by Asotir
They reached the clearing. They looked squinting across to the hall. The door was open wide, and the gate of the byre was open too, and Mielusine’s pets were gone. It was dark in the hall, and still.
The trees crept closer. There was no sound within, and fear was all but curling up their rooty toes.
Inside the hall they found it empty and cold, and bed-clothes and cups scattered about, all tri-na-chiele. But in the dirt outside the door, in a curve round the base of the bird-pool they eight had made, white stones spelled the words,
FARE
WELL
They stared at those stones, at those marks left in the dirt. But long as they stared, the words would not be transforming themselves into any better news than that.
‘She’s gone, she is,’ groaned Griff, after a good long while. ‘Maid Mielusine is gone.’
‘Will she be returning, now,’ wondered Neil.
‘It was Conn drove her away,’ said Ted. That was the start of another quarrel between them, the worst one yet, and it ended when they all broke away, and trudged down the hill on different paths. But each in his own path was slowing and stiffening.
It was Maid Mielusine had charmed them into life. Now Mielusine was gone.
And in the end they stopped altogether, near the hedge at the ends of the wood. Separately they closed their knotty eyes, bending back their arms in the most comfortable way. Their faces were blending back into bark. Their toes were sinking into the warm ground, holding them in place. Drowsy they were, and falling asleep, sleep such as trees know that live hundreds of years, the unquick life of trees.
But just before he stopped entirely, and the wood in him stiffened into its old hardness forever, and the rough bark crusted over the features of his face, then at that moment every tree sighed, a sigh as soft and plaintive as the old wind through the branches of the naked midwinter twilight. And he prayed in his last sigh, ‘Do not lose sight of me utterly, Maid Mielusine, but remember me from time to time.’
‘Remember me,’ sighed Barry, and
‘Remember me,’ sighed Griff.
‘Remember me,’ sighed Neil, while far away across the wood,
‘Remember me,’ sighed Will, and
‘Remember me,’ sighed Ted, while Tadgh sighed far away,
‘Remember me.’
‘Remember me,’ sighed How.
‘Remember me,’ sighed Conn.
Conn was the last of them, the last of them still quick in their slow woody way, and Conn’s sighing was the last of all their magic, dying in a wide ring round the half-burnt wood. They moved no more, nor spoke, nor sang, nor dug, nor drank. They were no more than trees. Do trees drink or dance?
And from then onward there was nothing to tell them from their burned brethren, but the one thing:
From the splinters of his crown, from the knot once a nose, from onetime fingertips, each of those eight was sprouting tender shoots, so pale in the moonlight they might have been gold.
* * *
MAID MIELUSINE was walking alongside Lady Agatha down the path.
And Lady Agatha was saying, ‘It was at the pond I told him. “Is it true?” he asks me. His horse is nearby; in an instant he’s mounted, and drawing me up behind him. And we’re riding, and the branches shooting past, down this very path. But at the wood’s edge we reach the hole in the hedge, when all of a sudden the hedge-claws push against me, and light me down on the moss. Eudemarec rides on through, stops his steed and whirls it round.
‘And he calls, “Come on, Agatha! Come riding with me!”
‘I leap after him, but again the hedge won’t let me pass. Oh, for the curse of too much wisdom! My own cleverness defeating me, the way I was casting a spell across the hedge not to be letting you leave without me, lest the Breton carry you off; but the hedge loves you, and won’t let me go alone either, lest you be trapped in the wood behind.
‘I groan and call to him, “I cannot go farther, man!” ’
‘ “No?” he asks me. Och, you should have seen the man! There’s a mad gleaming in his eye, and he making his horse to dance. Holiness is taking hold of him, the purity of vengeance, and he handsome as never before.
Again he asks me: “No? Then bide you here, my sweetest, grimmest Agatha: and I’ll bring you Master Aengus’ head in a basket!” And he rides away. He rides so fast, he must be halfway to the Sea by now!’
‘He will not really hurt Master Aengus?’ asked Mielusine after a bit.
‘Wasn’t he a cut-throat now, on the edge of Broceliande? Didn’t he learn of sword-cutting and pistol-shot from the finest dueling-masters in Nantes? Master Aengus is no soldier, Mielusine.’
The path was widening, the starry fields shining through. Already they could see the dense wall of the hedge, broken at the path’s end in the way of a gate.
Mielusine slowed her step.
‘Come on, now,’ urged Lady Agatha.
Mielusine was looking back. She wasn’t wanting to be leaving. Too soon it was coming, the moment she must be bidding farewell to this place.
She looked up, about and back again. The black trees were so comforting! A sudden pang was striking her: My trees now, where are they, what will they do?
‘Come along, we must be hurrying,’ said Agatha. Mielusine looked down, at the claw of the lady, pulling on her arm.
And ahead through the fine weave of the hedge and blackened branches was shining the tip of the arc of the Moon: dreamlike it was, and reminding her somehow of Aengus.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, ‘you are right. We must be hurrying.’
And the two women slipped out through the hedge, and on the gleaming road took up Eudemarec’s trail into the heart of Ireland.
14. Of the Each Dubh
THEY WERE WALKING now, walking through the Night. Summer had come round again, cool and belated, but an end to the snow at least. There was a stillness swallowing the Night-land, and only their steps on the road were cracking, loudly, like grain brayed in a mortar.
‘Och, this silence!’ cried Agatha one moon. ‘It’s mad it’s driving me, the way only my mad thoughts are filling it, all about Aengus, and madness, and death. Sing, Mielusine, will you please?’
‘What could I be singing, against this great high ceiling of stars and black clouds?’ asked the Maid.
‘It matters nothing, as to that: only sing. Sing a cradle song, sing something, sing nonsense sounds, so you sing away this crying in my self!’
Then Maid Mielusine took pity on her friend; she lowered her head, and thought; and after a moment, along with the crunch of their footsteps, the maid’s voice, wavering as a child’s, went out into that airy vastness. She sang songs she had learned of her mother at the cradle, she sang songs for washing and for work, and for resting by the evening fire.
That would have been Midsummer Eve in Day, and they wandering through a county burning with bonfires and the laughing of gentle folk. Overhead the sky drew across itself a covering in a muslin of cloud, breaking at times, showing the Moon. A chaplet of primroses wreathed the Moon, shivering like Mielusine’s voice.
* * *
THE NEXT MOONRISE they found a post-house beside a bank of rowans. Abandoned it seemed, but for a dim glow in the window.
An old man was waiting inside. He welcomed them in with a fine fialte; his name he gave as Connor; and he was so quaint and foolish-wise, Mielusine soon loved him. ‘No questions now,’ said he: ‘Eat, drink, be warm by my fire! Mary bless such travelers as you, to fill the empty hours!’
‘We are looking for a Breton, must have passed this way,’ said Lady Agatha. ‘Do you know what way he took? He was bound for the abbey of Arianna, wherever that may be.’
‘Is that where he’s headed now? Aye, I know him,’ said Connor. ‘Was in a fearful hurry he was. But he took the long road to be going to the mist. If he’d deigned to speak with a man, I might have set him right.’
‘Which way? We must be catching him.’
‘Ah, settle yourself, gir
l!’ he said.
He bent over the fire, reddening the tobacco in his dudeen. ‘I can set you on a way, will have you there in half the time he’ll take. I’ll even lend you a horse to be beating him. But for this you must be paying me – no coins, now! For it’s the love I have of travelers’ tales, and now that I alone am running the place, with no interference of others, it’s the only currency I’ll take!’
‘Then it’s a grand tale I’ll be giving you,’ Lady Agatha said. And then and there she set out a tale of how she and Mielusine had come to the post-house; a tale full of lost loves, duels and perilous flights: a tale worthy of her beloved novel, and not a word of it true. Maid Mielusine sat agape at it, but Connor listened with not a blink of his eye.
‘Well,’ he said at last, puffing on his dudeen. ‘Well, well! Girl, this is the fanciest tale I ever yet heard. And are you sure you’ve got it all straight, now?’
And he laughed, and Agatha joined him.
‘So you’ve told me one,’ he said, ‘let me tell you another! Did you ever hear of the Man Who Should Have Slept?’
He smiled at their frowns, and spat into the fire.
‘Och, ’tis the strangest tale! It was himself, sitting there across from me at this very table, told me the tale! He came from a far kingdom across the seas, and in the last evenings of the Day, he alone saw the spot growing on the face of the Sun, and knew what that betokened.
‘He knew, you see, the Night was coming, and he knew, too, that he was meant to be one of the Sleepers. But he knew how to fight against the Sleep, and he willed himself awake. And he alone, out of all the Sleepers, stayed awake in the Night, though at a cost – a dear cost, I can tell you, having seen the grisly grim eye in his dead gray face. I could have reached out and touched it myself, the man was as close to me as that!
‘Tell me,’ said Connor, leaning over the table and lowering his voice, though no one was about: ‘Did you never wonder, why was it we woke, while so many others are Sleeping? I’ll tell you. We are all of a kind, we Wakeful. Unspoken words, more secret even than the freemasons’, bind us all as one.’
‘Ah, it was an accident, sure, and no more than that,’ Lady Agatha said. ‘Listen, stage-keeper, if you like tales so much. Do you want to know why the Night fell, and what man brought all this on our heads?’
‘Och, you’ll not be telling me the old tale of our Master Aengus and his lady, will you girl? There are half a dozen stories more amusing than his. Everyone’s heard of him; but who can tell where he ended, and where his lady is? And what’s the good of a tale without a proper ending?’
She stared at him.
‘Oh, I’ve heard many a better tale,’ he went on. ‘And here’s the one I like best. It was no one man woke the Unappeasable Host, as what one man could? – but it was the groaning and the prayers of us all – all us Wakeful, now. We in our hearts, beaten down with taxes, press-gangs, and the heaping-up of laws, we all were calling them out. And now we’ve only so much Night to cut loose the reins of the world, ere the blessed dawn break and all the Sleepers wake! It’s them are sleeping, but us dreaming the new world up over their heads, and before they waken, why it’ll be done!’
‘What will the new world be like, Mr Connor?’ asked Mielusine.
‘Ah. Ah, now. ’Twill be a world,’ he answered, puffing with all solemnity, ‘where the past will be dead, clean uprooted from the earth. It will be a world where what a fellow holds in his hand and what he holds in his head will not be the same, but what’s in his head will be worth more! It will be the world of all Desiring, and Reaching, and Pleasure. ’Twill be the world of our own making, Miss. We’ve but to dream for it.’
Mielusine said, ‘Someone’s spying on us.’
‘Ah, now,’ said Connor, ‘Here’s Siobhan.’
A young woman emerged from the shadows at the back of the house.
She was dark and graceful, and pretty, the way she was biting her lip. She wore a dark woolen dress with a long dark shawl, and her black hair was spilling out in a mass of unruly ringlets halfway down to her knees. Her eyes were dark, narrow, and odd.
‘Let her bless you,’ she whispered.
‘Wasn’t I telling you?’ Connor asked with a snort of a laugh. ‘Where else but in the Night would a wild young maid be burning up her time with an old gentleman such as myself?’
She took his hand and kissed it. ‘It’s that you tell the grandest tales,’ she murmured.
Mielusine reached out and laid the palm of her hand across the woman’s lower belly. Siobhan held Mielusine’s hand there, and laughed.
‘Isn’t it grand?’ she asked, shaking her head and looking sideways at Connor. ‘It was during this Night he was conceived.’
* * *
COME MOONRISE Connor took them to the stable, and brought them out a horse.
And black was that horse; tall, great of body, too. Only his eyes could be properly seen, gleaming red, and the splash of a star on his forehead, moving against the clouds.
‘Here is my joy,’ breathed Connor.
‘He is a miracle,’ murmured Agatha. ‘How comes it that you, in this post-house, keep a horse worthy of a sultan?’
‘Did I not tell you, we’ve only to dream? It was Porter found me as much as ever I did him. Steady, girl! You both must ride him, for no other horse could match him! He’ll take no saddle nor bridle, but if you hang on, and whisper in his ear, he’ll bear you smooth as a Lughnasadh wind.’
Lady Agatha climbed on the each dubh easily, but the Maid hung back. ‘He’s wild, I’ll fall and die,’ she whispered.
‘Let you take hold of my arm and climb up,’ commanded Lady Agatha. ‘Mr Connor, help her – put up your skirts, Mielusine, grip him with your ankles and your knees. Wreathe your arms about my waist; I’ve a mind to see how fast he is!’
‘Moy-rua, let him choose his own pace,’ said Connor. ‘But you now, it’s a deoch an dorrus you must be drinking, to speed you on your way. Here’s the corna now, and be drinking down to its bottom. Isn’t it my own poteen, that warmer than porter, that warmer than mead?’
Lady Agatha swallowed down the burning hot liquor, and the three of them, Agatha, Connor, and Siobhan, made Mielusine empty the corna too, though she was unwilling.
‘And when,’ said Connor, ‘you’ve reached the place you want to be, let him be fed and leave him, and he’ll find his way back here to me, if it’s here he’s a mind to be. Now farewell, and Mary watch over you!’
Lady Agatha hugged the bony neck to her breast, burning from the white poteen.
‘Go where I’m going, Porter!’ she breathed. ‘Go!’
Porter took a turn about the yard, tossing his head and whinnying to his mares in the stable. Then he surged straight for the hedge across the road, knowing the way without telling, and he leapt into the field beyond: and they were off, and the post-house already far behind.
Oh, but what a ride that was!
They were crossing fields, streams and fences as fast as memory. In the county of bogs Porter was dashing and darting beneath quarried cliffs of peat, fragrant with roots and all the buried past. Mud and spray were drenching the women’s legs, and they must be closing their eyes and averting their faces.
‘Oh, can you go no faster?’ whispered Agatha in his ear.
Faster than the Moon they were moving, and the wind sweeping back the mane of the each dubh, and the women’s hair streaming back like banners black and reddish-bronze.
The horse’s flanks were shivering now. It was harder to be holding on. And dimly in the distance, in the last light of the Moon, a glimmering lit the edge of the world.
That was the ridge of Connor’s warning to them: beyond it lay the county of mist, and in the middle of the mist they’d be finding the lough, the crannog, and the abbey of the Lady.
And far far ahead, they spied a fluttering, of a starling on the wing. And Agatha whispered:
‘Let you catch me that starling, and pass her before she cross the ridge.’
Violence shuddered through the steed. The wind was snapping the women’s dresses like sails, fraying and rending.
Mielusine was laughing, she was so scared, shutting her eyes. Agatha’s eyes were narrow as a Russian girl’s. Grand was Connor’s poteen, the way they would have been thrown into a ditch long before then, but for the fire of it searing their arms and their limbs and helping them hold on.
Now the starling was a quarter mile ahead, a stone’s cast off the ridge. Porter was laboring up the long slope. And the Moon slipped behind the dark rise to the left.
The foam boiled off the stallion’s neck, stinging and burning Lady Agatha’s eyes. She rubbed them on her shoulder and looked back in time to see the starling, bobbing in the air, fall behind them as they shot past. And beyond the ridge stretched a lake, bright as a mirror, as far as the eye could see.
Over the ridge, across the road raced the each dubh, helpless to stop: they fell into the water with a stinging great splash, even as Agatha cried out her exultation.
But strangely, they plunged into the lake without being wet; and it was not water, but mist, so thick its surface cast back the moonlight like waves.
And all that darkness until moonrise they were descending the inner slope, walking and leading the horse. They had to, the mist was so thick in that county. Mielusine was lying moaning on Porter, and he in a muck sweat, his sides bleeding, near dead with the racing.
‘Oh, my poor darling, my Porter,’ moaned Mielusine, ‘will you be well again? Oh, I’m all sore and shaking, Agatha, why did you bid him to go so fast?’
Lady Agatha led the way. She paid the Maid no mind. Only one thought she was thinking, and that was this, how far a lead Eudemarec had, and where was he now?
Heavier and heavier weighed Aengus in her mind.
The fury of the ride had been a respite, but the poteen was burned out of her now. ‘So comes the prisoner home into his jail,’ she was murmuring. ‘Not hopefully and not defiantly, but merely because he must. Because in truth he never left.’
It was not that she was wanting to see Aengus again. She was dreading it. She was hoping he would have gone away, no man knew where. She had no trust in herself, in what she would do when she saw him. And she was hating herself for it.
