Jeanine nodded. “I have heard of the bean chaointe, the keening washerwoman whose voice can shatter glass from its pane. I have also heard it sounds like two slabs of wood slapped together in the dead of night, piercing one’s ears.”
The pretty but plain woman spoke through pressed lips and clenched teeth. “Again, why do you chance yourself with me at this fall time of harvest when those springtime spirits of May would no doubt be more willing to provide?”
“Perhaps I am too impatient,” Jeanine said. “I am growing older and the idea of waiting until the spring seems like another lifetime spread out before me. I suppose some people would find a desperation in that, but I have little shame in admitting it. I want a child, one of my own, and I found hope in choosing you, a spirit that others might not think to ask such a boon of.”
“Hope?” the woman laughed. “How did you ever find hope in my legend?”
Jeanine flipped through the notes in her binder. “Because even the creature you are now holds a hope for me.” She slammed her finger down onto the middle of one of the pages. “Here. They say that your voice is not always a terror. They say the sound can come as something pleasant, a soft singing . . . almost a lullaby, a child’s song. Surely that’s a sign that this boon is within your power to grant me. That is why I chose you, and the fact that this location in particular is strong with magic, not only a burial mound but a fairy fort as well. It is a liminal, a place of magic, ma’am. It is even said that leprechauns know of hidden gold in fairy forts such as this, but that is no concern of mine tonight.”
“Your concern is of a more carnal nature,” the woman said.
“You understand the want of being a mother,” Jeanine continued. “I thought perhaps it would be best to ask your favor while you were in this form. Please, I’ve tried, researched so very much. My husband Joseph and I know of no human way.”
The woman inside the circle of salt stepped to the edge of it. “You waste my time,” she said, her body transforming even further, until she stood there a young black-haired beauty with a body that her grey rags barely covered. “I could not help you on this day, even if I wanted to . . . which I do not. I do not hearken to demands made of me.”
“I have done my best to show you no ill will,” Jeanine said, shamed a bit by the way the risen sorceress queen stood there showing no modesty. “Have you no mercy to show me? Can you not help me?”
“Do you not listen? I said I could not help you on this day. You should understand all too well that fact. Today I am only of the flesh, as you well know from your studies.”
“I thought—”
The woman gave her a dark smile. “I know you have thought, girl, but I do not think you have considered everything.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Consider this circle, for instance,” Mongfhionn said, tracing the toe of her bare foot along the edge of it. “As you said, you built it to contain me, to hold back the spirit within, and it has. Yet . . .”
The woman paused. A ball tightened in the pit of Jeanine’s stomach, causing her to step back.
“You forget,” the woman said, and stepped beyond the barrier that encircled her, her toes breaking the circle, scattering little white crystals across the grass. “I am no longer spirit now that I am fully risen this night. As you noted, I am merely human.”
“Shite,” Jeanine said, fumbling for the backpack at her feet.
There might be nothing preternatural about Mongfhionn now, but still, the woman was fast and closed with Jeanine before she could even move. The woman’s now perfect hands rose up in a flash and grabbed Jeanine by a huge chunk of hair.
“I am not afraid of you,” Jeanine said, struggling to pull herself free from the woman’s grip but it was no use. “You’re only human now.”
“Then more the fool you,” she said. “For I know the damage one human can do to another. I’ve had centuries, and I will not be denied my day. Not this century.”
“I only sought your help!” Jeanine said, no longer able to hold back her tears. “Will you not help me?”
“There is no help to be had from me. I have neither pity nor remorse for you. I am Mongfhionn.”
“Then you have truly learned no penance,” Jeanine said. The woman pulled her hair hard, making her cry out.
“There are reasons that my followers worship me at the time of Féile Moingfhinne, Samhain. They are celebrating death and tonight; you too will join that celebration, foolish woman.”
“I am not foolish,” Jeanine said, grabbing her own hair and pulling it as she tore away from her attacker. “I did my research—”
“You are foolish,” the other woman shouted at her. “In coming here after the festival and staying alone. Your mistake will bring you little comfort in death.”
Jeanine backed away, standing up fully. “I never said I came here alone,” she said, and looked past the woman back up the hill. “Joseph!”
The woman spun around, hunched down like a wild animal. A brown-haired young man the same age as the girl stepped out from behind the thick trunk of the tree at the top of the burial mound, a book clutched in his hands. The man looked unsure.
“Read!” Jeanine called out. “Now!”
He looked down at the book, his voice wavering, barely audible as the wind began to whip through the surrounding trees.
The woman straightened up. “What is he doing?”
Jeanine gave the woman a sad smile. “Reinforcements,” she said.
The woman returned the smile, but hers looked much less sad, triumphant even. “I think not,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He is a man, after all,” she said, looking down her body’s now ample curves. “I understand how men work.”
Although she still wore the torn gray rags from the grave, they now lay over fair alabaster skin and a body that even Jeanine felt herself drawn to. Before she could respond the woman spun and walked over to Jeanine’s husband, her hips swaying with a rhythm that drew his eyes up from the page he was reading.
“Tell me, Seosamh,” the woman said, with a soft sultry quality that Jeanine wouldn’t have thought possible from so dark a woman. “Wouldn’t you rather give yourself over to a woman like me? I can offer you things no other can, sins of the flesh that would split your very soul in two with pleasure.”
Jeanine ran to her husband’s side. He stood there, not moving. Mongfhionn wore a look of triumph on her face and Jeanine turned to her husband, squeezing his arm.
“Joseph . . . ?” she asked, worry thick in her voice.
He shook his head as if clearing it and turned to give Jeanine a small smile. His eyes met hers, and she could see the momentary fog on his face lifting, then he cast his eyes back to the woman.
“Forgive me, enchantress,” he said, turning back to his wife’s eyes, “but do you think I’d be standing out here at the midnight hour incanting some crazy spell if it weren’t out of love for my Jeanine? I am not so easily swayed by a dead queen.” He looked down at the page again, then turned his gaze upon the woman herself. “Ó gach gairm bheatha!”
The wind picked up all around them on the hillside as Jeanine fought to piece together the words from the Old Gaelic. She wasn’t sure of all of it, but come to us from all walks of life filled her head as the weather changed.
The gale blew harder, branches swaying and snapping, even knocking over the straw men that stood upon the burial mound. They fell to the grass as their crude mountings gave way, the hill looking like it was littered with the shadowy figures of the dead. Then four of the fallen strawmen proceeded to stand up of their own volition, clumsy, awkward, rising like newborns taking their first steps.
“Máthair . . . ?” The word floated out into the air from one of them. The faces were nothing more than jumbled twists of twigs and straw with no mouth to even say such a word, and three of them closed in on Mongfhionn as she simply stood there in shock.
“Ailill . . . ?” she asked, abject
horror on her wide eyed face. “Brion, Fiachrae . . . my sons.”
The three figures moved to stand all around her, grabbing her, the sticks and poorly articulated arms and hands piercing through the skin of Mongfhionn’s arms. She cried out in pain and the fourth figure strode up in front of her.
“Deirfiúr,” it said. Sister.
“Forgive me,” the risen queen said.
“Forgiveness?” Jeanine said, almost laughing. “You’ve proved that you have learned nothing from your penance or your time as a human. You are beyond forgiveness.”
“Please,” the woman said, desperation heavy in the word, the first time her voice had sounded remotely human. “I will give you what you wish.”
Jeanine buried her head in Joseph’s shoulder, looking away from the woman. “I am sorry, but I cannot trust you at your word,” she said. “I . . . I have made a mistake coming here tonight.”
The woman struggled amid the straw men, but the blood running from her pinned arms was proof enough that she would not escape.
“As a banshee you may have stood a chance against us, but no,” Joseph said, hugging his wife to him. “You understand nothing about loyalty. Léirscrios!”
Mongfhionn went to speak, but the straw men holding her struck, crushing in on her as the final word of the incantation set them to their final task—to destroy. A flurry of action rose up in front of the young couple, obscuring the risen woman who all but vanished as branch and root and twig tore into her. The pile fell in on itself as the wind calmed, and when the night was quiet once more, the only evidence left of her ever having been there was the hole Mongfhionn had crawled out of, covered in what looked like a bonfire piling.
“Is she dead?” Joseph said, stepping to it and scattering the debris around with the toe of his boot.
“No,” Jeanine said, walking over to her backpack on the other side of the tree, “but I suspect she won’t be bothering anyone in the flesh for another hundred years.” Her mouth tightened and her forehead wrinkled. “Not that we’d have any ancestors for her to take revenge on.”
Joseph moved to her as she broke down with a keening cry and she collapsed into his arms. He held her tight until the worst of it passed.
“So what now?” she asked, wiping at her tears, still shaken. “What do we do now, Joseph?”
He shrugged, but gave her a warm smile as he lifted her chin and met her eyes. “We always have the first of May,” he said, taking his hands in hers, squeezing them. “Didn’t she suggest herself that the Beltaine spirits are a bit more receptive to proposals of our kind?”
“Aye,” Jeanine said, a glimmer of hope slowly filling her eye as she smiled back at him. “That she did.”
The two walked back down the hillside to the lights of the village below, guided by the light of the harvest moon, leaving the burial mound, the pile of broken sticks, and death behind them.
THE SENTRY
Fiona Patton
Physical sensations came on slowly, so slowly that he hardly recognized them for what they were at first. A disturbance and a shifting far away brought feelings near to hand: the scratch of a pigeon’s claws against his shoulders and the whisper of the wind against his cheeks. He stood frozen, marveling at them and wondering how they’d come to be.
He’d known the strength of stone and the serenity of silence. He’d known the call of duty and the slumber of the fallen. He’d stood, weapon clutched against his chest, guarding them from any who might disturb their rest. A candle in a distance burned for all of them, but not all of them could reach it; their time on earth had been too terrible and far too brief. For those, he took their memories of pain, loss, and sacrifice. Comforted, they took the path illuminated for them and passed away beyond the trees. A boy in face and form, and a man in duty, he knew death but he did not remember if he’d ever truly known a life that might have once been his.
He heard voices speaking words and strained to hear them, a strange unnatural ripple of anticipation traveling through his limbs.
“I found something.”
“A body?”
“Maybe. Bones, anyway. See, those would be fingers, there and there.”
“Be careful with them.”
Whisper soft, a brushing motion swept across his hands and the voices spoke again, more clearly now.
“It’s definitely a body.”
“A soldier?”
“Looks to be. There, that’s a brass button. See? And here’s another.”
Hundreds of the fallen had left their memories in his care and they flooded through him now; the screaming of the shelling in the distance and the corkscrew twist of fear as it came closer. He had sudden urge to freeze, to hide, or rise and run, to do anything but carry on slowly forward. A pain so sharp and bright it took his breath away, then falling.
“See here, the vestiges of a uniform tunic.”
The scratch of wool against his wrists and throat. The stiffness of it when it had been clean and new, the stiffness of it when it had been old and caked with clay, the heat and then the cold of it as it had filled with blood, but through it all, the hard unmoving armor of it as stone. He held on to that one image as his own as the voices carried on, unrelenting as they dredged up the past and layered it on the present.
“I found some metal.”
“A weapon?”
Jamming, shattering, flung away, tossed aside, or held as tightly as a talisman.
“No, it’s too fine, more like wire. Yes, see here’s a roll of it around what was probably a wooden spool.”
Crawling in the darkness and the mud, a line of wire unraveling behind him in the darkness.
“Wait. There’s something here tucked up beside the ribs, something leather. A small book, I think, or a piece of it, anyway.”
“A journal?”
“Could be.”
“Can you open it? Can you make anything out? Words or a name?”
“I think so. Shine your torch here.”
“Careful now, careful.”
The rush of memories froze in place as he waited for words he’d hadn’t known he’d ever hear or ever thought he’d need to.
“Private William Falkner.”
A boy in face and form, and a man in duty, lost, and honored to be carved in stone by the ones he’d left behind. Found.
He opened his eyes.
A white-dressed cemetery filled his vision: a jumble of old gravestones and iron markers radiating out to lines of stark, grey trees. He heard birds and far away a single church bell tolling morning. As the dawn sun warmed his face, he stepped off the monument that had been his sentry box and heard the crack of hard-packed snow break beneath his boots. The wind whispered past his face and, as he turned, he saw a single candle flame beckon in the distance.
He followed it.
The gravestones became older, darker, covered in moss and worn smooth by years of rain and snow. At the far end of the cemetery, the land sloped steeply down into a line of trees and he stared at them for a long time, feeling them stare back. They and their kin had been fed by the dead for so long that it was impossible to tell where trees left off and the dead began. But he could see the candle flame flickering behind them. He took a single step forward and suddenly the memories he had carried for so long rushed over him: the screaming of the shells, the stiffness of his uniform, the fear, the falling and the darkness. Behind him, the monument called out to him, offering the serenity of silence and the strength of stone, but the candle flame still beckoned and he stood frozen, unable to go forward and unable to go back.
Far away he felt himself lifted as the voices that had begun his transformation spoke again.
“Be careful with his bones. They’re fragile.”
“I wonder if he has any relatives still living who might remember him.”
“I doubt it, after all this time. But there might be family somewhere and a grave. People do that sometimes, you know. Just place a marker with a name on it to have a place to go.”
/> He glanced about the rows of gravestones. Many of them had fallen into disrepair as the people who’d once tended them had died in turn. The soldiers who lay beneath them had long since passed beyond the trees.
All save one.
He moved towards it, then crouching down, he stripped the moss away and read the words aloud.
“Private Arthur Townsend.”
His own voice startled him for a moment; then he shook himself and bent to study the grave itself, seeing it as only he could see it. The soldier who slumbered in this place held on to memories so dear that he would not be moved no matter how beseechingly the candle beckoned. And stretching out into the distance, past the monument, he saw a line of equal strength that bound the living to the dead through memories too precious and too painful to be forgotten.
But as he watched, it wavered and he knew it would not bind them long. Death was searching for this final soldier and it would not be denied. A day, no more. The dead might refuse the candle flame but the living could not refuse the dead no matter how much strength they might command. No strength could overcome the strength of death.
He paused. No strength except the strength of stone.
He rose and, with a sudden urgency, passed through the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates and set out walking, his boots making a soft shush, shush noise in the fine layer of snow upon the ground.
He walked all morning, barely pausing to register the changes in the world. The memories he carried were not the memories of shops and streets and he could not remember how the world had been before them enough to notice any change. No one remarked upon his presence and for a moment he doubted that he was even really there until he paused before a tavern window and peered in at his reflection with a frown.
He saw a young man, eighteen or nineteen years old, smooth cheeks, hair cut short, but grown out shaggy and uneven beneath his helmet’s rim as if he’d had no time to care for it. Uniform tunic, belt, and trousers wrapped in linen up the calves, boots old but serviceable. Hair, and eyes, and face, and clothes the gray pallor of cold stone and expression: haunted. He shuddered but, as he turned away, he saw the candle flame and, with a new resolve, he set out walking once again.
Human for a Day (9781101552391) Page 6
