(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
29. Of the Grianan
ON THE FAR SIDE of the hill Master Aengus found a little hut built above the Sea. He rapped on the door with a stick.
‘Who’s there?’ was asked.
‘Someone is hurt,’ said he.
An old fishwife peered out of the dark door. She was offering him no pleasant failte. But looking him up and down, she grumbled, ‘You look well enough.’
‘It’s not me who’s needing your help. It’s my lady, lying yonder on the hill. Please, can you not help us?’
‘Ah, very well then,’ she said, none too surely. Drawing on a shawl she followed him up the sands.
For a long while the woman looked over the fallen Agatha, and she said never a word. Then she fixed Aengus with her eye.
‘Bring her along,’ she said.
Light and yielding was the girl in his arms. The rising sea-breeze caught at the stray hairs escaping from her braid, about the nape of her neck. Her cheek was so pale it was blue. It was strange not to hear her coughing.
The crone bade him place his lady on the hut’s one cot, covered over with dried sea weeds. How did this come to be, she was asking him.
‘It fell out on the journey,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know the tale of it too well. She was hurt.’
‘She is dying.’
The old fishwife paced round her cauldron where it hung on a chain, and round the dark embers of the fire. ‘I am old and weak,’ she was muttering, ‘What do you want of me? I cannot save her. No one can.’
‘Ah,’ said Master Aengus.
Not a tear, not a solitary tear, did Master Aengus shed. He only was nodding his head. All his life he’d been seeking wisdom, ever since his seventh year, when a beautiful lady had taught him the Moon’s first name. Now he knew that Sorrow was her name.
He picked up Agatha’s chill hand and placed it over her breast. He turned and left the hut.
THE OLD WOMAN went out of her hut after a time. Down the beach she found him sitting on a rock, looking at the waves.
The waves came and went and came again, eternally, and it was not hard to see what way his thoughts ran.
‘It’s sorry I am,’ said the fishwife, ‘for my rudeness. But it was plain truth I spoke.’ It might have been a stone she spoke to, he was answering her so little.
‘I’m Grain,’ said she. ‘People come to me when there’s nowhere else for them to go. I can help in little things. Sometimes in large things, too. But I cannot save your lady. Maybe,’ she was adding, after a bit, ‘maybe you can.’
His head turned, slowly, and his eyes looked over his shoulder to her.
‘Bring back the Sun, Master Aengus. It’s brightness and warmth your lady is needing now. In this Night she’ll die as sure as grass is green.’
He bent his head.
‘I can’t bring back the Sun.’
‘If it isn’t yourself, then no one can.’
‘Once before,’ he said, ‘I tried. That was near the death of me then, and look on me now! The half of what I did before would be beyond me now.’
Old Grain nodded. She put her hand upon his shoulder. Then she turned to leave.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Before you go, tell me how you would have had me bring back the Sun.’
DOWN THE COAST in a grassy inch, a stream was curling about a little island covered with quince trees, pear trees, and wild roses. The trees were in blossom again: it was that mild on the skirts of the Sea. Master Aengus waded into the smell of all that blooming, that weighted down his heart. Dripping wet he was, climbing up the bank.
And he heard a singing down the way.
In a grassy glen a girl was sitting on a stone seat, weaving blooms together. At her side were perched a swallow and an owl. Her back was to Master Aengus, and for a time he stood watching her.
She was wearing a white woolen kirtle, and her arms were bare and rosy. Her hair was a cloud of black threads floating on the breezes about her face. There was a grace in the way she held herself, like a girl who is knowing how to dance.
The owl and swallow hooted and chirped and flew off into the bushes. The girl turned of a moment, her eyes widening at the sight of the half-wild creature across the glen. She dropped her basket.
‘Stay, don’t run!’ he shouted after her. ‘I’m no stranger, Mielusine! I am Aengus – Aengus that you knew.’
Mielusine peered back through the branches. She looked at the man.
His eyes were wild and yellowed, his cheeks cut, hair dirty and tangled, beard bushy, clothes feathered and ragged, hands blackened, feet bare, nails but broken talons. Still, it had the look of him, somehow.
‘Yes,’ said he. ‘It’s myself you rescued from the abbey.’
‘And Agatha?’
‘In a hut kept by an old woman on the strand. She’s resting, but is ill.’
‘Cannot Grain be helping her?’
He looked away. ‘What do you do here?’
‘Grain gave me this orchard to tend. Here I’m growing flowers and tending to the trees. Women come to me wanting Grain’s help, and I give them dried flowers, and baskets of red fruit to entice their sweethearts. And when they win them, then they are blood-wed, as they say, though their marriage may be lasting a life, a year, or a moon.’
Then they sat on the seat, and spoke for a time about this and that.
‘I only wanted to know,’ he told her, ‘the mystery of love.’
‘When you know the mystery, you have no love,’ she said.
‘I only wanted to master it: when I loved, whom and how much.’
‘When you have mastery, you have no love,’ she said.
‘I only wanted forgiveness, for the wrong I did her.’
‘When you ask forgiveness for your passion, you have no love,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘Did Agatha tell you this?’
‘Ah, it’s not what she knows,’ said the dancer in answer. ‘My bare body told me this, when Vasquez touched it.’ She reddened, as though for shame; turned her face away. After a bit she was asking, ‘And you now, Master Aengus: she brought back your memory?’
‘Yes,’ said he.
‘And now she is dying. Is there nothing to be done?’
‘Only Day might cure her. I must go down the well by the dun.’
The dancer shuddered. ‘It’s a horrible place.’
‘Will you help me? Can you?’
‘I might. But Master Aengus, yourself you are half starved. Have you strength enough to wake the Sun?’
He lifted his hands, and the ragged sleeves fell away from his wrists, showing the dark thin lines of his blood. Across the one wrist was the crescent of a scar, faded and tired. ‘I have all of this,’ he was saying, ‘and nought else.’
Mielusine was for a long time still. ‘You’re not like Agatha told me,’ she said at last. ‘If I said I’d followed you, and that I took the mask from the place where Agatha hid it, and that I have it still: what would you ask me?’
‘The White Hind is dead,’ he answered. ‘She died bloody murdered on my lap, a hundred and one moons ago.’ He looked on her. His eyes were hard. ‘You have the mask?’
‘It’s what I told you. Shall I don it?’
‘Do you want to?’ he asked.
‘I’m asking, is all.’
He answered, ‘Mielusine, Agatha is my lady. But if you wear the mask I will fall in love with you again, and stay here with you always, or go, if I go, only at your bidding.’
‘Then you wouldn’t be going into the dry well and braving its perils to bring back Day?’
‘Only if you asked it of me.’
‘No,’ she answered, ‘I do not believe you, Master Aengus. You are a part of Agatha, and she is part of you.’
She was so serene that he said, ‘I might have loved you had I known you. You are like some earthly goddess now, and worthy of all Lady Agatha’s teachings, the way you have gone past them all.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I’m only a dancer. But I can help you, I think, a little, with this.’
Out of her pocket she drew the leag lorgmhar, smooth and rounded as a hen’s egg.
