(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
28. How She Sang to Him
SHE WANDERED through the wood. In the brightness of the moon she heard the raging of the madman. The black leaves shook with his birdlike cries.
Her stockings, shirt and breeches were shredded by brambles, her shoes muddied and torn. Her hair was full of twigs and leaves, and the fear of Arianna’s bandits was in her, the way she could hear their hunting horns sounding outside the wood.
Could they hear him crying, too? Could they tell his voice, that voice that no other man was ever using?
On tree trunks she cut the thin grooves of his name, AENGUS. But she found no other scratchings beside the first.
‘Come down to me, Aengus,’ she was calling. ‘Come down out of the branches of trees. Let your feet feel the ground again: behold in my eyes the sight of the man that once you were: not so wild, not so driven by the winds, but mine.’
She knew he was near. But he did not answer.
She was drinking from a stream, and saw pale wood chips floating past her on the dark water. There were twelve, and then one larger.
‘Aengus, did you send me these? What did you mean by it?’
Agnes built a hut of fallen branches, ferns, and brambles. She made fires there, warming her bed. Her hut breathed blue smoke in the darkness, filling the wood and leading her home.
She hoped he would be lured by the smell of her cooking, and built a nest for him up a nearby tree. She rested dreaming that he was there; and when she might not dream she spoke to him, hoping her words like the smell of her fire would be reaching him.
‘Don’t go, Aengus, come back! Let me warm your rain-chilled body, let me soothe your chafed red hands!’
But he never came or answered.
And she found a hollowed log, lined it with leaves and put food in it beneath the trees. It was often empty. Was it Aengus who ate it, or a badger?
The dark of the moon came circling back. That cold was the bitterest ever. The stream froze over, and the branches cracked in the blackness loud as pistol shots. And her cough deepened, like a plague cough, like a death cough.
It seemed to her he had become the wood, and the wood was him. Gathering berries from a rowan tree, she thought he must have eaten some. Hearing the owl screech, she thought he heard it too. The creak of branches in the wind spoke with his voice. It couldn’t be anyone else’s, the way there were no other people left in the world.
Through the black claws of branches, she gazed upon the Moon. She was the Samhain Moon, and herself so cold, and Winter still waiting to be born. And what, she wondered, would that Winter be after a Summer of snow and ice? She’d never live to see its end.
‘Is this our Eden, Aengus?’ she said to him from the door of her hut. ‘Is this our Paradise?’
That darkness she crept out into the glen. Something huddled over her tray. It started at her presence, spread its wings and flew into the tree.
‘Aengus, don’t go! I can tell you the beginning of your pain, and it’s only I can set you free of it!’
There was no sound or stirring answering her, but still and all Agnes sat against the hut, sending her thoughts far back; and she told him:
‘It was the first of May, it was, and the Sun was hot and bright, and all the ladies riding to the lake. Dame Letitia and Lady Felicia were speaking of their lovers, but I, I had nothing to say.
‘And across the lake I saw a dark and solitary man. He was standing on a rock gazing down into the lake. He didn’t even cast a glance our way. Miss Cecily told me it was a farmer without friends, and he was often seen on the meads with his dog; a cold, backward man, but something of a philosopher.
‘Then under my breath I was saying, “Never, Master Aengus, will you be happy without love; and never while the Sun shines will you love anyone but me.” Then all at once a black swan flew up from the lake, and out of all the ladies by the lakeside your dark eye fell on me.
‘I blushed hot as foxglove, repenting my rash words. I had to look away at once, the way I couldn’t after tell whether you but glanced at me or stared all the while we were there.
‘After that, I had your house pointed out to me, lonely and apart, half fallen from neglect. I heard the tales they told about you. Once or twice I even saw you, walking in our preserve.
‘I had never noticed you nor heard your name before. Now it seemed you were ever in my path. I had loved looking out my windows on the meadows; now it was always you there, dark and still and watching. The morning after a rain I found footsteps in my flower beds, and knew that they were yours. I thought, “What does he want? Why does he haunt me?” Oh Aengus, why could you not have been foolish and light like any other lover?
‘Talk of the mad farmer who chased me was ever on my friends’ laughing lips. And I thought after all, it was only proper that you love me. It was none of them who’d won your heart.
‘Then you were gone away,’ she added, after awhile.
‘You stood no more upon the meadow grass, there were no more footsteps under my rosebeds. Your house, half shambles, came to be shunned. It was easier without you, yes! Never again did I think of you, I swear, until the night before the last day. It was ever on such a night that you would come for me.
‘I didn’t miss you. But I mightn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t breathe, I opened my windows and you were there.
‘Then all at once I longed for you as I longed for no other man. You were unhandsome, and the sweat of the horrible thing that you’d done came gleaming off your brow. I did not know my longing was but a trick, a thing you put on me. I stepped back to be away from you, but when you entered I took hold of you and kissed you, viciously, and laughed…’
Agnes hugged her knees to her breast, rocking slightly back and forth.
‘I said what I said by the side of the lake, and that was the start of it all, for you, for me…’
And a cry came croaking down to her, hardly human, the way she had trouble making it out: two words:
‘Why, lady?’
‘WHY, AGATHA?’
She was pacing the woods, weighted by his question. Why had she spoken those words by the lake? Why Aengus? And why word her geis in that way? She tried to recollect herself as she had been on that bright day, but that one was a stranger to her now. Only the wooing of her geis stood out in her mind, unforgotten.
She left him food on the tray, as before; when the Moon rose the food was untouched. She knew he hungered for her food. She knew he starved for it. One darkness, at last, he ate of it.
Come moonrise Agnes found him lying on the moss beside the tray. Her herbs had put peace in him.
It was a great black crow she was looking at, with one white feather on its wing, a bent leg, and human eyes.
She took him in by her little fire, and cradled him in the crook of her arm. While he slept she was silent, listening to the wood. She heard an owl screech very near. Then the fancy seized her that Arianna was there; she covered the fire and scooped leaves over both their bodies to hide them.
‘Now I’ve grown half as mad as you,’ she muttered. ‘But while I hold you I’ll never let you go, let lady and bandits come as they like.’
At length she rested. It came onto her slowly, in stages, and this was the way of it. First she was aware of his breathing, the rustle of leaves at his breathing. Then it was the rapid beating of his birdlike heart she was hearing, deep under the feathers. Her own heartbeat she heard as well. And she thinking, If music has the power to charm, so does love have strength to heal, and let my love now heal your poor burning brain, my Aengus, though I am so tired.
She felt her own heart slowing. So she rested.
When she opened her eyes he was gone. There was only a feather caught in her sleeve.
She saw him across the glen, crouching on a root, ready to flit up into the branches. But his feathered form was larger now, and he was almost a man again.
‘Aengus,’ she cooed sleepily, holding out her arms. ‘Come again.’
And warily, like one half-tamed, he hopped down off the root and came back to her, walking with darting steps.
She took his hands in hers.
‘We must go now,’ she said. ‘We must find shelter, and a way to summon back yourself. Even if it means losing you. Aengus, will you come with me?’
The way he looked at her he might still have been a crow.
Firmly she took his hand, and led him out of the wood.
IN THE FIELDS they were wandering in snow up to her waist, though the stars were harvest stars, and Winter after being born. They went down south and eastaways, down to the Irish Sea.
They went by starlight, and hid in the shadow of a hedge or rock by moonlight, when the lanterns crossed the distant hills, and the bandits’ horns were blowing. Agnes let drape the long braid of her hair down between them while they dreamed.
She was dreaming of flowers springing up and growing strong, taking her strength, like Day being born out of her bones. Her coughing was hindering her, and weakness and weariness, and a rising tide of sleep, dark and sluggish as death.
From the hilltop behind them they were still watched.
The woman stumbled and could go no more. The pair of them lay down in the snow under a hawthorn tree, the way there was no other shelter to be found. When the Moon rose, she shone down on them like an evil lantern lighting the bandits’ way.
Through the icy mist hanging over them like tent cloths, Agnes was watching the Moon. ‘Aengus,’ she murmured, ‘are you there? I am burning. Fetch me water.’
Aengus melted snow in the hollow of his hands, and she licked at it. They had nothing better to be eating. He looked on her, saying nothing. But it seemed to her a bit of reason was returning to his eyes. Or was it her reason was failing?
That moon she lay in the hollow under the hawthorn tree, waking and dreaming dreadful dreams. She knew she must find strength to move on with the darkness. But when it came, she hadn’t.
With the next moon her fever had lessened, but herself weaker. She was no better on the next darkness, or the next, or the darkness after that. But already they had tarried there too long. They must be going.
He was lifting her, and she leaning against him, and he hobbling with her, and they step by step going down a hill.
That walk was torment to her. Her head was thrown back against his shoulder, and she feeling the ground through his stagger, and the stars moving and jigging with them, like her starry black skirts.
‘AENGUS, Aengus, set me down.’
It was later, and the Moon was glaring through the clouds. Blown snow was a forest now.
She lay back on the snow. It felt so good that she lost all care for anything except to go on lying there until the dawn. In the back of her mind the flowers were blooming, tall in the Sun above her bones in the dark Night of the Earth.
She rolled back her head on the snow. On the hill side near them a cave was opening. ‘We must go in there,’ she murmured. ‘We must go out of moonlight. But I cannot…’
It was bliss to cease even the little effort of speech. She had no desire. Sure, and this is what the angels feel.
Mutely the man knelt over her, hiding her face from the Moon. He watched her, but she did not move.
It began to snow again. He took off his chaplet of laurel and laid it on her hand. He picked her up, and took her into the cave.
From the hilltop a figure was climbing down after them. He was a dark man, dressed in a tricorn, a muffler, and a long dark gray cóta mór.
The dark man stepped down to the cave-mouth. For a time he was standing there. Then with a turn of his head he strode forward.
FAR AHEAD, deep in the hill side, among the warmth of the stones, the man carried the woman. The cave stretching on before him, and he following it, down and up again, until it was ending, and he coming out the far side, into a green meadow, into a grianan. There was the tang of the Sea in the air, and the mewing of sea-birds.
And it was bright there, with the glow of early evenings or of late nights; the sky ended in a pale band over the Sea, of rose and violet wherein the stars were drowned. The Sea was still, with expectancy, and the light of the sky shone off it green as copper. The land down to the Sea was covered with long dark grasses, bowing to the Sea, down to the cobbles of the surf.
The man nestled the body of the woman down into the grass. He straightened her coat, her breeches, and her braided hair. He wiped a bit of dirt off her cheek, and stroked her dry, cold brow, and murmured, ‘Agatha…’
