by Asotir
‘You speak so wonderfully,’ whispered the girl. ‘Anyone could tell you’re a great lady.’
‘I had such dreams, once. I was pretty enough, and free.’ She was staring into the fire, into white lines and black knots, and the red tips of the flames where they vanished into smoke.
‘And he loved me,’ she was murmuring, ‘and abandoned all to be chasing on my heels. And in my innocence I was scorning him, and mocking his pain with laughter. Folly!’
‘Moy-rua, it’s a bad fever has caught you, Miss. Let her spare you! Don’t fret, there is no one else about.’
* * *
THAT DARKNESS Lady Agatha lay in the girl’s bed, the way Maid Mielusine could not rest. Three times the girl climbed to the bedside, looking on her visitor to see that she was real, and really there.
In her dreams the lady had turned her face away to where the dark roof timbers swept down close and cozy above the bed. The lady lay there, wan and flushed by turns, and her hair bedraggled, and her gown in tatters. But there was no mistaking her quality, as Maid Mielusine was assured. She was a lady.
Maid Mielusine sighed for clean delight.
* * *
WITH THE RISING of the Moon Lady Agatha woke and clambered down out of the warm bed in her shift. There in the middle of the cottage she found herself alone. She stood by the fire awhile, warming her hands and thinking. In the firelight she looked on her palm marked with its black spot.
Maid Mielusine came back with a pail of water. Her cheeks were less pale now, and some of the threads of her hair had strayed across her brow.
‘And how are you now, Miss?’ she asked. ‘But you shouldn’t have risen! Will you be wanting anything?’
Agatha shook her head no.
Then they ate a bowl of cream together, and spoke of this and that.
During the day, Maid Mielusine told her, she had been living in a cottage with her ma and her da and her sisters, Grisalta and Merrwyn, and Mielusine the baby. But when her ma died, her da changed.
‘Och, he was right enough with my sisters, but with me he was hard hearted, I cannot tell you why. Of the three of us girls, I looked the most like our ma, but still my da was giving me the hardest chores, to be cleaning the pens and cleaning the hearth until I smelled of dirt and ash.
‘ “Sini, you’re no good,” he’d be saying.“Sini, you’ve a pinched face. Sini, your nose is thin!”
‘Until one night my sisters wakened me, whispering, “Sini dear, our da’s gallous cruel with you, and it’s worse he’ll be to you before he’s better. Let you get dressed now, and we’ll go from him for ever and a day.”
‘Shoes in hands, we tiptoed out. The night was like summer in Italy, as they say in our county. The stars were shining in the dew on the grass, and we girls walking barefoot in heaven.
‘We had taken some cakes, and ate nuts and mugoreens from the sweet briars along the way. Soon in the wood it was so warm we did off our clothes, and naked in their shifts went bathing in a pool, giggling and free. We little knew the Night was hanging over us all.
‘The next day the sky was black until the red burst out of the spot on the Sun, and fire was raining out of the clouds everywhere, and I like a baby crying and running, the way I lost my sisters in the wood and found them never again.’
The Maid fell silent, stirring a wooden spoon in her pot over the turf. The lady observed her out the corner of her eye.
‘So you are all alone here?’ asked Agatha.
‘Ah,’ said the maid, ‘I’m not so all alone as that, Mary save me. There are my guardians; or should I be calling them my children now! Would you see them, Miss? They’re so eager to be meeting you!’
The country-girl drew her guest outside. They went into the middle of the snow, to the nine trees planted in a crescent. Now Lady Agatha saw that those trees were not bending of the wind, the way there was none, but of their own will.
In the gnarled wood Agatha saw faces very plainly smiling down at her: knotty cheeks, knotty eyes, and wide-pecked mouths. They had no necks, and their arms were branches, some doubly and some triply jointed. Their roots served for squat legs and curling feet.
One by one the trees were bowing, stepping forward, and introducing themselves to her.
‘They are my friends,’ said Mielusine, giggling at Lady Agatha’s astonishment. ‘They cleared the glade, dug me stones for warmth, and built the Honey House.’
‘What now!’ growled one. ‘She is our first guest!’
‘Aye now, Tadgh! You’re right about that!’
‘Celebration now! Dancing and mead!’
‘Mead and dancing, you mean!’
Laughing in gnarled voices, the trees were tipping over and crawling into the hall, mindful of their branches brushing through the door.
The maid served them from her cauldron, and poured mead for the trees. Merry they were all, though keeping their distance from the fire. They were singing and drinking and winking, and even went so far as to make the maid dance a jig with them, clumsy as they were.
Mielusine fell back at last breathless beside Lady Agatha, and brushing her locks from her brow. ‘Ah!’ she was saying, ‘That’s work, now!’
‘But this is a marvel,’ said Agatha. ‘What are these trees, that they speak and walk and dance?’
‘Well, but I told you, sure, how as I lost my sisters? And then I’d nowhere else to go, it being all night and strange, and so I went back to my da’s. But the cottage door was closed with sleeping. Then I wandered in the wood, until an owl and a swallow told me the magic of honey. It was honey I spread over the mouths of the trees, and charmed them into life.’
‘And here we are!’ said Finn, loudly, the way mead was ever raising his voice. ‘Mary bless us, as good as saplings, some of us!’
‘Ho, but Finn, you’ve a few holes now, begging your pardon – better watch those woodpeckers!’
‘Watch yourself, Ned my lad, for your bark is curling!’
‘Sini, come hither, bide a while upon my knee?’
One great tree swept up the maid from her seat and swung her round in a great galloping reel. The others stamped the earth with their rooty feet, marking time of the measure and shouting their complaints and cheer.
‘Shawnee, boy, don’t be so boisterous, can’t you see you’re all but bumping Sini to the ground?’
‘Moy-rua, I am a hobby-horse, and let her make me a fast one!’ said Sean; and sure enough in a matter of moments the maid, giggling and blushing, slipped to the ground. Ned swept her up in his branchy arms and spun her round the hall, his rooty feet clumping and kicking the floor.
By moonfall the trees were mopping their brows and blowing out their brown cheeks, and stumbling out to their circle again. Where they stood leaning in the snow, snoring and snorking.
* * *
THE SMOKE curled blue and cheery from the hole in the roof of the hut under the Moon. Inside Lady Agatha and Maid Mielusine sat on the hob by the hearth and told each other of their lives. Lady Agatha told of dances and masquerades, of journeying to Dublin and across the sea to London, where the King’s house was. Maid Mielusine blushed to have nothing to be telling but her own narrow life.
‘Why do you not go looking for your sisters?’
‘But I’m afraid of what I might be finding, there outside the wood.’
‘So pretty you are, and living like a hermit.’
‘Well, but I have my trees now, and we are happy.’
‘Are you now? I dare say cows will be happy enough grinding their teeth in the middle of a field. But a girl of your charms might aspire to more. Look at you now, your hair all tousled and draggling. Let me comb it out for you.’
With an amber comb she combed the girl’s tresses; and the while she was combing, Lady Agatha set to singing a bit of old poetry, with softness and ease as of long practice:
… come forth,
And taste the air of palaces; eat, drink
&nbs
p; The toils of empirics, and their boasted practice;
Tincture of pearl, and coral, gold, and amber;
Be seen at feasts and triumphs; have it asked
What miracle she is? set all the eyes
Of court a-fire, like a burning glass,
And work them into cinders, when the jewels
Of twenty states adorn thee, and the light
Strikes out the stars! That, when thy name is mentioned,
Queens may look pale; and we but showing our love,
Nero’s Poppaea may be lost in story!
Lady Agatha’s voice murmured away, and Maid Mielusine felt the words sinking inside her, seducing secret dreams.
‘I’m sure we must seem low to you, Lady Agatha. You are used to such fineness of manners. I’m sorry for my trees. Their hearts are kind, and maybe I’m no better, and too humble and coarse to be your friend.’
‘You are not low, merely untutored. That you could feel such regret shows you capable of better.’
‘Will you tell me more of courts and ladies?’
Agatha eyed the Maid thoughtfully.
‘What is it you’re wanting to know?’
‘Oh – fashions, dancing, and courtly manners! I’ve dreamt of it always, you see, to be a lady, elegant and sought after!’
‘But that’s the least part of a lady, Mielusine. These elegant ladies are the stupidest showhorses you ever did see. What truly makes a lady is much more than that.’
‘What, then?’ the maid was asking after a bit.
‘Ah, as for that, you do not want to know it, Mielusine! I did not know it, and am sorry now I learned.’
‘Tell me, please, Agatha! For how else will I ever be anything but the merest, commonest country-girl?’
‘There is danger in my lessons, Mielusine. Stay rather as you are, the way you are pretty as the third moon, and that ought to be enough for anyone.’
‘I see,’ sighed the Maid, letting her head tilt down to her breast, and looking away.
But it was late for warnings. In the Day Mielusine had been content to be a cottager’s daughter forever, the way that would never be changing any more than the Sun. But now the Sun was gone, and in the darkness trees could catch life, and why could herself, Maid Mielusine, not become a lady?
‘It is love makes a lady,’ said Agatha, after a long bit of silence. ‘Love and suffering ennobling her.’
‘Don’t my trees love me?’
‘Your trees? They know no more of love than you, my goose. There are two paths of love, Mielusine. Bright and broad is a boithrin, and that green lane glimmering in the Sun beside golden flowers all the way down to the blue Sea. But I can’t be helping you there, you see, it’s not that path I know.’
‘What is the other path like, Agatha?’
‘Ah, that one, now! Narrow, twisty, treacherous. You cannot see the end of it at all. And its banks are hemmed in with primroses dark and voluptuous as Eve’s own lips. But their brambles clutch and scratch at you, and a dark man waits hidden in the thorns. He’ll watch you suffering, and smile and offer you his hand, but he’ll press you back with the whole of his body into the swallowing fragrance of the briars.’
Mielusine stared at the lady, her eyes big as her fists. Agatha caught that look, and laughed a bitter laugh.
‘That is all I know of love. It’s the great heart is not poisoned by it. Only one or two ladies of a hundred might have managed it. These are the ones, bear the secret marks of their passions on their bodies and their souls. But the rest of us, we have been maimed by it, soured and gone old before our years.’
Lady Agatha’s voice was falling away into the merest whisper, and it was only the hissing of the fire filling out the silence.
‘It is wonderful, what you said,’ whispered Mielusine. ‘Ah, do you dream I could ever be like the one or two?’
‘It must come out of the untouched depths of you, out of your untried heart.’
‘Please.’
‘I might teach you, Mielusine,’ said Agatha after a bit. ‘But I’d want you to repay me.’
‘I’ll do anything,’ said the girl.
‘Do not be promising so quickly as that! It’s a burden and a danger you’d be taking onto yourself. Who are you but a girl, helpless and innocent as a hind, to be daring anything so terrible? You make me laugh! But here now, don’t be pouting, girl! Forgive me. A dark man’s put a spell on me, and I cannot be breaking it. And I’d be wanting you to save me.’
Sadly, Mielusine shook her head. ‘It’s not a blessed thing I know about spells; let her save me from all such!’
‘Isn’t beauty sorcery?’
The maid looked at Lady Agatha for a long while. Then she said solemnly, ‘I don’t understand. But I will do anything you tell me. Only, teach me love.’
Lady Agatha went on combing the fine black tresses, but she was not answering the maid, only looking at the fire, and her thoughts far away.
‘I will make you beautiful, Mielusine,’ she was murmuring. ‘Beautiful, beautiful…’
‘Am I really pretty?’ Mielusine asked. ‘I’ve never seen a mirror.’
‘I will make you a mirror in the face of every man. And most of all in his.’
* * *
THAT DARKNESS it was the Maid lay down in her bed, the way Lady Agatha would have it no other way.
Lady Agatha went before the hearth. Where like a dog she cast herself down on the warm stones. And she gazed upon her open hand, upon its hollow with its little black spot.
Oh Aengus, Aengus, why did you need embitter all the sweetness on the world, and change the day to Night?
She buried her face in her arms. But like a poison still she felt his fever working in her blood, like rust, like sickness, like a pregnancy. It was his song, come back to torment her.
8. How Agatha Taught the Maid of Beauty
AENGUS broke the arrow from his thigh. But a sliver of the head, and perhaps a bit of the hind’s own blood, stayed in the wound and lamed him. And the pain was not half so hurtful as the sight haunting him, of the dark spot of red on the white white coat, put there by him.
‘Come back to me, let me heal you,’ he cried. But the White Hind was gone.
Only her curse echoed in his ears, in silver tones across the ice:
You, who hunted me, will find no cure for your wound, not from herb, nor root, nor sage, nor poison, until the woman wakes, who for love of you will bear a greater pain than any woman ever bore.
He knelt in the snow by the burning black lake, and cursed himself aloud.
And after a time he rose and he turned, and he trudged out of the wood. Round and round the ring of hedge he walked, until in the snow he was finding some tracks; he took those tracks to be hers, and followed after them.
Behind him in the wood, a dark man stepped out from behind the bole of a tree, and walked down to the lake.
He was tall, that man, and wore a dark gray greatcoat cóta mór against the cold, and a tricorn hat, and a muffler round about his neck and chin. The dark man stooped and picked up the fallen bow and arrows, and he followed the footprints out of the wood. He was trailing after Master Aengus, and keeping his distance.
From that hour onward, Master Aengus wanted nothing in the world so much as the White Hind: and she the one creature of all creatures denied him.
Winds went in the way of him, and he was wandering, Master Aengus, through wood, through hills, and through fields, even to the shores of the English Sea. Imbolc passed by with a thousand thousand need-fires burning, and the Cailleach took in her firewood, so much that it was a sure sign the cold would be staying, and and Beltane and Lughnasadh. He had put Lady Agatha out of his mind. It was the White Hind in his dreams, and the fever going round in him, the way he was starting to hear a new song, the song of the White Hind.
It was her curse on him singing in his heart: You, who hunted me, will find no cure for your wound, not from herb, nor root, nor sage, nor poison, until the woman wakes, who for love
of you will bear a greater pain than any woman ever bore.
One darkness I will find you, he muttered, and I will do what I will do. We are meant for each other, you and I, hind and man, game and hunter.
And a thought came to him.
In the brightness of day, it would be easier to find her.
* * *
AS THE MOONS PASSED over the Honey Hall, Agatha taught Mielusine manners and speech and dancing, and the art of beauty. It was hard Mielusine was finding the lessons. Never had she dreamt there would be so much to it, and a right way and a wrong, of doing every blessed thing. But Agatha’s whisper came back to her. I will make you beautiful, Mielusine. Beautiful, beautiful…
So Mielusine submitted, and worked at her lessons with a heart and a half.
And Lady Agatha was teaching her a mystery, and that the hardest of lessons: the art of promise, and of seeming to know what could never be known.
‘I do not know the mystery,’ Mielusine was saying. ‘I have never suffered, I have never loved.’
‘And what does that matter, now? Become the veil concealing you. What will Aengus know, seeing only the veil as he will? When once he has torn it, then you will have loved; and when you see what lurks at the back of his eyes, then you will have suffered. Draw away from him then, and he will follow you for ever and a day after: it’s free I’ll be then. But else it will be yourself who is lost in my place!’
Now, Lady Agatha had kept the cloths Master Aengus’ art had made for her. And she made for Mielusine a gown out of the white, paler than starlight and brighter than the moon. It suited Mielusine just so, and she was enchanting in it.
‘Agatha, how can you make such a thing?’ she asked. ‘There’s surely magic in your needles and shears!’
Lady Agatha’s pale lips smiled, and she put away her pins.
‘Agatha, what is it? Mary spare you!’
Agatha looked on the maid without seeing her. Then she shook her head and took up her pins again.
‘No, it is nothing, nothing at all.’
‘Have you some hurt about you? Can I not heal it?’
‘It is not – well, it is love.’
‘But how can love be bringing you such pain?’
