Blood by Moonlight: 41

(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)

© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Afterword

ON THE MORNING of November 29, 1757, Sir James, Dame Letitia, Lady Felicia, Miss Cecily, and Mr Humphreys woke up in their chambers in the manor house. The servants woke as well, and the wealthy men and their ladies enjoyed a hearty breakfast.

It was a topic of some curiosity amongst them, that the lord and his lady had deserted them in the night; but they knew the old lord’s eccentricities, and soon enough their questions were answered by Lady Agatha when she returned to them. She told them the truth, that the lord had fallen in a duel over her honor, and that the man who’d killed him, Master Aengus, had fled their country.

That same morning a gruff, callused cottager woke up in his hut, and gave three calls for his youngest.

‘Sini! Sini, you lazy bones, come fetch me my porridge!’ he shouted. But the rest of the cottage was empty, and the countryman’s daughters fled away in the night. They never came back, either, and the cottager lived on in loneliness, grumbling at anyone addressing him, and ending his days in peevish sourness.

On that morning of November 29, 1757, the world wakened, as it always did. An unusual night seemed to have passed, the way so many had died, and so many births were to be recorded; but it was no great marvel, the way the odd facts seemed all to be applying only to the poor folk, Tinkers and such like trash; and whoever gave a Tinker’s damn for them? Governments took their seats and began another day of taxing their nations, judging their criminals, and sending them to gaols, prison, and hemp.

But the folk who had Wakened through Night into Day remembered, and carried a little bit of the Night about with them for the rest of their lives. And the ones who had been born in the Night were gifted with dreams for ever, and they looked on the world through eyes bred to the Night-land. They only came alive at the falling of the day.

With the help of Mac Bride, Lady Agatha took over the old lord’s estates. They hung up over the main door an arrow, and forbade all further hunting on the estates. The rich men and their ladies found her much altered, sad and dreamy-eyed; soon enough even Lady Felicia lost patience with her and went to lodge with other hosts.

But herself, Lady Agatha, voyaged to Italy, where for all that winter she bathed in the Mediterranean sun. Her health was coming back to her, but in the secret place in her back was still the small red star, and in the spring she went back into Ireland. On Beltane Moon, she built a Need-fire out of driftwood on the lawn, burning all night, the way Beltane is a favoring fire, for then the Druids had made fires with spells, driving cattle between them against evil. And there was merriment enacted there, and lovemaking among strangers, the way all there wore masks.

And on Midsummer’s Eve Lady Agatha rode down to the shore alone, beneath the dun at Knockadoon Head. She swam naked in the sea, and shivered beneath nought but a shawl, waiting for the dawn, that always came, always. And for this folly of swimming in the Western Sea she suffered her cough to come back.

November Eve came, Samhain, for suain is a gentle sound, and at Samhain gentle voices call. Lady Agatha found Mac Bride in a riding coat, his few belongings tied in a sack.

‘Faith, where are you off to?’ she asked him.

‘It’s to Lough Mask I’m going, to the Lady of the Lough,’ answered he.

‘Take me along with you.’

He looked at her sternly, shaking his head; it was plain he wanted to be obliging her, only the thing she was asking was forbidden. He said at length,

‘Yes. If you want it.’

And together in the sunset those two were riding across the fields, leaping stiles and hedges, outracing the Sun, until they rode over the ridge into the watery mist, that could be entered at no other time.

Master Aengus waited for them there at the bottom of the lough.

He had not died, but he lived as Arianna’s man in her abbey on the lough, where an endless twilight darkened into night. The bandits and wild ladies and the elder folk had flocked to Arianna in the mist; second only to her was the Lady of the Stone, the one they called the Dancer. She lived in the second tower of the Abbey, the Bride’s Tower, that was finished at last, with her sisters, Maid Grisalta and Maid Merrwyn.

And Agatha joined him in those darkling misty lands, under the orchards, and for one night they were together, speaking quickly, catching up on all their news. Holding each other with all their strength, beneath a quince tree, for one night.

When the night was brightening into dying, Mac Bride told her he would not leave that place again. ‘It was only to be helping you I went back into the foreign land at all,’ he told her.

Alone Lady Agatha rode over the ridge, out into the misty dawn, and found it was not a night that had passed there in the foreign land of the day, but a full month of the Moon.

In all the years after Lady Agatha was wintering in the Italian sun, building her Beltane fire, bathing beneath Knockadoon Head, and riding to her ghostly lover in the lough every November Eve.

As the years went by, she grew older at but half the quickness of those around her. But Master Aengus in the orchard aged hardly at all, the way he was living in Tir-na-n’Og. Soon enough Agatha matched him in seeming year for year, and after that looked older. Master Aengus did grow older, a little, the way he aged a month’s time every night she came to join him, and he took back a little of her age, and put it on himself.

Even so, Master Aengus never forgot the Princess Maeve, the White Hind. He saw her prancing in the wood in white moonlight on Midsummer’s Eve, even as Agatha in the foreign land was diving in the sea-foam. It is not to be thought he was so utterly faithless as that, to be forgetting her. But he kept his faith after his own fashion, as he did all other things.

Once riding to him Lady Agatha mistook the height of a stile and was thrown from her horse and killed.

She was old then, but the grandchildren of her friends were fully grown, and their children old enough to have danced their first mask in the Need-fire light.

They did not bury her in the church with the rest of her kin, but put her under Earth on her lawn, beneath where the grass was dead and the ground bare, the way she had been building there her Need-fires for nigh a hundred years.

Master Aengus waited in the watery mist below the ridge. And when he saw she would not come, then he broke out across the ridge and dared steal even over the fields of the foreign land, going only by night, and hiding himself by day. He went to the manor house, now falling in ruins, ill maintained for all Agatha’s extravagance in keeping about her vagabond poets and wild-souled beauties who cared for nothing at all but love and pleasure, and only their own loves at that: were they not the children of the Night?

All fallen in ruins was the manor house, and the grass grown up wild about it, and the hedges of its mazes tall as castle walls. It was almost fallen beyond all recognizing.

But Aengus knew where to go.

There was a little marker there. It was of wood as she had wanted, the way it would soon be gone, burnt beneath the driftwood of the next year’s bonfire, and the next year’s after that.

Master Aengus had aged a day for every step he had taken out of his mother’s land. He sat by the marker all the night long, weary and breathless. Once he had stood beneath her windows yonder, and cut a bloom from her garden, a single bud of the night-blooming rose.

When the dawn broke, the Sun’s rays, marching green across the rimy lawns, discovered not Master Aengus sitting, but only a few moldy bones fallen beside the marker.

And the Sun rose, cruel and all-seeing as it ever is.

A young woman in a dark dress came out on the lawn. Her eyes were light as sea-waves, and her face fair, and in her reddish dark hair was a streak of white. She was the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of those two, and her name was Siona Mac Ulcin.

‘Bury the bones with my great-grandmother,’ she said to the servants. ‘She told me he would come.’

Come October, 1858, on her way to Italy, Siona Mac Ulcin took the stage round Ireland with one of her young men friends. She stopped at old Connor’s stage on the way, and she told the master there her story. Himself now was Connor’s great-great grandson; his great granddad had been Shawn Ruadh, Siobhan’s son; and he made Siona tell the tale out three times, until he had it right.

In his turn he told it to his guests, the ones he most liked, the way it was his best-loved tale. They stayed over to hear it out: it took all the night to tell, and who wouldn’t have tarried, to hear the truth of why the Sun had ceased to shine, and to recall the feats of daring in the Night of Seven Years? Traveler told it out to companion, and the latter told it out in turn. So it has come in a long, long line; and now in my turn I pass it on to you.

THE END

OF THE TALE
OF MASTER AENGUS AND LADY AGATHA,
AND THE LADY OF THE LOUGH.

Blood by Moonlight: 40

(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)

© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The New Dawn of Day

In the first new year of Day, those Waking who had no Powers, and who had been Cast Out of the Strong Places, found themselves in the second hour of the Dawn walking down old familiar paths again. To their old front doors. They opened their doors and looked inside. They found their lovers, their kin, their friends, and all the other Sleeping, stretching in their chairs and beds and opening their eyes.

But the Special Ones raised their walls higher against the Sun, and shut themselves away. They walled off the Strong Places forever from the harsh light of the world. They clung to their Powers and the company of their own kind.

The Waking shared breakfast with those who had been Sleeping through all those Seven Years. And the Waking tried to tell the Sleeping what they had missed, the strange lands and unheard-of adventures of the Night of Seven Years. But the Sleeping rubbed their eyes and yawned and said only, ‘Enough of your dreams, now let me tell you mine.’

The Waking held their tongues at that, and the world went on – as if only one night of twelve hours had passed across the world, and not one of seven years.

But some of the Waking never forgot those years, and over and over again they were telling of them, in fairy tales, and painting of them in unworldly colors and strokes, and singing of them with fire and too-great joy. They knew one another by what they read and saw and heard in the new schools of art. And though their children never knew what it was to walk and breathe the airs of Night-Land, all the same they remembered, in their dreams and in their blood, when ecstasy took them, when they danced and sang, whey they heard the tales of the fantastic, when they saw strange building and unearthly paints, what their fathers and mothers had lived through.

And faintly through all the art works born of that impulse, there ran the traces of the Strong Places and the Special Ones, walled away from the world forever by their own devising. Always those traces can be found with longing and a sense of loss and regret. But they are gone to us all the same.

Blood by Moonlight: 39

(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.

Blood by Moonlight: 38

(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)

© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The End of the Seventh Year of Night

In the end of the seventh year of that Night, the Earth shuddered underfoot. There was a pause – a breath was taken and held.

All the Waking felt it, those with Power and those without. They all wondered what it might portend. And when the burning blinding Brightness came, they shut their eyes and turned their faces away.

They didn’t know what it could mean. They had forgotten Day. They had forgotten Sun. Only at the end of the first hour of the Dawn did the memories flood back to them.

Blood by Moonlight: 37

(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)

© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

30. Of Aengus in the Sea

OVER THE SEA was a bluff, driven up by thick slabs of stone; and the waves foamed over those rocks, and gulls and rooks wheeled in those airs. A pile of rubble stood on the bluff. Once it was a strong man’s dun. Folk said the Druids built it before the first grass grew.

Before its gates the well was sunk.

It was dry, that well, a low circle of the same gray stones, bleached by the casts of birds. Deep in the well the stones were black as hearthstones. And in the brightness of that county, with the sky bright on the glassy sea, Master Aengus looked down into the well. Dark and black it was. He thought he saw a little light far down in it flickering, like a candle. But there was no sight of the beast.

Aengus let down into the darkness a ladder of rope. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

Grain held a lantern in her hand. Mielusine was cloaked with a red mantle against the sea-breeze. The dancer nodded.

‘Och, my heart trembles for the two of you,’ muttered the old woman. ‘Are you sure you’ve taken all measures?’

Half was he swallowed up beneath the stones. Ghastly pale was his face in the lantern light; and his jaw was set.

‘I will do it,’ he told her.

The fishwife pressed into his palm a bit of trefoil.

‘If it’s hot you’re feeling, eat a stalk of this. But save enough for coming back.’ He closed his fist about the green.

And she was handing over to him the lantern, and he was going down into the well. Mielusine went after, bearing a basket of quinces.

Grain’s face shrank with the closing of the mouth of the well above them, but the moaning of wind was growing.

Deep down in the well the ladder ended, but that was near enough the bottom so they could climb down the rest of the way. The sides of the well were rough stone, hard gravel, and broken bits of pottery. It was dry as bone.

‘Aengus,’ whispered the dancer, ‘I’m afraid for you.’

Before them a tunnel led down into the earth. They followed it in silence, to where the tunnel widened, showing three dark, gaping mouths.

And stretched out before the three openings was a thing as big as a horse and white as dead bones: Henwen, the monstrous sow of men’s nightmares and fears.

Such a thing you never have seen in life. Her jaws could have gulped down a man’s head. Two of the cave mouths she lay across, growling, her breath rough as yew-bark. Directly the two entered her cave she started up and snarled and snapped at them. But Mielusine scattered quinces before her, and held out in her hand the white stone.

The huge sow snorted at the fruit, but she licked at Mielusine’s hand, and nibbled daintily at the quinces.

‘Do you see, Master Aengus?’ said Mielusine, patting Henwen’s great bobbing head. ‘She’s just hungry, after all, half-starved for love.’

But Master Aengus was already stealing down the tunnel Grain had told him of, moving swiftly in the black and brightness, catching and feeling the walls close around him.

Mielusine took the lantern and went back up the ladder. She and Grain rolled it up and carried it away.

The small, dark shapes of the two women walked slowly down the broad beach under the weight of the bright clouds in the sky, back to the hut.

Mielusine glanced back. ‘Who is that,’ she asked, ‘standing over the well?’

‘Where?’ asked Grain. The old woman shaded her eyes against the gleam of the waves and squinted. ‘Ah, but my dim eyes can hardly see a thing in all this gloom.’

‘He is standing over the well,’ answered the maid. ‘A tall, thin man hidden in a tricorn and a dark gray cóta mór.’

‘Could it be our Aengus?’

‘No,’ answered the Maid, ‘no, but it seems I know the fellow.’

Fergus, the dark man, watched the women pass. When the coast was clear, he stepped up to the well, and peered deep down inside.

 

IN THE HUT it was dark but for the dim glow of the embers. Mielusine and the old fishwife crouched over the cot, tending to the dying woman. From outside the hut came the sounds of wind and rising waves.

‘She is weaker now,’ said Grain. ‘She has been unwell that long a time.’

‘I shouldn’t have left them,’ said Mielusine.

All at once a great crash sounded from without, and the sod roof shook.

‘What wave is it?’ cried Mielusine, covering Agatha with her body.

Grain answered in a hushed voice: ‘He is there.’

The dancer rose, and catching her skirts round her legs with her hands, stepped outside the hut.

Agatha moaned, and twisted in her place. Grain had taken off the damp, mouldy shirt and breeches, ragged from the thorns of the wood, and dressed her in one of Mielusine’s shifts, and covered her with blankets. The old woman took a bit of straw, lit it off the embers and held it over the bed.

Agatha’s face was pale and flushed by turns, and the sweat standing on her brow, and her teeth chattering with cold, in spite of all the blankets covering her.

Then the straw burnt out, and shadows swallowed up the sight of her.

 

OUT ON THE SANDS the dancer twirled her skirts with her hand. She stopped on the cobbles of rocks above the wrinkling lace hem of the waves.

‘Hello, Mr Vasquez,’ she said.

The dark man standing at the well-side bowed to her with an ironic flourish.

‘Will you dance for me, Maid Snowflake?’ he asked.

‘Surely,’ she answered, ‘I’ll do that, Mr Vasquez, after we talk a word or two.’

‘What is it you’d be wanting to know?’

‘Why you’re here, and why you wear the mask you wear, and who you were, and who you are, and where it is you’re going, Mr Vasquez,’ she answered him.

He laughed, and ran his fingers over the fabric of the mask. ‘It’s not so much,’ he said, ‘you’re asking.’

 

‘THERE WAS A PIECE of the Sun,’ said the fishwife, sitting rocking over the lady in the darkened hut. ‘It was the very heart of the Sun, to tell by the heat of it. It fell into the Sea yonder; for the longest time we lay buried by mist singing up out of the boiling sea; lobsters and crabs were tossed up cooked onto the cobbles and sand.

‘In time it cleared,’ she sang, soft and gentle like. ‘And some of the boys went out onto the water, to see what they could see. They dove into the deep. But only darkness was there, and a black heat rising from the seabed. The way we knew it had gone into the Earth, swallowed up forever. But later, in the darkness, we were seeing strange lights flashing out of the well up by the old dun.’

And another crash sounded from outside the hut, like a fearsome wave tearing round all the coasts of the Innis Fodhla.

A wind tore through the cracks of the hut, and the fire in the embers roused and sprang up.

Agatha’s dim lips opened, and she breathed, ‘Aengus…’

‘He has found it,’ whispered Grain.

 

THE WARM WET SPUME was draining away from Vasquez’ dark gray cóta mór, and Mielusine felt her gown clinging to her through the wet. In spite of the fearsomeness of the wave, he by his singing, and she by the quickness of her feet and the weight of the white stone, had held off being washed out into the deep.

‘Tell me then, and tell me true,’ said the dancer.

He answered, ‘Well, and I will.’ He held up his hand, considering; and it was plain that his thoughts went into the past and he was forgetting the well and what Master Aengus did there; and that was just what the dancer was desiring.

‘Once of a time,’ said the dark man, ‘old Tadgh and Maille May were visited: that fell out on an evening just at the moment the first stars come forth. A woman and a man, wrapped up in their cóta mór, shawls, mufflers, bonnets and hats, asked the cottagers if they hadn’t a boy, a dark lad, living with them? And they went on and told the shape of your Aengus, Maid Snowflake, to the last feature and trait. Tadgh and Maille May looked each other in the eye, and didn’t know what to say. When Aengus himself, a tall lanky boy, appeared in the doorway next to them. And it was just his seventh birthday, or near it, if you trust what the calendar says.

‘Then the strange couple were much relieved,’ said Vasquez, ‘and they told how they had heard such good things of the cottagers, and they said that they were the best of parents, “and we have here a lovely child,” they went on, “and we know of nobody who’d be better at raising it than yourselves,” and they handed over to them another boy. Of course, old Tadgh and Maille May fell in love with the child from the start, and raised it after Aengus, and those two got on so well together, that in after years they were swearing blood brotherhood, and sharing all the secrets in each other’s hearts, and went under the sod as one, and were of the same mind in all things; all things, that is, save for one. And it was said the second boy was a Tinker’s child, the way he was dark, with a red, red lip, and I know the tale well, having heard it enough, the way the child was myself.’

‘Go on,’ said the dancer, ‘if you please, and tell me all of it, Mr Vasquez. It will do you good.’

So the dark man took up his tale again, and all the while, unbeknownst to himself, he was speaking his words in a rhythm like chanting, and moving his feet to the swaying of her hands and hips, the way indeed the very waves out of the Sea were starting to do.

 

‘FAR AND WIDE,’ said Grain over the shivering, dreaming lady in the cot, ‘we were sending, to find one to go down there and heal the Sun’s heart, the way she’d be rising again. But the few daring enough to try never returned. They were longing for Day; but it’s only a true child of the Night could be winning there.’

‘Aengus, beware!’ hissed the lady in her dream.

The old woman took her hand and lightly stroked it.

‘Agatha,’ she said, ‘what are you dreaming? Tell me what you’re seeing, Agatha, the way my eyes are blind to it, and I cannot see it at all!’

‘The tunnel,’ muttered Agatha in her dream. A fit of coughing took her, so that for a time she was too weak to speak, and her hand closed tight and cold in Grain’s, like one who has been drawn up drowned out of the deep.

‘He is stealing down the tunnel,’ whispered Agatha. Her eyes were still shut, and it was her dream she was telling the fishwife. ‘The darkness is burning with growing flames, and winds are beating up out of the deeps of the tunnel. The streams of fire are pouring round him, but he is unburned…’

…And deep underground, under the bed of the Sea, in the deep cave, Aengus paused, the way he was feeling her thought on him and her heart beating along with his.

The fire was burning, breathing, roaring all round. The stone walls glowed red and white and blue with the heat of those fires. Nothing human could have lived there; but Aengus stood against it, armored in the last of his art, and he pushed on forward again, and fought and battled down into the breath of pure fire.

Deeper and deeper he walked, bending his head low against the fire, beating it away from him with his arms; his shoes burnt black in the flames, and the iron buckles of his shoes melted away; and even Aengus had to pause.

In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.

‘He has eaten the first stalk of the green, and feels cool now in the oven! And he is staggering farther down, and the flames are red hot beating against him. He is falling!’

…Deep under the Sea, in the pits of the Earth, Aengus fell with his hands before him onto the hot fiery floor of the cave. His coat burned clean off him, and his hair waved and flashed in the fire, and the sweat off his brow boiled off his dark skin where it gleamed like a mirror of diamond and iron.

And the breath that went in by his mouth was all fire, and flames were turning in his lungs, and fire was going up and down his blood with the air that went into his lungs. It was near boiling, Aengus’ blood; it was near catching fire and bursting out from his veins and tearing him apart still living.

Aengus looked up, and saw down before him the end of the cave, and the entrance in fire to the Chamber that lay beyond.

In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.

‘Girl, girl!’ breathed the old woman. ‘It’s on fire you are, you’re all burning up!’

‘But on the ground he eats the second stalk, and he is managing to rise to his feet again. His body is black with soot, and the flames are bright yellow, tearing at him, battering him.

‘And the flames are white, and the tunnel walls lost in brightness. Aengus is standing as if over the edge of a white blind cliff. The heat growing in him, and he with but the one stalk clutched between his fingers, and it the smallest of the three.’

Grain took a wet cloth, and she laid up along the girl’s brow, and the heat there made the cloth bubble and steam.

…And Aengus where he stood in the entrance to the Chamber felt a soothing coolness on his brow, the way the girl was taking some of the hot breath of the fire away off from him.

And he pushed against the flames, and shoved into the fire.

Inside the Chamber it was hotter still, the hottest yet, and the flame was like pure light, like the heart out of the Sun, and so vast was that Chamber, that its walls all fell away, and Aengus stood on the brink of a space that seemed unending, broader than the sky, deeper than Day.

Aengus squeezed his eyes against the pure hotness of heat, and he tried to see with his eyes deeper against the light that roared and shot and streamed out against him.

And it was like he trod on light itself, the way the brightness of the hot was all around him, and under and over him. And it was so bright his shadow fled away from there.

In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.

‘Waves of light are swirling up, rising round and round. It’s like music they are, the beating coils of light. But the music is flawed. There is the slightest break in it, like a halting of breath.

‘Aengus! Aengus! Do not go so near it!’

 

WINDS were tearing off the waves, casting spray like rain across the face of Mielusine and the mask of Vasquez.

‘Tell me more, Mr Vasquez. Tell me all.’

‘Out of exile in a far land, when this Night fell, I came back into Ireland,’ he answered, and his words were reft out of his throat as though against his wishes. ‘And I hunted him, who’d killed my love, and left my foster parents to die in the ripeness of their age, and he looking still so young when I, born on the same year as the calendar tells, wore the face of a man twenty years older – thirty years older, forty or more! And I took up his bow and arrow, and took to trailing him across the fields of the Night.’

‘To kill him?’ she asked.

‘Nay, now! What man can kill the devil? But I know his love as well as he’d known mine. She was the very spirit and joy and romance and deep delight of the Night, was the White Hind: I knew she’d be about him where he was, watching after him, though never showing herself, for fear of the curse was lying between them. In the abbey I had to take pains, the way the old Man of the Bog was there before me, and he’d know me – so I put on this mask and kept myself out of the way of him. And in time you nicely took Aengus away out of the abbey, away out of safety. And when he lay dreaming, now,’ he said with a laugh, ‘and all alone, the White Hind couldn’t help herself, and went down to him, and gave me such a clear shot, now!’

‘You didn’t!’ cried Mielusine.

‘I did, and she’s dead!’ shouted the man.

At once she stopped, still as death herself: and he had to stop, and all the face of the Sea, like a painting, or a carving on a cathedral door, had to stop, all stop, for one moment: then the heart in her took up beating again, Mielusine breathed, stepped, swung her arm, and all the rest fell back in step with her.

‘Now he’s out there, the doomed devil,’ said Vasquez, just as though he wasn’t aware of the death of the moment that had passed over him. He stretched forth a hand to her.

‘Come with me now,’ he beckoned, ‘Maid Snowflake, come with me up to the dun, and we’ll stop up the mouth of the well with hand-small stones, so Aengus has no way out.’

‘Come with me instead, Mr Vasquez,’ she called, and danced out of his reach down along the waves. Her bright eyes were stormy as the waves, and she was dancing him after her, and dancing the waves up too, higher and deeper over their heads.

She was seeing, but he was not, that they two were no more alone in the Sea’s edge in the storm. There was another there, and it bore the likeness of a man’s shadow standing at the edge of the sand.

Mielusine gestured, and the man stepped into the waves.

‘Show me your face, Mr Vasquez,’ she called.

And she danced back, and he trod a step after her.

‘Show me your face, and the grimness of it, Mr Vasquez.’

He reached for her, she danced away, and helpless, he staggered after her.

‘You should have been sleeping, Mr Vasquez. You are the Man Who Should Have Slept – aren’t you, Mr Vasquez?’

Mielusine waved her hands, and the shadow stepped up behind Fergus in the waves.

‘Stop, come back,’ groaned Fergus, but she only danced on farther afield.

‘You should have been dreaming, Mr Vasquez,’ she called. ‘Look at your face now, shame on you! Can you stop dreaming and stop from going mad, Mr Vasquez? Ah, but your face is telling me another tale, Mr Vasquez!’

She reached out her hands, dancing back deeper under the waves. And he, helplessly stumbling after, followed step for step.

Until the shadow behind him could reach him, and locked up both his arms in his grasp.

 

IN THE FAR CORNER of the hut Grain was huddling, hiding. She was covering her face with her shawl, and muttering prayers in a tongue long forgotten upon the face of the world. But out of her prayer she was asking, in spite of herself,

‘Tell me what you’re seeing, Agatha. Tell me, the way my eyes are blind to it, and I cannot see it at all!’

In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.

‘He is standing over it! It is on the floor between his feet, the root of the flaw in the light!’

…Up and down, round and round about Aengus, the pure light of the heart of heat and of all things hot danced and swirled, round and round with the beat of Maid Mielusine’s wild dance above, back in the world that we know, in the dark of the end of the unending Night.

And Aengus reached, and it seemed to him he held something struggling in his arms.

But not all evenly, nor all cleanly, did the hotness swirl; but there and here Aengus could discern a little flaw, and a break in it, like a gasp, or the snag of a sleeve on a sliver of wood in a rough plank.

And somehow Aengus could not find the source of that break, until all at once, as if the girl’s words rang out in his ear, he looked down between his feet.

And he saw it there.

In the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.

‘Small it is, dark and round, the size of a man’s brains, and the white flames bending round it.

‘Aengus, do not – ah! He has it in his hands, he is picking it up!’

…Against all the strength and the madness of the light, against all the evil of it bending and bearing up over and against him, its very enemy, Aengus bent low, and he drove and strained, and managed to bring his arms down, and shove his hands deeper into the heart of all that hotness, to the thing that lay buried there.

With a great will, Aengus was bending his fingers and clamping them round that thing, and he was pulling and tearing at it with a heart and a half, until it began to break free. Then it was with twice the effort in his heart, Aengus strove with the thing, and now all at once it was as if the pure hotness of that heat knew what he was about, and it came to his aid, or he would never have done the thing, not even Aengus, not even himself.

And all at once the thing tore free; Aengus staggered backward in the light, and the pure hotness of heat throbbed and thundered through the unending space of that pit.

‘And now the music of the light is restored. And fiercer it’s growing, and awful beyond denial.’

…Back Aengus staggered, and he was finding himself at the entrance to the Chamber once more, and fighting his way back up the cave with the fire tearing and shooting at his back, twice as hot, thrice as fearsome, four times as evil. And it hit against him in the back of him, and threw him forward and down on his face.

And the thing in his arms tore free of his grasp.

 

THE STORM rose up in a great tower over their heads, and Mielusine danced across the waves, a wild and dangerous dance. Fergus tore himself free, and turned to face the shadow. The face of Fergus went all white, and Mielusine laughed.

‘Aengus! You!’ shouted Fergus. And he swept out their father’s sword.

But the shadow dipt its hand in the sea, and sent bits of salt scattering into his brother’s eyes, and it leapt forward and caught Fergus’ wrists in the lock of its fingers. And for a time they were struggling there, and the great waves throbbed and thundered about them both beneath the dancing feet of the girl.

Fergus threw the shadow back, and went for him; but the stroke of the sword went past the twisting shadow, and cut only brine instead of flesh; the shadow rammed into Fergus’ chest, and the sword broke out of Fergus’ hand and dropped into the Sea.

Under the Sea swam the shadow, and Fergus after it, and the great waves roiling the sand and stones of the shore up and about them. Deeper the shadow dove, and Fergus after it, down to the bottom where the sea-bed glowed red and orange from the heat of the fires of the heart of the Sun below.

 

IN THE CALM LITTLE HUT by the seashore the girl in the cot turned and tore.

‘But no! he’s eaten the last stalk, and manages to hold his footing. But it was the last!’

…All the cave filled with fire; it tilted and it spun. Aengus was pitched backward as though he were swimming down, down toward the mouth of the Chamber where the new-wakened Sun was growing and bursting like fifty kegs full of gunpowder and pitch.

The Sun growled, and groaned, and roared out, Awake, Awake again!

But in the calm little hut by the seashore the girl in the cot turned her fingers upon the rough planks of the cot, and her nails tore and dug into the cracks in the wood.

…And Aengus turned his fingers upon the stone of the cave, and his nails tore and dug into the cracks in the stone. And he held on, and did not fall back into the mouth of the Sun.

Slowly Aengus went now, slower and slower his feet and his hands were gripping and pushing back the stone.

Something was calling him. Some voice was calling out his name from the back of him, deep in the Chamber of the heart of the Sun. And it was a dire duty in his heart to be turning and looking back and beholding the source of that voice.

‘Go on, go on! Don’t be halting, don’t look back! What are you listening to? What words are you hearing breathed upon the fire?’

…He lowered his head, and he was starting to look back; and all at once the cave twisted and spun like a wild pony; there was no standing or holding on to it then.

‘Tell me what you’re seeing, Agatha. Tell me, the way my eyes are blind to it, and I cannot see it at all!’

But then the crash sounded from without the hut, and it shook the Earth.

 

DEEP UNDER THE WAVES Fergus swam, and he saw his father’s sword half-buried in the sand; he reached out his hand for it.

But the hand of the shadow flashed there before Fergus’ hand, and it was the shadow gripped the sword, and turned it and stabbed it, deep in the black heart of Angus’ brother.

But then the crash sounded from above, and it shook the Earth. The third great wave of Ireland broke on all the coasts, and bluffs fell into waters, and stones shattered in foam, and vast bites of beaches were swallowed into gray-green waters. Grain shrieked: Agatha’s body shook and went lifeless and limp in that last of all moments.

And the shore to the grianan was the hardest hit; and the peak of the wave smashed into the little hut, breaking its walls and toppling its chimney and burying all within.

And the third wave ripped away the dead bones of the dark man, the Man Who Should Have Slept, with the sword still sticking out of it, and the dancer laughed a wild laugh and danced up on the white spume of the wave, all the way up to the headland over the dun, where she lighted down nimble as a sea-bird on the wild grass blades.

She turned, wet through and drenched, her white dress clinging to her, her black hair streaming wet and wild down her back, and her lips red as Arianna’s cloaks.

‘Take him away across the Sea, my wave!’ she sang, still dancing and showing the leag lorgmhar. ‘Take him away back to his place, and let him be happy there, and wash away out of his heart all the evil robbing his peace and his contentment!’

And the while she was dancing, the wave was rolling away, away across the Sea, until it rolled over the far horizon.

 

BUT WITHIN THE CAVE beneath the Sea it was quiet for that moment. Huddled on the sooty ground, Master Aengus loosened his grasp of the sword hilt that he felt but might not see. And the feeling of waves over his back left him, and he raised his head.

He found that he had fallen in the cave of fire, and soon the winds were swirling up again out of the deeps. But he saw, too, that the shock of the wave had cast him up out of the reach of the flames, and around him was only light.

No more than light glancing up the tunnel walls, and he lying on the cool floor, his eyes open and staring, his lungs sucking in the unburnt air in sobs.

Later he was rising to his feet, and picking up the stone. He climbed the last reach of the tunnel, past the sleeping Henwen and up the well-wall, easily. The clouds in the sky were breaking, and the wave falling away out into the glassy deeps of the Sea, its mother. The stars were peeping down on Ireland, and a rosy light was shining, of the moonrise.

Master Aengus laughed, the way he knew he’d won. And he knelt and touched his brow, and prayed out his thanks to the Moon aloud.

But that was ill done.

Blood by Moonlight: 36

(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.

Blood by Moonlight: 35

(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…’

Blood by Moonlight: 34

(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)

© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Seventh Year of Night

In the seventh year of that Night, the Masters, those who Woke and Spoke to the Strong Places in the Night-Land, put forth their Powers.

They Cast Out the other Waking away from the Strong Places. And they raised stones or air or water or fire about the Strong Places, and forbade the others from every walking there again.

Blood by Moonlight: 33

(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.

Blood by Moonlight: 32

(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.