by Asotir
11. Of the Irish Witch
MIELUSINE was nursing the nameless man. At first she would give him her own bed, but Lady Agatha would not hear of it. They covered him with blankets and left him on one of the benches. At the point of moonrise the Maid found him sprawling naked on the ground. He was groaning strange words and scratching the scabs of old wounds, and his nails red with his own blood. Mielusine was horrified.
She washed him all over with water from her cauldron, and the trees bound him in blankets with their belts. They put him in Agatha’s bed, and Agatha slept on the floor by the Maid’s bed.
The Moon was rising and sinking again, and the man still groaning in sleep through it all.
At the last, when the snow was melting up the hill, reason of a sort came back into the man’s dark eyes. Mielusine loosened the bonds on him and let him dream freely, smoothing his hair and cooling his dampened brow.
‘He is healing now,’ said Lady Agatha. ‘You saved him, Mielusine.’
Mielusine sighed. She was thinking of Aengus.
‘He is well-born, Mielusine: comes of finer folk than you have ever known. Still, he might find you pretty.’
Mielusine bowed her head. ‘My heart is trembling.’
‘For love, so soon?’ asked Agatha.
‘For fear,’ answered the Maid.
‘The life you knew is over now. Prove your art on him, make him fall in love with you.’
‘Yes,’ answered the maid. ‘I’ll do that.’
She was looking athwart the dreaming man, to the black shape of Owen planted in the yard. What was she thinking of? Her mouth was smiling.
* * *
THE NEXT DARKNESS Lady Agatha and the stranger went away. Mielusine and her trees were eating when the two of them returned, and Agatha presented him.
Pale he was still from his fever, but his hair was cut and combed, his beard shaved, and he wearing clothing Agatha had made for him. Indeed he was well-made after all, and straight off the trees were hating him. He said his name was Eudemarec, and his country the principality of Brittany.
‘My lady,’ he said to Mielusine, ‘your woman here told me it is thanks to your kindness I regained my health. I’m at your service for your pains.’
‘I could not let you die,’ she answered.
‘Many could not have helped it,’ he said. Then the blush was deepening on Mielusine’s cheek, and she caught at her white gown with one hand, absently, casting down her gaze.
She is perfect, Agatha was thinking. Could I have taught her that?
Sullenly the trees made room on the bench for the man, and he shared their meal, complimenting the Maid on the excellence of it.
‘Well, what I’m wanting to know,’ grumbled Neil, ‘is who were those others, and what wrong you did to them.’
‘Neil!’ protested the maid; but the stranger only smiled.
‘Old comrades in arms of mine they were,’ he answered softly.
‘Will you not tell us your story?’ asked Mielusine.
Eudemarec sighed. ‘It’s only this,’ he said, ‘that I’m so long on this road after my enemy, I hardly know the start of it now. And there’s pain in it for me, and the man I might have been.’
A silence was flowing down from the rafters. The trees were swaying in their places, supping mead. Mielusine was all but speaking, but Agatha made a sign to still her.
And in that silence, they heard the Breton’s voice as if it came out of the rafters, as he began his tale.
‘I come,’ said the voice, ‘from a rich and noble house…’
It was a house among the oldest in Brittany, descended from the Roman Emperor Postumius. In the third year of his legateship Postumius found a maiden on a hill. On her arms she bore the marks of Druids, and in her hands she held a golden cup.
‘I stole it from the Druids,’ she called down to him. ‘Who drinks from it will have health proof against all sickness, and live a fortunate life.’
Postumius took the cup, and he took the maiden for his wife, the way her hair was golden as the cup. He betrayed his city and fled with her where the mists come rolling over the woods from deep in the uncrossable Sea.
That was the founding of Eudemarec’s house. And the heart of his house was the gold cup.
Father would pass it to the boldest of his sons. The baptisms of the family were always made with it. In war and darkest time, through plague and burning, that cup was handed down, until it came into Eudemarec’s father’s hands. Eudemarec was his father’s seventh child, and the favorite. It was his the cup would be.
One day Eudemarec was called into his father’s study. To the young man’s eye it seemed a great age had been added to his father: overnight he was shrunken and infirm.
‘My son,’ he said, ‘it’s foolish I’ve been, and a curse is fallen on us all through my folly. Mablaith, my black-eyed, black-haired, black-hearted Irish witch, is gone. And the cup of our fathers is gone away with her.’
‘I will win it back,’ said Eudemarec. ‘In seven days’ time I will strike Mablaith down for treachery, and you’ll drink from the cup with your own lips. I swear it!’
But a month had passed, and he had found neither cup nor maiden, when he learned that his father was dead.
‘Now you are lord over our lands,’ Eudemarec’s brother, the Jansenist abbé, told him. ‘Give up this seeking for vengeance on the woman, who is damned. The cup is idolatry, let it be gone with the godless past.’
Eudemarec did not listen. That night he turned his back on his brother and his lands, and he walked with the gray mists deep into Broceliande, the forest without end. His hatred for Mablaith was his only thought. He knew she was near, but he could not find her.
It chanced he heard an owl in the mist. He followed its voice and found a yew tree, and under the tree a little hut, and in that hut Mablaith was hid. He found her sitting by the fire.
‘And with that,’ said Eudemarec, ‘I laid a pistol up along her head.’
Mielusine shuddered, but Agatha said, ‘Go on.’
‘Mablaith, seeing her life was balanced on the point of a pin, pleaded with me. “My noble young Sir,” she told me, “let you not be cruel to me! I did not steal the cup – your father gave it to me! It was always you I was longing for. So often I saw you,” she said, “wanting your touch when it was only his old hands on me. If at last I took the cup, it was only that I knew he’d be sending you after it.”
‘Her bright face was stained with tears, and all at once I knew she had not been running from me all that time, but only waiting for me to come to her…’
For a long while in the dim hall, before the trees and Mielusine, Eudemarec did not speak, lost in that moment – his mind reeling, Mablaith sobbing, the wind in the forest, the pistol heavy in his hand.
He had always, he said, longed for Mablaith. It was that desire so fired his hatred. And then he looked down and saw the pistol in his hand. What a blasphemy her death had been, the bright face broken and the brains black with powder on the wall! He threw down the pistol.
‘In that moment,’ he said softly, ‘I was lost, and hers.’
He betrayed his father and all his fathers. He never returned home; he kept to his ionarbadh. He renounced his own name, and took to calling himself Eudemarec, that had been the name of an ancient enemy of his house.
Eudemarec and Mablaith lived at the forest’s edge; he sold the cup and they lived well enough. When their monies were dwindling, he took Mablaith with him into town, to the gaming houses. ‘Hold my hand,’ he told her: ‘I cannot lose, and you are there.’ He played at faro, and he won. Soon he had won enough to make his own bank.
Each night Mablaith was going with him, until the jealousy in him, at the looks other men were giving her, made him send her home. And then he did not always win. The end of it was not hard to see, for when he won sums he spent them on gifts for her, and when he lost he went into debt.
Then the last Day came.
Night fell, this endless
Night, and passion for the cards kept Eudemarec awake. But Mablaith alongside him was sleeping, and she did not awaken.
It was then Eudemarec took to the road, wild for its danger. He fell in with bandits. They were robbing with impunity: there were no soldiers in the Night.
To the empty village at the forest’s edge the band was returning, where Mablaith lay sleeping in the chamber only Eudemarec could enter, for grace of having been sitting there beside her when the Night fell. Eudemarec stored the robbers’ treasure in Mablaith’s chamber, where it was secure.
And they trained rampant thorns to grow about the village against all intruders, leaving only one gateway clear.
In their empty hours the bandits were gambling and wagering their hoard. Eudemarec laughed at the poorness of their dreams; he laughed when he wagered and lost. Without Mablaith wealth was empty. The others marveled at him; that was why they trusted him.
Only one piece Eudemarec never wagered. The cup of his fathers had been won in a raid. He did not drink from it; he laid it upon Mablaith’s breast, wreathing her chill fingers about its stem.
When the ramparts of brambles were complete, Eudemarec went no more a-raiding. He was worrying lest he return and find the gateway grown over. The others they were grumbling, and eying the door to the chamber that was closed to them. But still and all they went.
Eudemarec feared none of their wild words. He lingered in the empty village, in the treasure room. Treasures stacked to one side, Mablaith sleeping to the other. His eyes were on her.
It was a long while Eudemarec was silent. Then he heaved up a great sigh, and carried on:
‘Softly I stepped to the bedside. I bent over her, my shadow slipping over her, and I kissed her cold, cold mouth. I laid my hands upon her shoulders, bent down, and kissed her cold, cold mouth again.
‘I had lighted a hundred candles outside the chamber, for within it no flame could live. The candles making an oppressive heat, the sweetness of their burning making the air unbreathable.
‘Golden and russet gleamed the treasure, saffron and silver the countenance of my love, my bride. Her pallor seemed to me the height of beauty. Her loveliness was greater for having been consumed.
‘It seemed I slept – I must have slept, the way I did not dream.’
Once more Eudemarec fell silent, so that Lady Agatha and the maid thought him lost in the brambles of his story. He fetched a sigh, and spoke again.
‘That darkness – that darkness I left the village. I left all that treasure. I closed off the gateway through the brambles. No one can enter there now, until the dawn come and kill all those nocturnal thorns. But will the dawn ever rise again?
‘Behind me I could hear my bandits riding round the ramparts, discharging their guns, hacking with cutlasses at the iron thorns, vainly trying to burn away the barrier. I turned my back on them.
‘I was thinking of rumors I had heard. Fantastical wild tales; but who is to say what lies outside possibility when the Sun has fallen, and Night outlasts the year?
‘It was rumored the Sleepers would awaken, once the Sun returned. And there was only one path to that end.
‘I gave no thought to the bandits, or that they might waste their time in tracking me. And yet that is what they did. The thieves turned soldier in hunting me. It was they, reached me at last here in your wood.
‘But I burned with seeking for my enemy, and paid no heed to them. I searched in the east, in Europe, England, Scotland, Wales. Now I know he is not far from here. He came to Ireland Imbolc Moon.
‘In the name of my love and for her sake, tell me now if you have heard of this one, Mablaith’s own countryman and my enemy. He it was, they say, unbound the girdle of light and waked the Unappeasable Host. It was by his doing Mablaith was put asleep, and only by his death, they say, will Day return to waken her.
‘Tell me if you have heard of Master Aengus and where he may be found, for I have sworn an oath upon this lock of Mablaith’s hair that I will kill him, put an end to Night and summon back the Sun.’
12. How She Learned of Him
IN THE SHALLOWS the fish-girls swam and played. One said, ‘It’s cold the Sea is now. Shouldn’t the Sun be warming it? Has Aengus not fulfilled his lady’s bidding?’
‘He never meant to,’ said the other.
‘Not Aengus! Let’s learn what became of him.’
‘Well, I still don’t know what it has to do with us,’ grumbled the third.
The three fishes swam back into the West, to the isle beneath the water. On the sea-floor they found the body of Master Aengus, all rough and charred from burning.
The fish-girls tugged and tugged, and they bore dead Aengus on their backs, in the long streams of their drowning hair, beneath the Imbolc Moon.
‘Where to leave him now?’ asked the second fish.
‘Not here! I hear a frightful thirteen steps upon the sand, to and fro, like a clock.’
‘It’s far the nearest, and my back hurts,’ grumbled the third.
So the fish-girls took Aengus up the coast, outside of Inishark and Inishbofin, and curved inside of Inishturk into the river at the flood. Past the water-change they left the body, on a bank of weeds and reeds.
To the frogs and herons on the bank the fish-girls said,
‘Let you go now over the hills to the lady and have her send her bandits, for there is one here having need of her, and it’s only she by her art can restore him.’
And when the Sea ran out so did the three fish-girls, and the body hung high up on the weeds, drying and black against the silver halo of the moon.
* * *
IN THE HONEY HALL a silence fell after the Breton told his tale. For a long while no one was answering his question, concerning Master Aengus. The trees, half-drunken, had long since stopped listening. Agatha sat very still. Mielusine blushed so deeply the red of it suffused her breasts beneath her gown.
‘The man you speak of,’ she said at last, ‘—what was his name, now?’
‘The devil,’ answered Eudemarec, ‘named him Master Aengus.’
‘And it was he, you say – one man alone, brought an end to the Day? But why?’
‘It’s said lust for a woman drove him on to it.’
‘That may well be – that may well be,’ stammered Mielusine. ‘But we are alone in this wood. And I cannot say that I ever heard of this man. Nor have any of us here—’
‘Nay, I know him,’ said Agatha.
The Breton looked on her – looked on the sparkle in her eye, the color in her cheek, and the bitter hunger in her mouth.
‘What have you heard of him?’
‘That he was a poor free farmer, dared woo a lord’s young lady. He had no power to enrich the fields, but his one philosophy was to blaspheme against God and set a woman in His place. So he ended the world to win her, and it was a cold portion he got for his pains. Where he is now I do not know, but for a time he was holding the lady prisoner in Ballynoe, in County Cork not far from the banks of the Bride, so you might look there to start.’
The Breton’s eyes took shine. ‘Ballynoe, do you say now? In County Cork?’
‘Aye, hard put to by the river Bride.’
Mielusine put out the trees, and went to bed herself. But all through that darkness Lady Agatha and the Breton sat up speaking; he was asking, she answering.
And as soon as ever she could next moonrise, Mielusine drew Agatha apart, asking, was it true? ‘Was it Master Aengus, put out the Sun?’
Lady Agatha looked at the maid. Mielusine had never seen her so alive and proud. ‘Aye,’ she answered, ‘it was he.’
‘And it was for you he did all that?’
‘Nay, now: he did it for himself.’
* * *
AFTERWARD there was not the same closeness between the Maid and Lady Agatha as there had been before. Mielusine was left alone with Eudemarec, and that was for the best.
In the wood the Maid and the Breton were gathering mushrooms, spied on by the trees. Little
enough work the trees were doing, but only such as to win the Maid’s attention. Eudemarec laughed when he saw them peeping; at that their faces ran brown with sap, knotting up in squints.
Agatha left the lovers and went down outside the wood, and walked the length of the hedge encircling it. And at every hole in the hedge she stopped and glared at it, muttering binding words, ‘Let her not be passing out through you, unless it’s the two of us as one.’
Now as to Mielusine, she was more full of herself than ever in the highwayman’s eyes. She could not help but be trying her new arts on him. The Breton smiled at her, and treated her courteously; but elsewise there was no whit of the earnestness Lady Agatha had told her of.
He plucked up a wide flat mushroom and showed it to her. She thought he was standing rather close. Nervously she moved apart; he moved with her, coming closer still; reached out of a sudden and brushed back a tangled wisp of her black hair, whispering, ‘Mielusine!’
She started and skipped back; Eudemarec leaned against a tree and laughed. ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘this is the Beltane Moon? That sport you’re playing, Mielusine, it’s no sport to be playing,’ he said, ‘unless you are ready to win.’
* * *
THE DARK MOON rose, and the silver Moon fell. The tides of the Sea swarmed in the darkness all black, and out to sea beneath the waves something red shining darkly, gleaming now with this swell and now with that: and that thing was the Sun, buried deep beneath the bottom of the Sea by the cursing of Master Aengus, that was dead now, and hung in the silver reeds above the tide.
And while Master Aengus hung in the silver reeds dead, a faint dim dream occurred to him.
He dreamt a shadowy woman in white was lifting him down and laying him on the grass. And she stroked his hair and pressed her mouth to his, and brought him back to life.
That was the dream that came to the dead man. But outwardly there was no sign of it in his still gaunt black body.
Now, out of the bushes on the braes above the river, a timid beast came down, and looked on the man’s form caught among the reeds. It was a small white hind, and two horns were emerging out of her head, and round her neck was clasped a torc of gold.
The White Hind sniffed at the sea-wet clothes of the man, and licked a little at his salty hand.
