(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
31. Of the Lady’s Share
IN THE PALE LIGHT, in the calm after the great storm of the wave, in the cool after the burning of the Sun’s bright heart, Master Aengus walks along the strand. His path is not straight, but is weaving here and there between the pits eaten out of the strand by the third wave.
He is looking at this shell, and circling that stone, and he is breathing in the wet salt air, and hearing the songs of the morgans in the waves. There is a sort of drunkenness in him, light and breathless, and his eyes look on the face of the world with the wonder of a child. And so bright is he shining, that he is casting no shadow on the bosom of the Earth.
In the wreckage down the way, two figures were standing. It was only after a time that Aengus was aware of them.
The smaller he knew, and the name of her he knew, and that was Grain. The other was taller, and of fairer form. She was a young lady dressed in a black woolen dress such as fishwives wore. A scarlet scarf was caught about her throat, her breast was bare, and her hair bound about her head shone with streaks of red gold. From that, Aengus knew she wasn’t Mielusine: nor was she, the way the dancer was standing higher up on the grasses by the hill. Next to her on the rocks were perched her sister owl and swallow.
‘Tch, for shame, look at yourself!’ scolded old Grain.
He had to laugh at the sight of himself. The fires in the cave had burnt off his tattered clothes, burnt back his hair and burnt off his beard, and all the filthiness was burnt clean away from him. The fire had even burnt away the scratches on his arms and the lines in his face, as if it polished him. His skin was pale and burning bright, and where his bare feet touched the sand steam was rising, the way he was yet coal-hot. He hadn’t even felt his nakedness.
Old Grain shooed him back, and he stumbled into the waves, raising hissing clouds of steam. The old woman drew him back, but he was still hot, so in he went again, and Mielusine danced him out, and now he had his shadow back. And the third time it was the lady in black and red that quenched him, and drew him out by the hand.
Naked, shining with water, Master Aengus took Lady Agatha in his arms and kissed her.
‘You are younger now than ever I knew you,’ said Agatha, holding him at the ends of her arms. ‘And even handsome!’
But Grain, clucking her tongue, covered him up in her shawl. He let her do that, but his eyes were full of Agatha.
‘But I’m not the White Hind,’ she told him.
‘No,’ he answered her, ‘you are the woman I love.’
He said that so earnestly that she had to laugh.
Then he gave the old fishwife the blackened ball out of the heart of the Sun, and she turned it over and over, looking at it closely.
‘This,’ she said, ‘is no stone, but the skull of your enemy, Master Aengus, all charred by the fire. It’s his dreams that have been cursing you.’
But Master Aengus frowned. ‘Who hated me so?’
‘No, but I know,’ said Agatha. ‘Is it not my old lord?’
‘Aye, that was the one.’
‘But what had he to do with me?’ Aengus wondered.
‘Faith, what had he not to do with you? Do you not know how at birth you were put in his cradle, and he was taken away to your own mother? You two were born of an hour, for all that you came of age before him, and he was old when you were still taken for a youth. After seven years, your mother brought him back, and would have taken yourself away with her, only you proved stubborn, and must stay in the world of men. Then your mother cursed you with forgetfulness and ionarbadh, and left you as you were.’
‘And he was old from my first memory of him,’ wondered Aengus.
‘Not wholly was your heritage to be denied. For every year that took its toll on him, you paid but an hour’s fee. You had forgotten, but he was cursed with remembering, as of dreams, those first seven years of his. As who indeed could be forgetting marvels?
‘Not his fine house, his hounds, his carriages, nor his stables pleased him, but were as tarnished gold. Why else was he forever going off alone with his hounds? It wasn’t the fox or the stag he was hunting for!
‘He was hating you with all his heart, Aengus, but you were too innocent to see the truth of that… Is it any wonder the both of you loved the same auburn beauty, with her eyes bright as the moon of your home?’
Then Grain hummed, lightly to herself: ‘Yaaaaaa … ai!’
And Mielusine brought down the leag lorgmhar and broke the skull like an egg. Grain let the charred fragments fall to the sand, but drew out of them a little red jewel, perfect as a dream. She held it out behind her, and made as though to hurl it to the waves.
‘Hold, now,’ said Master Aengus, frowning. ‘You still have not told all. If old Tadgh and Maille May were not my parents, then who were? And who was this mother of mine, of whom you seem to know so much?’
‘Now, that is a question you ought not have asked,’ said the old woman. She pointed with her cípín, fear in her eye. ‘The way you are Prince Og, and your mother is the Lady of the Lough, and she’s coming even now to claim you.’
The Earth under their feet was shaking like waves, and over the hill a hundred riders rode, resplendent in scarlet and black cloaks and cutlasses. Behind them was a coach drawn by eight white mares, and round it bounded a great pack of blood hounds.
Grain shrank back. It was the look in her eyes of a gambler wagering high, and seeing the prize almost in his grasp, only to lose with the last card.
And Agatha knew then that in the last evenings of the day, the horsemen hadn’t come for her at all. They had come for him.
The bandits and wenches thundered around; the coach wheeled to a halt. Arianna stepped forth. A silver fan in her hand, her step imperious, and wrath in her eye. From the coach windows the faces of her maids peered out.
Grain cowered, and Mielusine and Lady Agatha curtsied, and even Aengus knelt on one knee in the black shawl.
‘You think to cheat me,’ said Arianna.
‘Did you think you could pray to my Moon aloud, Aengus, and not pay me so much as a penny for a duais? Do you think this will all end happily for you four, and badly now for me? No, but it’s one of your lives I’ll be taking for my injuries.’
Then Mielusine spoke first and said, ‘These two have suffered enough because of you. But I without my sisters am still lost. Take me then, and let them live.’
‘No,’ said Agatha. ‘You won’t do that for him, Mielusine. Only I should have that right. I will go with you, Lady, and little difference it will make, the way I am near dying anyway. But let Aengus go, and be happy.’
‘Neither you nor you will go,’ swore Aengus. ‘Nor myself, either. But we will bring back the Sun and burn away your mists, Arianna.’
‘I can yet forestall the Sun from rising for all that you have done, foolish boy! Ask her, if you doubt me.’
And she pointed her fan towards the fishwife. Old Grain nodded.
‘You tried to rob Eudemarec away from me,’ resumed the lady. ‘Were you thinking you could take him from me without replacing him? It’s you I’ll be taking, Master Aengus. For you alone of all men loved me and yet did not love me well; you loved me with your heart alone, therefore it is your heart I will have torn in two.’
And she dashed down on the sand a slender chain, and on the end of it a golden guinea.
‘I took this as the price of your life, Aengus. Now I’ll buy you back.’
He bent and picked it up. He had to.
He looked on Agatha.
He looked on her for the last time. As if he would seal forever the sight of her as she was in that moment: distraught, pale from weakness and so beautiful it made his heart ache.
‘Lady Arianna,’ he said, ‘you called to me once, in a hayfield in moonlight, when I was seven winters old. I turned my back to you then, and cast aside your parentage, and held myself to be a man, though I was never one of Adam’s sons. Then my bride called out to me, and you cursed her and me. You took away my memory, but now some part of it is coming back to me, in spite of all your doing. Even so, I accept your judgment.
‘I will go with you,’ he said, ‘and serve you in your abbey in the mist. But in return you will watch over Lady Agatha as once you watched over me, and shelter her as one of your own.’
Then he stepped up over the wreckage on the strand, and stood on the sedge with Arianna. But Agatha said, ‘Wait.’
She drew out of her scarf a small bundle and unwrapped it. In the nest of rags, the little jeweled snuffbox sparkled like a gathering of stars.
‘I took this from you along the way,’ she said. ‘I cannot open it. Will you be needing it?’
‘Mielusine will open it,’ he said.
The dancer took the box, and putting her fingers to it she laid it open, easily, discovering what was within. It was a velvet black ribbon threaded with scarlet, with a cameo of ivory, of the face of the third night’s Moon.
‘Until now, I myself had never seen what was within the box,’ said Aengus. ‘It was Mac Bride gave me that snuffbox, upon my twenty-first birthday.’
‘It was herself gave it to me to give you,’ said Mac Bride among the bandits. ‘What did I tell you then of it?’
Aengus was looking at Agatha. ‘That what lay within it would be hidden forever until I found the woman to whom I should belong. That it was only she it would fit.’
Then Mielusine was clasping the necklace round Lady Agatha’s throat, which it fit that snugly and well. Agatha put her hand up to the velvet warming to her flesh.
‘She will have to watch over you now,’ said Aengus.
Agatha stepped forward, with a little ‘Aengus!’ on her tongue.
‘Hold your place,’ said the lady. ‘You have chosen, stay where you belong.’
The bandits led Master Aengus to the coach, the blood hounds nipping at his heels. The lady stepped up after him.
‘Lady! Lady!’ It was Mielusine calling.
‘Yes, Dancer?’
Mielusine cast down her gaze, then looked up boldly. ‘Will it go well with you, if I am returning to the lough?’
‘Were you happy there?’
‘I was. What will my beauty win me in Day? Riches, perhaps, and back door acclaim, and to be called a doxy and a whore? But in your abbey I will be a lady.’
‘It’s wise you’ve grown, Dancer. Very well: come into the coach.’ Two of the jades covered Mielusine with one of the scarlet cloaks, and it was himself, Mac Bride, held the door and helped her up.
‘You must have servants if you’re to be a lady,’ said Arianna. Mielusine looked behind her, and saw the owl and swallow growing, and turning into her sisters.
‘Grisalta!’ she cried, and ‘Merrwyn!’ And the three of them embraced, and set to telling one another tales of all they’d been doing during the long Night.
But Aengus where he sat bent his head and squeezed his eyes. ‘What is it now, boy?’ asked Mac Bride.
‘The White Hind,’ answered the man. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Is she now?’ asked the old cottager with a breath.
‘Yes,’ said Mielusine, breaking from her sisters. ‘Mac Bride, Mr Vasquez killed your daughter.’
‘Ah, you people of Day,’ sighed Arianna. ‘Look where I’m looking, and tell it over again.’
They looked up the strand, and saw a young lady walking down to them. She was wearing a long white gown, the side of it all reddened, and in her hand she bore an arrow.
Mac Bride, the old Man of the Bog, went to his daughter. But Arianna was there before him, and she called to the lady, ‘Princess Maeve, where have you been hiding?’
The Princess frowned and answered, ‘It’s what I don’t know.’ She held out the arrow. ‘I dreamed I was sleeping.’ she said, slowly, ‘for many years.’
‘So you were,’ said Arianna. ‘Dream again, safe from all harm.’ She took the arrow from the lady and stepped back; and then it wasn’t a lady at all, but a small hind standing there, with silver horns, a collar of gold, and a white coat streaked along one side with a doeskin colored streak.
The old Man of the Bog knelt beside the White Hind, took her head in his long, lean hands, and stroked her soft white brow.
‘Ah, you were wayward as a girl, when you sided with my fosterling Prince Og. Then you were made to serve the lady in her abbey for seven of our years; but you were wayward, wayward, and fool that I am, I taught you the secret of the causeway, and you ran away home again.
‘But for that the lady haunted and cursed you, and in your mother’s arms you became again what you’d been when we fostered you, a beast of hill and wood, hunted by men. Then your mother was saddened to death over the loss of you. And I,’ he said, ‘I hardened my heart against you, the way you were so wayward, and the death to me of your mother. It was glad I was, to go back into Day and watch over Aengus again from afar. But is this truly the only way to save you now?’
Arianna handed Mac Bride the bloody arrow, and answered, ‘No man’s arrows could kill her, but this came from my father, and was shot by a man who learned our secrets. It’s the only way to be saving her now, to let her be the Hind.’
‘Go on then,’ he muttered into the White Hind’s ear. ‘Go on then, and trust no men with their bows and lures.’
The White Hind pranced away up across the grianan. Agatha and Mac Bride and Aengus watched her go.
‘So that’s why you loved her,’ said Agatha. ‘You remembered Princess Maeve, and saw her in the White Hind.’
‘No,’ said Aengus, ‘I didn’t remember her. I longed for the Hind.’
‘But it’s only a story, of Princess Maeve and Prince Og.’
‘All our lives are only stories, Miss,’ answered Mac Bride, ‘when they’re told to somebody else.’
The coach started, and in the window Agatha saw Aengus’ face looking back to her. And she heard the words Arianna spoke to him: ‘It was never for that world you were born, Master Aengus. Now you are going home again.’
And the silver bandits mounted, and in a clopping, a creaking, and a barking they all rode up away over the hill with Master Aengus and Mielusine, and were gone.
Mac Bride only stayed behind, and held Lady Agatha to comfort her. But she tore herself away, went down the strand and knelt on a heap of cast up seaweed, where she bowed her head, tore the braids out of her hair, and let the waves splash round her skirts.
‘’Tis best this way,’ said Grain. ‘The way Agatha could not have lived on in the Night; and he must be ever hounded and hunted in Day for what he’d done.’
‘Yet even if they had been able to live there together, unknown,’ answered Mac Bride, ‘with such a love as now possesses them, they would have been friendless. Men would hate them, women would envy them, and before long the soldiers of the King would be marching round to tear them all asunder.’
Grain sighed. ‘Those who love with a true love have no other needs, and make the worst of rebels. Only in death could they have been united there.’
Then she leaned back, and flung the red gem to the waves.
Deep into the Sea the red gem floated, past waving bands of weeds, under schools of flashing fish; deep into the dark the red gem sank, into the land that was sleeping under the waves.
And soon the waves quieted, and the pale band of gold and blue brightened and spread up into the sky, pointed like the crown of Christ or of Hercules, putting an end to Lady Agatha’s long ionarbadh, and shining on the green, green hills; and an intolerable brightness burst out of the Sea, and it was dawn, and the beginning of another day.
