by Asotir
The beauty smiled, daring and tempting and urging all at once.
‘I will do it.’
The beauty pointed with a twig. ‘Go into this hollow. In your shirt you’ll be shivering, and your throat it will be dry. It’s Samhain now and the Winter’s Moon, elder than the Sun. Not all the fire of day can thin the mist on this holy last night, with Winter wanting to be born.
‘And you will hear a singing down the way, like a nightingale. Draw near, but make no sound.
‘In an island in the bog you’ll be finding a slender maiden singing, and she alone and drawing in the mud with a willow-wand. Little older than a girl she’ll be in her grass-green coat.
‘Catch her if you can, but if she prove too quick, it’s with cleverness you must coax her out. Hold on fast, and don’t be letting go until she promise all you want! She has the secret, though she will be swearing she doesn’t know it at all. And if she will not, then tell her, do it for my sake. And if still she will not, then show her this.’
From her sleeve the beauty drew a small white stone, rounded and smooth, the size of a hen’s egg.
Master Aengus took the stone, the leag lorgmhar. He went down the path. The beauty’s silver voice calling after him:
‘She’ll be telling you your love can never be, dark Aengus. Your love, and your love only in all the world, is so cursed: and why should that be so? But there is a way. Would you wake the Unappeasable Host, Aengus? Would you break the Axle, would you prick the Sun’s blood-red black boil, for one woman’s sake? Could any man’s love be so mad or singular?’
Master Aengus went into the hollow. In his shirt he was shivering, and his throat was dry, just as she said it would be. It was Samhain and the Winter’s Moon, and not all the fire of day could thin the mist on that last night, with Winter wanting to be born.
And then he heard a singing down the way, like a nightingale.
* * *
AGATHA woke up in her golden bed.
Now, that was New Year’s Eve by the cottagers’ calendar, when all the souls are loosed. In spite of the rain, the land was brightened by hundreds of bonfires lighting on the hills; needfires the countryfolk called them, burned to rekindle the Sun against winter night. Lady Agatha huddled underneath the pallid golden sheets, hearing a sound of hoofbeats, of a hundred hundred riders coming forth. And she heard a gentle woman laughing: and she could not sleep. It was four weeks before the fever would be leaving her.
The next evening was clear and fine, and the rich men and their well-fed ladies in the manor house were delighting in the splendors of the sunset. It was most unseasonably warm.
And in the last moment of the day, a small black speck showed on the sun’s broad face.
Lady Agatha all at once asked, ‘Whatever became of the strange lonely farmer was ever chasing me, was Master Aengus not his name?’ But they didn’t know.
All that night the rich folk lay sleepless in the heat. Cambric upon cambric and the finest India muslins were let drape upon the floor.
Lady Agatha was alone. Her lord had gone out to take the measure of his lands, and his voice calling to his hounds came from far-off through her window, till it was hidden in the wind.
And she heard a great wave breaking on the stones of the Irish land, washing to the Western Sea; and an anguished cry went with it, from a stricken old woman in a hut beyond the hill. For the girl had told her tale.
There was a story the cottagers told to make sense of the word, Samhain, and it was like this. Suain is a gentle sound, and at Samhain gentle voices sound.
And Lady Agatha heard a third voice calling; and that was Aengus’ voice.
She went to the window, but was seeing not a soul. She shut the window to stop the voice, but the room waxed so warm she had to open up again. His song went on and on. And the beat of the riders was everywhere; and Lady Agatha was so forlorn, that she fell asleep at last.
And Master Aengus’ song went right into her sleep.
She knew now why the riders came. They came for her.
* * *
FOR FOUR WEEKS the air waxed warmer.
For four weeks the spot grew bigger on the Sun’s broad face, like a fat beetle that ate of it.
And every night, the Moon in the sky grew rounder, and fuller, and nearer by.
For four weeks the days grew shorter. Mist like soot obscured the sky. Weary and spent, the wealthy men and well-fed ladies were crying for a good long rest: in all those days and nights, they had not known sleep, no, not a wink of sleep at all. But Lady Agatha slept straight through those nights, and the days too, with a secret smile upon her mouth.
And the twenty-seventh day was brutal and dark.
And in the evening of that day the skies broke clear. And in the last moment of that day the blood-red blackness swallowed the Sun’s broad face; and the third wave shattered all the stony Irish coasts. They both heard it, she and he; but none of those others did.
Shooting stars rained out of Heaven in the dusk of that day, and the wealthy slept at last. They slept as they had never slept before. They slept like dead souls. Oh, but they slept!
And the date of that day was the 28th day of November, in the year of Our Lord 1757.
* * *
BUT THAT NIGHT Lady Agatha did not sleep.
‘Aengus,’ she murmured, waking.
The old lord was standing over her bed. ‘Why do you call that name?’ he asked. His face was a dreadful mask.
‘Because he’s there below, and it’s his voice I hear singing out my name,’ she answered gaily.
Lady Agatha stretched out her limbs, and she rose out of bed in only her shift, and stepped across the room.
She heard the old lord shouting for his steed, and riding after the Sun.
She lighted a lantern, hot between her hands. She paced about her golden bed. Tumult was rising in her roselike breasts, and a hollow in her like the apostate’s regret.
She leaned against the casement, peering into black. There was a glow lacing the hilltops, as from forty flaming cities. The pregnant trees murmured with the growing chaos, and the black air shook, with the elongating Night.
‘Oh,’ she cried and sighed at once, ‘Oh, Aengus!’
He stepped from a tree into her light. In the dancing glow his face gleamed darkly, sweating, as from some toil terrible and great. She was hearing his song again, and it welling in her, drowning out her own voice, until she danced to it.
She knew that he had caused these things.
‘Who are you, Master Aengus, and what are you, that you can summon up the winds, the clouds, and this Night? What are you, that you dare do such things?’
‘I am yours,’ he answered, and gestured with his hands, and more winds came, like hot breaths, and she was watching the gestures he made with his fine and lovely hands.
And she was afraid no more.
The warm night swam in Lady Agatha’s titian hair, her eyes were dim with passion, sultry desire was roused in her strawberry lips. Red naked beneath her fine lawn shift she reached and called to him hoarsely, ‘O my Beloved, my aching sweet love, come up to me here, clothe me with your kisses and lie alongside me for the night!’
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘for one Night.’
Part I.
The Rising of the Moon
The First Year of Night
In the first year of that Night, the Waking stayed close about their homes. They never strayed far from their own front doors.
What had taken place across the world? Why was it always Night now, and never Day? It bewildered and befuddled them. They knew not what to make of it. They did not know what had become of the Sun. They did not know why they Woke and their lovers, kin, friends, both High and Low alike, still Slept. They did not know why the Sleeping could not awakened. And every moon-dark they thought to their hearts, ‘Surely now the Sun will rise.’
But the Sun did not rise.
3. How They Lived After
‘YES,’ HE ANSWERED, ‘for one Ni
ght.’
Darkness and heat blotted out the stars, and Lady Agatha coiled in the great carved bed with Master Aengus. There was a brilliance in the south, there was a rain of fire. Thick showers steamed with the smell of ash. Heavy, hot-breathed clouds caressed the earth.
Hour after hour it was lasting, long into what should have been day, until at last the clouds were parting, and a placid flow of light emerged out of the east, of the second moonrise of that Night.
Master Aengus took Lady Agatha by the hand, and led her out of the great carved bed. Fires burned in all the manor’s hearths, and candles shone on the walls and ceilings. Bright was that house, and warm. Ceol-sidhe of pipers and harpists was heard from far-off rooms, while the table was spread with rare delights, and the bricks glowed ruddy with cheer. She kissed him, and he smiled. They went back into bed. She was wanting him still; but was it not a lie?
The Moon rose a third time, and a fourth. But the Sun rose no more. The Sun had burst into a million bits of fire; the Sun was gone; the girdle of light was unbound.
The Moon, alone among a million strange stars, lighted new contours on the old Earth. By bubbling seas, blackened hills, and shrunken lakes, there was only darkness where light had been looked for, where the cities all had been.
It was as if an age of man had passed.
The great cities of the world were still. London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, were that many crags of stone. Their doors were shut; behind those doors, in sealed, dark chambers, the former rulers of the world slept on.
Others, the Wakeful, went out of their rooms. They stepped silently into their Night. Beyond the black outlines of towers and houses they saw the land beyond, rust red and violet in the silver light.
What was it had marked them, that they few should wake while all the rest slept on? There is no telling. Cataclysms render no accounts. But many of them were children.
The Wakeful left the stone-paved streets behind them, and went out scattering among the fields and hills, to build what had never yet been built, and make anew what had been forgotten.
Now, as to Master Aengus and Lady Agatha, the miraculous had taken place. His song went on and on and she was happy at his side. But sure, it was a lie.
Now the first month of the Night ended, and another took its place. And thirteen Moons went over, till 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.
The Second Year of Night
In the second year of that Night, the Waking stopped looking to see the Sun again. They grew to greet the Night as their own. They gave over their grieving for the loss of the Sleepers. And they began to wonder, What might they find in darkness down the road, over the hill, and on the far shore?
So they donned their hats and bonnets and they shut their doors behind them, softly without locking them (for they did not wish to wake the Sleepers), and they wandered out into the Night-Land to greet the other Waking.
4. Of the Three Gifts He Made Her
WHEN SHE STOOD out of bed in icy dark, Lady Agatha shivered.
His song had stopped. The rooms were still. The tables were bare. For the first time since the setting of the Sun, she looked outside the windows. And it was Night.
In the main hall she met Master Aengus. He came holding one small candle. In the candlelight it was his old dark face again, bent in on itself.
He reached to take her hand, but she withdrew it.
He bowed and uttered, ‘After you, my lady.’
The Moon rose again, but the bright fires, the ceol-sidhe, and the magical feast never returned.
‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you don’t think I’ll be staying here with you?’ And she saddled her mare and rode away off.
She traveled down the King’s road. Out of the sky a chill was falling, and a bit of snow, but out of the ground warmth was rising, from deep out of the sun-burned earth, and the snowflakes melted in midair. The stones and hills, all charred and singed as they were, gave back the warmth of the fallen Sun. And a soft whisper was singing in the wind, like a sigh or like the sea. She could almost make out the voice of that whisper, but its words were too faint or strange.
On either side of the road the Night-Land spread darkly in the Moon. The fields were untenanted and still, the hedges black tangles, the streams sullen silver strands. She passed some carts along the way, emptied and forsaken. The dray ponies had slipped their yokes and gone off to places unknown.
Lady Agatha shivered.
‘This isn’t my land at all,’ she wondered. ‘Where is my home?’
She stopped at a public house, feeling hungry, but the windows of the place were dark and the chimney cold. The landlord was sleeping, and the enchantment of his sleep locked the door fast to all hands.
She saw a few figures alone on the grass fields, and they dark and twisted, and their gambols unpleasant and odd. She avoided them, and held to the King’s road.
After some hours, the road led her up a slope and over a hill, and she saw a great house down the way. The house had a familiar look, and lights were gleaming in some of its windows, and so she rode down towards it, until she drew her mare up short. She stared at the great house.
It was indeed a house she knew. It was the old lord’s manor house she had left behind her hours before.
She turned her mare, crossed to the far side of the road, and passed through the hedge into the fields.
She was following the swale of a valley for a time, along a little nameless stream, until the stream took a turn, and she saw a great house on a hill. Lights were gleaming in some of its windows, and it was the old lord’s manor house in her way again.
Lady Agatha turned her mare about, and plunged into a wood. She was wending her way through the wood, and coming out the far side, and seeing a great house beyond the trees.
It was her manor house again.
‘Och!’ she cried in anger, and spun her mare back into the wood.
Which she traversed, and came out again by another side, and another again; but whatever the side of the wood she was coming out of, it was always the old lord’s manor house waiting up the way, and himself, Master Aengus, quietly abiding within, smoking his pipe no doubt and telling off the hours until she came back to him.
Lady Agatha threw herself down on the grass beside her mare in a little clearing in the middle of the deep dark wood, and wrapping herself in her silver riding cloak, she made herself sleep. The Moon rose up over the tops of the trees and shed an oval of light on her.
After a time she woke, and looked about. She was lying in the oval drive, and the manor house was sprung up around her with all its walls and windows.
Lady Agatha fetched a sigh, stabled her mare, and went into the house.
She heard him smoking in the hall, but she went up the stairs to her own room and closed the door.
The other bedchambers were all shut fast. At moonrise Lady Agatha made a tour of the hallways, going from door to door. She missed Lady Felicia and Sir James, and prayed that somehow they might waken to her knocking and rescue her. No door was locked; but no door would open.
‘They’re sleeping yet, Miss’ said the old countryman, Mac Bride. ‘It wouldn’t be right to be bothering them.’
Next moonrise Lady Agatha tried the doors again.
The old lord did not return. Mac Bride stayed on to serve Master Aengus. A few cottagers still waked in the village. Not many.
That moon Master Aengus lingered at her side. He was the tenderest, humblest, most solicitous of jailers.
He chose her dresses and helped pin her hair. Then she looked less like herself and more like his vision of her: sad, elegant, dangerous. Her melancholy seemed only to increase his desire. He sat and spoke to her of his philosophy, of arcane, erudite things. She sat obediently by his side. At length, before he had done, she left the room.
When next the Moon rose, a cool and shivering image on the waters, Master Aengus went to hun
t. Having no powder, he hunted with lures and his grandfather’s long bow. When he returned, he cooked potatoes and turnips, carrots and cold carcasses over turf fires in the kitchens. He ate his stew out of gleaming copper bowls, with sterling forks, at the lord’s long table. Lady Agatha ate in her room.
‘Come,’ he said to her, ‘and let’s have a game.’
So she played him at chess. Now Master Aengus would be winning; now Lady Agatha. Each strove silently, with a great will, to win.
And all the while their bodies, bending together over the table, were speaking to each other. And when the king had fallen, Master Aengus touched her hand, softly, and Lady Agatha let her fingers trail across his bared wrist, delicately, so that her touch was no heavier than an hare’s breath; and the end of it was always the same, they two lying in bed together, in the great carved bed the lord had let build especially: and they two still wordless but for their little moans and cries.
To deny it ran past all her powers, for the strength of his spells lay still upon her. It was her body loving it, and never herself at all. So she swore it was so in her heart, and would hear of nothing else.
But when it was done, she gathered her clothes over her bare body, blushing, and she fled to her own room and her own bed to rest. He watched her go with his eyes. And so in the dark of the moon, they rested unsleeping and dreaming apart.
‘Why can’t I leave?’ she demanded.
‘There’s nowhere else for you to find welcome,’ he answered.
‘Am I your prisoner, now?’
‘No, but I’m yours.’
‘Then let me go!’
But all he did was smile and shake his head; and ‘I love you,’ he told her – and she flinched.
‘Once it was, you were kinder to me than that.’
He looked at her, at her reproachful eyes. There was a question in his eyes. He did not ask it.
‘You miss the colors of the day,’ he said. ‘You’re wrong. The colors of Night surpass them. Wait, and I’ll be bringing them to you.’
For two moons and a darkness in the attic he worked, and brought her down a bolt of cloth. And it was white, that cloth, and brighter than white. White as the stars, white as snow upon the lofty places in the cold. No fold nor wrinkle might be seen in all that bolt, but only white, and white.
