Blood by Moonlight

by Asotir

  There the Waking felt as if they had come home again to places they had never known before.

  5. Of Agatha by Moonlight

  MASTER AENGUS made ready to go.

  He emptied the attic room, packed his parchments in a bag and bound it to his horse. The old countryman was helping him.

  ‘Will you be wanting me along?’ Mac Bride asked.

  Master Aengus shook his head. ‘Alone I did the thing, and alone I’ll be undoing it.’ He looked back to the manor, to Lady Agatha standing in the doorway. ‘You’ll look after her?’

  ‘So long as she’ll be staying here,’ said Mac Bride.

  Master Aengus walked toward the house. Lady Agatha was wearing a robe of blue Pekin Muslin, and in her hair three green feathers.

  ‘I am going now,’ he said. ‘It is a far road I must be taking, if I am to do your bidding.’

  ‘Go then,’ she said.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘And find this house ever in my path?’

  ‘I take off that blessing. You may put this manor at your back and never see her more, if that should be your pleasure. Only come along with me.’

  ‘No.’

  Deep in his eyes anger was lashing, like a storm far off the coast. ‘You want me to betray the Night? It’s my mother land. And why should I turn traitor for your asking of it?’

  ‘Do it,’ she said.

  Master Aengus nodded, all quiet and still and terrible.

  ‘You knew nothing,’ he told her, ‘of living ere we met. It was only the way you’d been taught you were following. I did know how to live, but my life lacked an end. You became that end. I’d have done anything for you. I did do what no other would have, to win you.’

  ‘Well you may say it,’ said she, ‘but what did you have in our former life? You lost nothing when the Sun declined: myself, I lost all. You wagered the world, which was none of yours, for some hours of my love. But even those hours were only a trick you played on me. It was never myself who wept for you, but only a doll you made in my likeness.

  ‘What did you win then, but my body’s love, and that spell-wrought and untrue. It was only this end of yours that you were seeking, and never myself at all. So you made me your wh—; did you think I’d be loving you for that? Did you dream you’d find a lawful wife in what you’d made of me?’

  Now there was but sadness and wisdom in his look. As for Lady Agatha, she felt almost a softening for him, watching the man trudge back to his horse. But when he mounted, his mare reared, and Master Aengus turning her, called back in a dark voice,

  ‘Love is desire, desire is love! A wife, do you say now? Were you his wife any more? But myself, I’d no bit of a need for a wife!’

  ‘May you,’ she shouted after him, ‘be damned all to Hell, Master Aengus! May you be blasted and waste, for what you did to me!’ Tears blinding her eyes like veils, and she swinging the door with a bang against him on his dark mare riding off.

  The young moon was high above the fields, when Master Aengus went away. And she was the Beltane Moon.

  When he was gone, the manor seemed colder and darker, as though it had been only Aengus had kept alive the last bit of warmth and cheer.

  Lady Agatha ate with Mac Bride in a side room. She was almost chattering, speaking of Lady Felicia, Miss Cecily, and dear old Sir James, but not a word did she say of Aengus. The old countryman watched her, waiting as it seemed.

  ‘And you, Mac Birdie?’ she asked him. ‘Did you leave no family behind you in the day?’

  The old man shrugged and answered, ‘I had a daughter once.’

  Now this surprised her, to be thinking of Mac Bride, old as he was and a fixture belonging to the manor, as a man and a lover and a father to a girl. In the years she had been growing up in the county, Lady Agatha had seen and heard tell nothing of a wife or a daughter to Mac Bride, and she had to be asking, ‘What became of her?’

  He put down his spoon and wiped his mouth, and she thought he hadn’t heard her, when he looked up at her and answered, softly, ‘She was a wayward girl. As wayward as yourself.’ And it seemed that subject was closed.

  ‘Mac Bride,’ she said, ‘will you do me a favor?’

  ‘Sure, and name it.’

  ‘Tend to the house. See that no rogues despoil her.’

  ‘Would you be going, then?’

  ‘Yes, and before the world is any older. I’ll not be staying, and waiting like a wife for him! But you must stay, Mac Bride, and guard the lords and ladies sleeping.’

  ‘No,’ he answered, ‘I’ll not do that.’

  ‘What, Mac Bride! You lived here all your life, and you’ll not even see to the place?’

  ‘I had a life before this place. And it was never the house I came to serve.’

  ‘Stay for your lord, then. He may return some day.’

  ‘No, that one will not be coming back, the way he is gone out of life.’

  ‘Well, what of Master Aengus? He’ll be returning at all odds.’

  ‘When the master returns to this house, it will mark the hour of his death,’ answered Mac Bride.

  She peered at him, at his face as rough and plain as a lichenous stone. ‘What are you then, Mac Bride?’ she wondered in her heart.

  He nodded, as though he was divining her very thought.

  ‘The Sleepers will be well enough, Miss. The enchantment shutting their doors will seep through all the house after we two have gone, until in the end it will be at some cost that any of us three will be able to open the front door; and for anyone else it shan’t be done at all. No thieves will be harming them.’

  ‘Will they never waken? Is it a tomb we’re dining in?’

  ‘They will waken surely, if—’ He stopped.

  ‘—If Master Aengus succeed, and call back the day.’ It was a truth she had already known.

  * * *

  SHE HAD an odd dream on that dark of the moon. In the dream she met a woman on the road. ‘Mary bless you, and where are you for?’

  ‘I’m meeting my darling,’ answered the woman in her dream. ‘We’re bound for the abbey. And you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you no sweetheart, now?’

  ‘I did have, once,’ answered Lady Agatha in her dream, knowing what a lie that was.

  ‘Then quick find another! And Mary bless you, indeed!’ And laughing the woman rode away.

  * * *

  CLOTHED in her finest traveling-dress, Lady Agatha offered Mac Bride farewell and blessings before taking to the road. She carried with her some dresses and things, and her beloved book. So she mounted her mare and was off.

  She rode down the lane, down to the somber village and its houses closed with sleep. She forded the Bride on horseback, swimming against the slick, dark stream. She cut across Squire Kimball’s fields, the path she always followed to the King’s road.

  And this time she won free of the house, truly. Aengus’ saying proved true. The road did not bend back upon itself. The manor did not swing back into her way. And for a time she was breathing lightly in the turnings of the road. Then she straightened her back and rode faster; and the summer air behind her scattered her bright laugh.

  The air was mild as milk, and she hot in her dress, so she rode for a darkness and a moon naked in her shift, that was pale with rippling like the waves curling in to shore.

  And it was a wonderful delight she was feeling rising up in her. She was free of him, free of that house! The vast Night seemed to be welcoming her. The darkness, hiding so much from sight, seemed quick with promise, and all the land seemed gentle.

  She was alone now, and must be depending entirely upon her wit and talents to be making her way; but she was sure she would be finding all she would be wanting at the end of the King’s road, in Dublin. There in the great city would be the most people, people of the Day.

  She saw the city from afar, waiting to welcome her, and she rode quick to meet it.

  But Dublin in the Night was a ruinous plac
e.

  Lady Agatha rode the empty streets in darkness, and the ache of it deepening in her breast, the way she had known such delights in that city, once upon a time. And now the place was like a quarry pit dug poor beneath the stars.

  Its chimneys breathed no more cheerful coal smoke, its windows all were black, its streets shone oily and slick. Somewhere behind the stones ten thousand souls lay sleeping, walled in by their dreams. But in the quiet, moonlit darkness, they were no better than dead; and the city a place out of Egypt or Sodom, cursed by God, shunned and haunted.

  Lady Agatha shivered and shook. She rode those forsaken streets no more than an hour, before the dread and the horror of it drove her out into the countryside.

  Then the darkness did not seem so kindly to her, but forbidding and mean-hearted. Instead of the friendly green of grasses, blue of sky, and gold of haystacks, she was seeing nothing but black lands and white ribbons of streams, and red, caught in glimmers at the edge of things, like the deep burning of rage.

  Along the way she ate off the trees and briars of black Ireland. The fruit, ripened in the moonlight, had a different taste. She was finding it bitter.

  Waste it seemed to her, and every village forsaken and lone, until she saw a ruddy brightness on a hill.

  She rode up the hill, and found a child burning planks and twigs in the middle of a crossroads.

  ‘What are you doing now, child?’ she asked.

  The child looked at her, put a finger up along its cheek and answered, ‘Wait. They’ll be coming.’

  She tethered her mare at a bush by the way and let her graze. And after a time other children were coming, bearing bundles of twigs and logs and many other things, and casting them onto the pile. And soon the needfire mounted halfway up the sky, roaring and reddening the hill.

  ‘What are you burning?’ she asked the child.

  ‘Whatever we want,’ it answered, and danced around the fire.

  More of them came, curious folk, boys and girls and bent old folk, and many tongues were spoken among them, though there seemed no lack of understanding. Only the very young and the very old were there, children and grandfolks, and no parents. They wore the dress of different lands; some were fair and some were dark, and some dressed in fineries and some in rags. But there was a robber’s look and a gleam in the eye of all of them, so they seemed all kindred.

  Some were smoking pipes, and some were singing, and some were dancing, and many were laughing, laughing as it seemed without reason or end. And some were hammering planks together and building.

  There below the crossroad, where there had never been any stone raised before by living hand, tents, Tinkers’ wagons, and weird scaffolding loomed against the black sky. It would have been Midsummer’s Eve during the day. Lady Agatha caught raucous laughter, and the lewdest Tinker songs, and the clapping of unseen hands.

  Off to one side she saw two great stallions, and on the horses sat a woman and a man. They were at the far edge of the firelight, and the redness just caught at them, so that the tails of the horses and the backs of the woman and man were drifting into the black between the pale white stars.

  The woman and man wore wide hats, masks, and heavy riding cloaks draped from their shoulders. The man’s cloak was scarlet, and on its shoulder was embroidered in black the letter A. The woman’s cloak was black, and bore the same letter in scarlet.

  The dancers went round and round, and from time to time one of the riders gestured, and a young strong lad, or a bold lass, went shyly before them and spoke words with them for awhile.

  The strange child went past her, and Lady Agatha called after it, ‘Who are those two now, and what will they be wanting with the lasses and the lads?’

  The child laughed and said a thing, but all she could catch of it was, ‘—to the abbey!’

  The firelight limned the scaffolding with a hellish light, and the rising planks were seeming almost alive, as if this was a place where the timbers dwelled, and no human folk at all; and Lady Agatha rode away from there, thinking if anything this was a worse place than lost Dublin itself.

  * * *

  SHE WANDERED INLAND away from the roaring nightblue sea, to a marsh land, the border of the county of bogs. The air was quiet there, and the whispers in the winds so soft that at times she wasn’t even hearing them.

  A few small hovels stood by the road, pitched on the bog’s edge like a village. During the Day the squatters of the place had earned their bread with the hard toil of digging in the bogs, carving out peat-clods and drying the turf for fuel.

  Now the cottages were darkened and still. For a moment Lady Agatha thought she saw the dark form of a woman standing pointing beside one cottage, right on the lip of the bog. Agatha raised her arm to wave to the woman, but a sudden weakness took her as of labor, and an ache as of childbirth, and she tumbled out of the saddle to the ground.

  The dark form moved – it was a woman, after all.

  Softly the countrywoman bent over Lady Agatha lying in her fine white dress, dirty and bemired. Then putting fingers to mouth, the woman whistled thrice. Six ragged children appeared quick as the wind, and together they bore Lady Agatha into the farthest hovel.

  Where the countrywoman laid a black shawl over Lady Agatha, where she lay on a stone by the blue turf-fire. When Agatha moaned and showed some life was still in her, the woman gave her to drink. Porter it was, more warming than the fire.

  ‘One of the weakening-spells you had, let her bless you,’ the woman told Lady Agatha. ‘They come over some when they are lacking. A lady so fair, it’s sure some men will be missing you.’

  ‘It’s brightness and warmth I’m wanting,’ answered Lady Agatha. ‘Not any man at all.’

  ‘You’re like poor Agnes then,’ said the woman. ‘Moy-rua, six mouths to feed, and a seventh on the way! My darling took off in the fire. He went to the abbey, to gain a great fee. It tore at him cruel to see me working so hard. But surely my love’ll be coming back to me! Only, the thing of it is, when he comes back, what of the grawls? He’s got no great love for them.’

  Outside, Agnes’ children played in the bogs. It was every blessed one of them had stayed awake, freed from catechism and labor and glad of it all as of a high holiday.

  ‘Here, now,’ said Agatha, ‘take this book and read it to your children. It is a favorite of mine, and I’m sure they’ll love to hear the tales.’

  The woman took the book in her hands and squinted at its smooth, worn spine.

  ‘You’d not leave your children, now?’ asked Agatha. ‘For him?’

  ‘Well, but the grawls can see to themselves, after all. And I do yearn for him!’

  Lady Agatha drew off her jewelry, and put rings and pins and bracelets into the poor woman’s hands.

  ‘Take these and be selling them, and feeding your children,’ she said. ‘Do not go away with him, he will prove you false as before. I would give you this too, but it is dear to me as my life, and I cannot bear to lose it.’

  That piece, the only she withheld, was an emerald on a gold chain. It was himself, the lord, gave it to her for the price of her beauty on that night when she had gone, a captive bird drunken with kindness, into his bed. So young, so very young she had been!

  ‘And promise me now you would not go with him.’

  ‘O Miss, I cannot be saying any such thing, and if that is the price of your bounty I cannot take it at all.’

  ‘Take it, take it!’ scolded Lady Agatha. ‘It is for your kindness now. But tell me at least you will think of your children.’

  Agnes held the jewels in her lap, more wealth than she had ever known. Lady Agatha could not see her eyes.

  * * *

  THAT FELL OUT on Imbolc or Midwinter, when Brigid’s fires are lit. And upon that same darkness, while Lady Agatha was resting in the loft, she heard voices at the door.

  ‘Come inside, and bide a while,’ called Agnes’ voice softly. There was a lilt in the voice, and all the weariness gone clean out of it, the wa
y Agatha hardly knew it.

  And a man’s voice answering, ‘Ah well, Nessie, and you know it’s not for them I’ve come. Come back out instead, close the door my dear, and give me kisses three.’ She heard Agnes laughing like a girl, and the closing of the door, and nothing more.

  ‘Children,’ she whispered. ‘Do you not hear the voice of your father, now?’

  ‘We hear it,’ their whispers answered her. ‘But whoever told you he was our father?’

  * * *

  WHEN AGATHA rose out of dreaming, Agnes was not in the cottage nor anywhere near, and her pot by the fire was cold.

  Lady Agatha walked out of the hovel. The moon was not yet up. A few stars were glimmering through the clouds. Agnes’ children were looking at the other cottagers, slyly.

  From the back of the house a dark causeway led snaking down into the bogs. Deep into the wet black earth the people of the hovels had been digging, cutting cliffs out of the hills, delving into the past. In the mud at her feet Lady Agatha found a silver spur. Carefully she wiped it shining and clean, looking down the causeway.

  Surely it was this way Agnes had fled with her lover, forsaking children for the sake of lust. In the Day, Lady Agatha would have sent sheriffs and the King’s men after her. But no one would return her to her duty in this Night.

  Lady Agatha left the silver spur for the children and rode away, turning at hazard, until the bogs were well behind her.

  Behind her Agnes’ children passed the silver spur between their dozen dirty hands. The looked up past the cottages, and saw a fire burning on a far-off hill, and they gathered twigs, quietly, and trooped off towards the fire.

  * * *

  AS TO LADY AGATHA, she was wandering for many a moon, through Beltane and Lughnasadh, bitterness in anger burning her, until she found herself at the edge of a wood. And even there she was not free of him and the shame he had put on her.

  Below the wood, down the slopes, some dark stones of buildings littered the riverbank like tombstones. And if it had been still day, Lady Agatha would have said the place had the look of the city of Cork. But what place was it in the Night-Land?

  Under the moonlight many birds were gathering. The birds were small and black and swift, coming in troops of twenty and thirty, some out of east, and some out of west. Those out of east all flocked together at one end of the city, and those out of west flocked at the other end. They were squealing and squawking at each other, for hours on end. She watched them with admiration, and not a bit of fear.