(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
27. Of the Dark Wood
IT WAS THREE MOONS, Agnes did not go back to him. Then she found his tracks and followed them.
A line of wagons crossed her path. The wagons were brightly-painted and clad with tin, and the pans and pails hanging from the sides rang and clattered like rain.
‘Let her love you, young man! And what are you doing walking through the gentle Night, alone?’
‘It’s searching I am for another. Tall and dark he is, with one white lock, and not strong, the way he is limping. Have you seen him?’
‘Not the buckle of his shoe. But climb up with us, and if we find him on the way, you will, too.’
‘I’ve got to be finding him, do you see. His wits are limping too, and I don’t know what will become of him.’
‘Climb up, and we’ll keep a sharp eye out! We are going to the Fire – do you not count the stars? I’m Bera, and these are my girls Brigit and Buana. And you now, young man, what are we to be calling you?’
She answered, softly, ‘Aengus.’
The old Tinker woman smiled a smile that split the whole of her face in two. She held out her hand. ‘Aengus, climb up, and we’ll look for your friend along the way.’
‘Yes,’ she answered, and taking the woman by the hand, she went up beside the daughters on the plank seat.
The line of wagons sang and rang, down dale, up slope, with lanterns swinging like fire-flies from their tails. Alongside the wagons went many on horseback: some Tinkers like the wagoneers, but the rest wild women and men with pistols and scians at their belts, and eyes bright in the dark. Arianna’s bandits and jades, hunting the Bacach. But they didn’t know her on Bera’s wagon, the way she was another Tinker, and in disguise.
The Tinker girls talked to her, and laid their hands along her knee, and she must be telling them something of herself and the man she was looking for, but she could never remember, afterward, what it was she told them. In her heart she was cursing herself for the harsh words she’d lain on him. In the middle of it she broke down coughing, and staining her handkerchief red, so Bera put her back in the wagon and laid her down, and one of the girls lay alongside of her for warmth. They clucked their tongues and turned their eyes sorry-wise, and the mother shook her head. Then the two girls quarreled over which of themselves would be getting to lie alongside the young man to warm him.
But Agnes was drifting in warm and in dozing, deep into the deep. Dim and faint she was hearing them quarreling, and the words of the tale their ma was telling them to keep them still and attentive; so far away it seemed to her, so far herself seemed from herself!
‘But didn’t she fight against it?’ asked Buana.
‘Oh, it wasn’t that she didn’t,’ answered Bera from the front. ‘But what was it she could do?’
‘Run away,’ said Brigit.
‘Fie now,’ said Bera. ‘She was only a girl, and the other was the Lady of the Lough! Only a few of the gentle people could have stood up to her. And less than a few would have defied her as Princess Maeve was doing.’
Agnes closed her eyes, listening to the Tinker women talking on about the fairy tales as though they were truth.
‘And when will the curse be put off her?’ asked Brigit, the way in stories there is always a way to put off curses, and the way is always found, unlike in life.
‘This is the way of it,’ answered the mother, ‘that Princess Maeve will only return to her own shape upon her betrothal to Prince Og. But Prince Og defied the lady, and she cursed him with forgetfulness, and exile in the Day-land, forever, and there in that place he fell in love with a human girl, a daughter of Adam; and as to Princess Maeve, she followed another path.’
‘Hush now,’ whispered Buana, ‘you’ll be waking young Aengus from his dreaming.’ Agnes felt the brush of soft lips across her brow, and a fragrant breath murmuring, ‘Dream, sweet man, dream.’ So she did.
It wasn’t they not knowing, was she woman or man. It was only they letting people be what they wanted to be. She wore a man’s clothes and a man’s name; so it was a young man the girls tended to, and a young man they carried in their wagon, and laid down on the outer circle in the red light of the needfire.
The heat of the great fire was blackening the hill, melting the snow even outside the rings of wagons, and warming the ground. And the heat of the Fire washed over the young man on the ground in three great waves. It dried her hair, it dried her clothes, it dried her flesh and bones.
SHE SAT UP, looking in the Fire.
It was a huge beehive risen on the hill. The flames were spiraling up and about, wreathing into smoke. And from one hand a dozen lasses came out of the dark, bearing over their heads a great nest of wildflowers, primroses and brambles, blooming even in the snow in the Night. And atop that nest lay the body of a girl all in white, tattered and airy as lace, with a great red scarf wrapped round and round her throat, and a golden torc clasping round the scarf.
The lasses took the nest up to the needfire, and they shifted to place it on the top, so that the flames withered the roses and wildflowers, and the thorns sparked, and the body of the dead girl was joining with the smoke, and becoming no more than air itself.
About the needfire were gathered a thousand or more of the bandits and jades, Arianna’s folk. And on the far side of the fire Agnes could see a fine fair carriage, drawn by twelve horses, and Arianna herself was standing there, grieving.
‘But who was she?’ Agnes was asking. To which one in passing answered in low tones,
‘’Twas one well-loved by the old Man of the Bog. But she is flown now with the birds.’
Then Arianna turned on her heel, and went up inside her carriage; her coachman cracked his whip, and lady and robbers and jades rode galloping away into the Night-land, searching for her Bacach as they had done for moon upon moon, with gallous small success.
At which the Tinker lasses and youths came ringing the fire again, and were grasping one another’s outstretched hands, and beginning a slow somber dance. In time the steps of them flashed quicker, the way it was not for long they could be withholding their joy in the great vast spaces of the Night-land. The last of the robber women and men were dancing with them, and their silver spurs were flashing in the fire. From out of the dark on every hand others were climbing, carrying bundles of twigs and logs and many other things, and casting them onto the pile.
More of them came, curious folk, boys and girls, and bent old people, and many tongues were spoken among them, and there seemed no lack of understanding. They wore the dress of different lands; some were fair and some were dark, and some in finery and some in rags. But there was a look and a gleam in the eye of all of them, so that they seemed all kindred.
A child came up to her with a cípín of birch in his hand.
‘What are you burning?’ she asked the child.
‘Whatever we want,’ answered the child, and asked her, shyly, ‘What do you want?’
Bitterly she shook her head. The child moved on around the fire, and she reached into her sack, and took out a book, much used, so that the title on the spine had worn out with smoothness.
It was the book she had loved so, when she had lived, and the Sun had shone.
She let the old thing fall open to any page, and she read there: and the words came back to her, so that she could keep on reading them, even closing her eyes, even closing the book.
And unsteadily she rose, and stepped forward, and the dancers broke their ring for her, and she stood inside it. The great breath of the flames was burning into her face, like hot summer sunshine, and against it she narrowed her eyes, and breathed in fire. And she cast the book on the fire. Sparks and ash flew out of its lies into her eyes, drawing out tears. She looked through the tears and saw a woman on the yonder side of the fire.
This woman was dancing alone around the fire, dressed in a cloak reddened by the flames, proudly glowing and alluring with the sins of the flesh. The woman paused in the turns of her reels, and her shadowy, mysterious eyes caught Agnes’ own. Then the woman danced on, and others joined the circle.
‘Come dance,’ sang Brigit, beckoning, ‘with us, Aengus! Take my hand with me!’
‘Nay, now,’ answered Buana. ‘It’s with me Aengus will be dancing!’ But the young man shook her head, and quietly stepped back to the dark edge of the fire.
The rush of the ring swept the Tinker girls round out of sight on the fire’s far side, shrieking and laughing. Children were dancing after them, seven children in a row: they were Agnes’ children. All at once they caught sight of her and pointed her out, singing, ‘We know who you are! We know what your heart desires!’
She looked on them with no words in her at all. Then the dread of them took hold of her, and she slipped away into the darkness, and went down the hill side to a dark wood, ingrown and tangled with brambles and dense dead bushes.
She had nothing then. She had lost her lord and manor house, and her friends of the day, and Mielusine, and her beauty, and her hope, and her book, and Aengus.
ROUND THE WOOD she walked, looking for a trail, until the glow of the needfire was only a lost smudge of red in the sky beyond the twisted, thick, black boughs.
Some cottagers were living beside the wood, themselves coarse as homespun, still brown after those years without the Sun. Agnes thought them quite the loveliest people she had ever seen.
‘Mary love you, surely we been watching the trails,’ they said, giving her a failte and sitting her before a smoky peat fire on the only seat in the cottage, and it old, and in no good repair. It was odd, they to be burning turf and living at the edge of a wood.
‘We always watch for strangers and suchlike, it been hard to get some things since all went dark. You now, Miss, have you any goods?’
She could only offer them a hank of tobacco out of one of her coat pockets; they snatched it up gleefully and reddened their dudeens at the fire. But they knew nothing of Aengus.
‘Nay, now, none has been afore you for ever so long – seven moon or more: and them bandits on horses hot on the chase of something, but we hid from all them. All’s we gets is the madman in the wood. He howl, he howl, Lady! Whenas he’s close, it’s damned little rest we can be getting, the way he howl. Listen! There, now! Och, why don’t merciful Mary send him down a well, or break trees over his head!’
Outside the cottage Agnes heard a dim moan. It grew to a yell, a shriek. The cottagers’ children stopped up their ears. It went on and on, longer than a human voice might last. Then it broke, and faded away.
‘Moy-rua, he’s been doing it for ever,’ they told her. ‘He’s devil-haunted, poor miserable creature. And when he howl, we may churn and churn, but no butter will come. Why can’t that blasted devil chase him crost to the far side of the wood? – Or bring clouds in on bright moons. That’s when he’s worst, whenas the Moon’s most brightest.’
But Agnes felt her blood chill, the way that cry was in his voice.
And she went from the cottagers, burdened with jars of berries, and bags of nuts. Puffing happily on their pipes, the woman and man sent her off with a blessing.
‘Be well, be merry, Miss in a man’s breeches! Let her keep you warm and dry! Go east now, skirt the blue bogs, and you’ll be finding Grain’s county alongside the Sea. She maybe will be curing you. Do not be going into the wood, it’s an evil, nought but badness dwells there.’
‘Let her bless you,’ said Agnes, kissing the both of them.
She left the cottage behind her on her right hand, trailing round the wood, stepping closer and closer in to it. The eye of the spying Moon discomfited her.
The wall of brambles, tangled dead weeds, brake and bush shifted warily past her. Over the brambles she could see dead, white, rotting trunks; crooked branches curling low; black leaves bunching, blotting out the stars. She heard the rooting of boars, the rustle of small sneaking things, and owls and birds of the night. And she heard the cries of Master Aengus, gone mad in the middle of that wood. But there was no path through that wall.
She bent down by the wall of the wood, feeling the tangles. It was like wicker, and stronger than stone walls, the way not even cannonballs might have breached it. In some places the weeds were woven close as woolen mittens.
She dipped her hands into the weeds, taking them back with a shudder when thorns cut her palm.
The dampness breathed through her coat. She was feeling a burning round her brow and a dryness in her throat ever since she slept on the snowy hill side.
And after a time she felt an opening in the wall.
It was a dark hole down on the ground, half-covered with a fringe of grass. It must have been a fox’s path; but if she left the bags of nuts and berries outside, and took off her cóta mór, she might just squeeze into it.
The brambles coiled about her inside the black tunnel. Her breeches were wet with mire. Where the brambles crossed the tunnel she took them carefully between her fingers, bent them down and put her knee upon them. Behind her, her knees, cut by the brambles, left little curling trails of blood. She crawled further ahead, reaching her hand into the black.
Where her hand touched a thing, slender and slight. She took it into her bosom, and went on crawling.
The Moon must have fallen while Agnes was creeping down the tunnel. Weary as she was, seeing nothing at all about her, she dared not stop, the way she might be meeting some beast coming out from the far end.
At last she won clear. She crawled up a little mossy knoll, where the ground was some less damp, and there, in darkness, she let her limbs bend back out straight, until the soreness was fading and she could dream.
The Moon was peering through the branches when Agnes rose. On the broken trunk of the tree over her, she saw in the moonlight two words, crudely scratched out of the bark, one above the other:
GODDESS
STOP
Agnes traced the letters with her fingertips. Then she took out of her bosom the card she’d found in the tunnel. There was a couple drawn on the card, a man and a woman, both red naked, chained by collars on their wrists beneath a winged giant.
Il Diavolo, the card read.
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.
