?’
And she began to tell him of himself, of the ruined man he’d been, and how he’d wooed her, and how he’d drowned the Sun to win her, and vowed to bring it back.
He only said, ‘It’s the White Hind I remember, and nothing at all before her.’
‘It’s lying you are,’ she answered him. ‘You do remember. You remember it all. You only say you can’t recall it, the way you couldn’t be facing me otherwise.’
They did not speak after that. They went a long way together, fleeing the bandits, hiding under hedges and rocks in the high places.
The man was carrying the mask, looking on it always.
‘Why do you seek the White Hind? What is it you are looking for, then?’
‘I look for myself,’ he answered, gazing on the mask.
‘Are you lost, then?’
‘I am here, but my wholeness is missing.’
‘Go away, Master Aengus! Go where you will never see her, never hear of her, where no one will bring her to your mind!’
After a long while, the man sighed, and lay down with the mask cradled in his arms. He sang, softly, a mad song:
‘Over the earth is moving the wind
Relentlessly; I stand here
Still; she at the back of the wind
And beyond.
‘She travels here, she travels there
Wherever her fancy leads;
But her fancy never leads her
Where I am.’
She stared at him. She pulled at him, but the man wouldn’t be budging from that place, and so she must lie down beside him, and lay the half of her cóta mór across him to warm his crippled leg.
Slowly the stars wheeled into and out of clouds.
About the middle of the darkness Agnes rose, and she took the mask of the White Hind away from him, and going far apart she put it under hard earth beneath the snow.
And she left him, and walked by herself in the snowy Night.
It was three moons, she did not go back to him.
MEANWHILE the Bacach lay dreaming in the snow. He didn’t know that Agnes had risen from his side, or that she had stolen away the mask, or that she had gone away. He didn’t know that the Man Who Should Have Slept was even then sharpening the points on his arrows. He didn’t know that something else was watching after him from a bit of wood on a nearby hill. That was a little beast of the wood, pale as the snow, delicate and arching as a willow, with small silver horns and a golden torc twisted round her neck.
The Bacach lay dreaming while the White Hind slipped out of the wood and crept down softly to his side. He lay dreaming still while the dark man appeared on a far-off hill, and raised his bow, and shot an arrow into the beast.
The White Hind took the arrow full in her throat, and she staggered, and tarried, dreadful tarrying; she swayed a little over the man laid out on the snow before she fell, heavy falling; and she died.
The man in the dark gray cóta mór stepped down over the Bacach, and troubled his leg with the tip of his boot. The Bacach stirred, but the man bent over and whispered to him, ‘Now, now, brother, don’t trouble yourself! It’s nobody that’s here, it’s nobody at all, only your long lost beloved brother Fergus, come to pay a call! Dream now and stay dreaming! Dream of your love lying and dying for love in your arms.’
The dark man laughed, and uncovered his face. And his face was ghastly and grim and mad, the way he hadn’t dreamed in all the months of the Night. He couldn’t be dreaming, you see, and he didn’t dare rest, for fear he might fall asleep like all the Sleepers. Because he was the Man Who Should Have Slept.
‘Well,’ said he, grinning, ‘my brother Aengus, won’t you even bid your dear brother Fergus good-evening? It’s so long since we grew up together, and swore ever to be true to each other, when we mingled our blood together. Where are your fancies, airs, and powers now? Who studied better, you or I? And who learned best?
‘You stayed at home after our father fell, but myself, I took the rebel road, and I went across the Sea for it, and worked on the work of our land, and you doing nothing but studying after your heart’s desire. And I hated you for that, and for the traitor you are.
‘I knew it was your work, when I saw the black spot on the Sun,’ he said. ‘It was in a far land I was then, but I still found the needed ingredients to mix a brew to keep me wakeful in spite of anything you or the old man could do! Oh, this Night of yours is a fine thing, brother, if it let me come back to my homeland, and kiss my kin once more.’
And he said, ‘Oh, I came back again to the Bride, and I waited and watched, until I found your trail. You let my love die, brother, and you stood by while the King’s men hounded me out of home and country, but you never were thinking that one fine night would see me revenged on you!’
The dark man slung off his bow, and put that into the Bacach’s hand; he slung off his pouch of arrows, and tucked it up under the Bacach’s arm.
And he took up and brandished a sword in his hand.
‘What are you thinking, brother Aengus, that you find me with our father’s sword? It was me should have gotten it, not you; I found it again in the Night; it was in a dead hound’s breast; fancy that, right where you left it! You’ll not get this back again!’
The Man Who Should Have Slept turned and left the Bacach with a laugh. And after a time the Bacach was freeing himself out of his dreaming, and stirring and opening his eyes.
He sighed, and saw at his feet a lady stretched out, as lovely as the lee. She was dressed all in white, torn and ragged and airy as lace. Her long throat was arching up his thigh where the old wound beat, and her head in his lap, and in her throat an arrow, and the blood from the arrow staining all the front of her gown, and the snow also all about her skirts and feet and where he sat was red, red with her cold, cold blood.
For a time he was staring at the dead woman stretched out on the snow. He had never seen her before, never in his life; but there was something about her, something – and then he saw in her pale brow by the start of her dark hair two small nodes like the start of silver horns, and round her throat a torc of twisted gold.
The man looked down and saw in his hand his grandfather’s longbow, and a quiver of arrows alongside his leg. He looked up, and his hands cast aside the bow and arrows, and his eyes saw that three blackbirds were flying across the clouds by the Moon, high up away from the Earth.
His cry was choked off under the clouds, and few would have guessed it came out of a human throat.
