He recalled the persistence of local legend of an invisible track that led to the underworld. That’s it, he thought, his eyes on the slope of the far, gentle hill: that vanished ley is the one they mean. And sometimes, he had heard said, in the spring when the new grass grew, strange patterns were formed on the side of the hill ...
A hill figure, he thought, lost like the ley itself. A figure thousands of years old, cradled in the turf, waiting for the patience and devotion of some expert to uncover it. It could be a horse, or a hero, perhaps the mother goddess herself. That was what he privately believed — that she was there, some depiction of her cut into the turf, standing at the gates of Annwyn, the underworld — and he had his own reasons for believing that.
He looked down at his aunt’s grave.We both know, don’t we?
Because it had taken more than his aunt’s magic to summon the body of Leonora Lee and the death-bringing girl she carried within her. There had been something older than time in that creature, a spark of divinity, the eternal and cohering presence of the open-armed goddess herself who had come from the hillside in the bright darkness of Samain: the Great Goddess, the Queen of Life and Death ...
He had been standing for a long time, close to the grave, his hands in his pockets. Becoming aware of the dankness of the night creeping into his bones, he shivered, emerging from his thoughts to find that the moonlight had dimmed and that blurs of mist, fine as grey chiffon, had risen from the ground and threaded between the gravestones and the clustering yews.
He had made only the beginning of a movement to turn and go when a sudden, perceptible current changed the quality of the air about him; then something as fine as gauze, unseen and soundless, brushed past him, quickening his senses to awareness of some chill presence occupying the dark. Rigid, strung upon the tension of an inexplicable necessity not to move, he strained his eyes, clinging with all his senses to the moment, to the intimation of a grace so profound he could scarcely comprehend it.
Veil upon veil of mist gathered in the churchyard. No rational sense but some responsive instinct told him he was looking in the direction of the green hill — along the line where the ley led away from him, away to the gates of the Otherworld. He stared, and as he stared there was an instant when the mist parted, when a shape passed beyond the yews.
He thought he started, or cried out to call her back; but the mist swirled in again, softly closing away the glimpse of a tall woman walking serenely away with the moonlight on her hair, her long skirt brushing the grass ...
Leonora?
He closed his eyes. For a long time, in the acceptance of his self-imposed oblivion, he thought of nothing at all; then stirring, opening his eyes, he collected himself with prosaic considerations: he was very cold, standing in the dark, imagining things. He must go home.
Leonora has gone home.
He put up the collar of his coat, pushed his hands in his pockets. Before he turned away he looked down at his aunt’s grave. ‘Sleep well, now,’ he said softly.
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Samain Page 22
