by Asotir
She could feel his breath, hot and dry on her cheek. He was stroking her hair, her cheek, her throat, her breast.
‘Not here,’ she said. ‘…the dogs…’
It was by the pens of the lady’s hounds they were. She heard their scratching and whining very close.
‘Old friends of mine,’ he muttered in her ear. ‘I brought you here to show them. Go on – show my friends how pretty you are!’
He turned her round, dropping her cloak. In the gloom she saw the hundred white eyes of the hounds, their dark red ears, and their pink tongues licking the night. Herself she was gleaming, pressed against the iron in her dancing dress.
The dress they all were practicing dancing in, it was a silk shift open for freedom of movement, nothing at all, and compared to it nakedness would have seemed chaste. The stinging flakes bit straight through it, dizzying Mielusine. Vasquez slipped two fingers beneath the ribbons of the shift, sliding them off her shoulders; she crossed her arms just in time to catch it at the tips of her breasts.
Mielusine gasped.
She was feeling the warmth of him, smelling his flavor mingling with the warm odors of the dogs and the icy sweet smells of the lady’s garden. Slowly she let the shift slide down her, its caress soft as Vasquez’ breath on her nape. She kicked it aside, with a showy, dancer’s kick. His hands streamed down her sides with the melting snow, and red naked she leaned full against the iron bars, turned away from him, reaching up to grip the top of the gate with both hands. The ice cold metal kissed her cheek, her breasts, her thighs. She heard him take a breath behind her, sharply like a kiss.
The dogs gathered round, whining and clawing the earth. Mielusine felt no shame at it – she was burning, burning, burning.
All at once she could hold no more, and her cramping fingers broke from the iron.
‘Oh my Beloved,’ he said into her ear, ‘my Beloved, my Beloved, my Beloved.’
She sank onto her velvet cloak. He was still kissing her, very cleverly on her shoulder and throat, and she was sobbing for the ache in her body and the sadness in her heart, the way then at that moment, closer to this man than she had been to anyone since she’d been an infant in the arms of her ma, she was feeling alone in the world.
Still and all she was proud lying there on the snowy hard ground before the gate, proud he had chosen her, proud of her deed, and proud of her pleasure, of her pleasure above all.
After that moon, she went no more to the grave beside the apple trees.
21. Of the Bell-tower
AT THE TOP of the bell-tower was a door of oak, and it cracked, dark, round at the top, and hinged with black wrought iron. The latch too was of iron, cold under Agnes’ thumb.
For a time she was standing there, not making up her mind; then the cat mewed. Agnes pressed the latch and entered the room where Master Aengus had lived, when he lived here as Arianna’s Bacach.
In the Bacach’s chambers books, papers, instruments, dishes, linens and cushions were scattered about the floors. A few lone embers shone red in a makeshift grate; at the left was darkness, and black lines of a scaffolding beyond the bells.
It seemed someone had taken over his rooms after all.
The snow was ending, and a little starlight showing in the night through the high openings, chopping the floor into black and gray fragments. The bell-tower climbed above the mist, so that the starlight could be seen shimmering on the top of the mist as off a calm lake.
From the crannies over the bells came an ominous croaking, of rooks in tangled nests.
The puss leapt down out of Agnes’ arms and ran across the mess. She bounded up the scaffolding by a brass telescope to settle in the lap of a man.
Daintily prancing, the puss was turning in the man’s lap, and his hands scratching her ears, absent-like, until she curled up, veiling her eyes in the plume of her tail.
The starlight shone off the white cat and the telescope. It outlined the man’s dangling trouser-legs, and his shoes and hands. The upper part of him, though, was darkness.
She was afraid of a sudden, with a great overmastering fear, and she wanting nothing better than to be fleeing the place; her throat was choking, strangling, and the words she would not utter barely escaped her into the room:
‘Master Aengus!’
Something stirred up there, making no more sound than the whir of a bird’s wings. Agnes felt eyes turning her way, peering through the gloom. She was glad of the darkness for this, that it spared him the sight of her stained worn skirts and bare arms raw and red with soap.
‘Who are you calling for?’
The voice was rich and resonant, but softer than Aengus’ voice, less sharp, less knowing. It was the voice of a man is dreaming all the time. But was it his voice?
‘You, now,’ she answered boldly.
Out the great window their voices were carrying, up above the mist. The dark man on the rooftop leaned forward closer to the edge, listening.
‘Why did you call me that?’
‘Surely it’s your name.’
He was silent a while. ‘Here they call me the Bacach. The Lame One.’
‘What did they call you elsewhere?’
He was stroking the cat, drawing his fingers soft and slow through the thick white fleece.
‘I don’t remember.’
She had seen him shot and buried. She’d moistened his grave with her tears. But had that man been Aengus? She’d seen him but dimly – he’d had the shape of Aengus, and not his shape. And this one—
‘What do you remember?’
In the faint starlight his fingers were dark in the pale fur. For a moment Agatha’s heart leapt, the way she thought she saw the pallor of a scar on his inner wrist.
‘I remember a flood,’ he said softly. ‘Water rushing, boiling up. I remember a cathedral of light, and the voices of women singing, like angels, like sirens, sweet and paradisiac.’
‘What else?’
‘Nought else.’
‘Nothing of – what you were before?’
‘No.’
‘Did they not tell you what you were?’
The fingers clutched the cat’s fur. ‘They told me,’ he answered, ‘that I am the murderer of the White Hind. Because of me, she is no more seen about these isles.’
‘Aengus,’ she moaned, ‘and do you not know me?’
‘Why, surely I know you,’ he answered. ‘I’ve seen you wandering about the lawns below, and the old countryman told me your name. You’re Agnes who is washing the stair.’
‘And Lady Agatha?’ she asked.
‘I know of a Lady Agatha,’ he said, sounding pleased to be able to answer her. ‘She was in a story. There was a man in love with her. But she didn’t love him back.’
‘What was the end of the story?’
He nudged the telescope, pointing it from star to star. It was as if that old story did not interest him. He was forgetting her already. ‘The man died. I don’t know what became of the lady.’
After a while she went back out the door.
She trudged back to the Hundred Steps and a Step, each one blacker than the rest with mud and muck ground into the marble’s skin. They would never be cleaned, not by a hundred hands working twenty years; they would stay black for ever and a moon after. She stepped on them with her wooden shoes, scraping their faces with her heels.
But something stopped her. The last step, now, did it look a little bit less black than all the others to her eyes?
She thought to herself, Master Aengus is alive.
And she stepped out the servants’ door and looked straight up into the black ruin fading into mist.
‘I will win back your heart, Master Aengus. For all you have forgotten now, the memory will come back to you, and myself I will win back your heart.’
* * *
IN THE MOONLIGHT the old countryman, Mac Bride, was feeding the lady’s blood-hounds. He was holding a bucket full of bloody scraps, and as the hounds ran round him leaping, he was dol
ing out the scraps, calling them all by name as though they were his old friends: ‘Here, Francesco! Do you like that, Estéban? Wag for it, Waltherius! Ho now, Cormac!’
The last scrap he saved for the smallest, a floppy-eared pup. It was only recently Arianna had found a pup bold enough to be one of her pack, so she’d let it into the pens with the rest, and now her troop were fifty-one. She had named this latest Gwangior.
Mac Bride left the hounds’ byre and washed his pail in the lough.
When he stood up, the old man’s lean body rose like a pine tree against the moon-path on the water. He called out in a soft voice, speaking words older than Gaelic unto the fishes and weeds clustering under the water at his feet. For a time Mac Bride was listening. Strange was his face: a Firbolg’s face.
He went into the pleasure hall by a back way, quietly round. From a doorway he looked across to the woman bent over the Hundred Steps and a Step.
For so many moons she had been toiling, and now she was expert in her labor: the way the Moon was almost sunk, and she had reached the seventh step.
Which if she cleaned, there would remain only ninety and four to clean. And even so, come moonrise those seven would be black as ever, and she would have to be starting all over again.
The old countryman was shaking his head in turning away, the way he was hearing Agnes singing at her task.
* * *
THAT MOON Agnes heard voices coming up off the water. She left her work and drifted down closer to the edge.
The last Swan boat was ready by the mooring poles. A bravo of a man was aboard, giving his hand to help aboard his lady. She was dressed all in black, and her arms were swathed in black, and her hands were in black gloves, and a black veil of lace was wound round her face and trailing down her back. Only her bosom was bare, and it was white as the moon outside the mists. The lady and her bravo were laughing and bidding farewell to their friends on the stones.
‘Lady Ann,’ called Agnes, ‘I know who you are.’
The lady fixed her eyes on her through the veils.
‘Do you now, my girl?’ she said.
‘Don’t you remember me? It was I gave you jewels once, and pins, in your home.’
‘Ah,’ she answered, ‘was it you, now?’
‘You’re much changed.’
‘Thank you for it. Faith, the trinkets came in handy here – how else would we have won all that we now have? But I’ll pass you back all that’s remaining. I’ll throw it over to you, can you catch it?’
‘I’ll catch it. But Lady Ann, what do you hear of the children?’
‘The grawls?’ The lady’s peals of laughter rang out on the water. ‘Well, and well! It’s the devil’s own time they’re having of it, on their larks and wild kailees! Sing them a song if you see them, my girl! Now farewell!’
‘Farewell, Lady Ann,’ she said. The couple’s friends had gone up already into the abbey, and Agnes was standing by the mooring poles alone, gazing into the mist brightening in the moonglow. She took up what the lady had throw back to her, and went back to her labor. All that moon she was working, but only with half a heart, the way her eyes were always stealing back to the beloved old book, with its spine worn smooth, hiding its stories well-known to her heart.
Come darkness, Agnes went to her cot in the low hall where the girls were dreaming. She was always the last in of those who would be coming. She took off her woolen dress, smoothed her shift and lay down into her cot. And she was so weary in herself that she could not help but be happy in her heart.
But she heard, in the long darkness of the hall, sighs and groans, and the sounds of some girls weeping softly into their pillows, fretting away with homesickness and heartweariness, and Agnes rose up and went to the sides of their cots one after another and asked them,
‘What is it now that’s troubling your dreams, dear one?’
And one after another they were answering her, saying, ‘It’s hard the work is here, and I miss my ma and my da and my brothers at home.’
‘Come with me, and I’ll smooth away your trouble,’ Agnes told the girls.
She led them to her own cot by the doorway, where they all clustered round. And Agnes pulled out a dog-eared book, and it was so well-used the whole of its spine was worn away, and the girls might read no title there. And putting the book open, and singing down a witch-light and rubbing the last glow out of its scales, Agnes starting reading the tale of Prince Og and Princess Maeve, which in the course of its course runs much as follows:
Out of all the gentle places remaining in the Innis Fodhla, Agnes read, the two strongest were those of the moon and of the woods. But the gentle place of the moon was better-peopled and defended: it was the last true stronghold of gentleness left in the isle. As for the Princess of the woods, Princess Mab, she was hunted by men and Englishmen, and saw her hills built upon with castles of conceit, and her woods cut low, or tamed into parks for hunting, until in the end she was left with only a few sides of hills scattered widely, and a few tangled shadowy corners of woods, as the last shrunken yards of what was once an empire.
The last of her folk clung to her, but they too dwindled, hunted by the Englishmen, until in the end only one hart and one hind were left to her. And then a hunting party found them out, and cut off the hind’s head and shouldered her flanks home to their cooking pots.
Now nine days after this, the Man of the Bog happened to be in that place, setting his traps and lairs. It wasn’t after foxes and badgers the Man of the Bog was hunting, but after this and that: strange curious things: a bit of moonshine, a patch of mist, a cobweb, a will o’ the wisp. The Man of the Bog was checking his traps and his lures, when he heard a sobbing in the wind: went over the hillside and found the Princess Mab weeping over her last fallen faithful one, but she was bright as a mirror for all her sadness, and the Man of the Bog in an instant was falling in love of her. ‘Come away into my arms,’ he was saying, ‘my bright Princess Mab, and I’ll be making you forget all your causes for bitterness and pain.’ And she, being gentle and a princess, longed for his kisses, and went weeping to his arms.
And for a time they abided in the wild moors and the Bog, where only the wayward go, and are soon trapped and lost for ever. And all that time they were as happy as any of their kind could be with the counties overrun with Englishmen and Protestants.
The daughter of this pair was the Princess Maeve, and she was born in the same moonlight as saw the birth of Prince Og. All throughout the gentle places the birth of the Moon Princess’ son was proclaimed, and in a few dank places under leaves folk talked of the birth of Princess Maeve as well.
Then and there the Man of the Bog and Princess Mab decided they would wed their daughter to the son of the Moon Princess, the way her mother was a Princess without a county, and her daughter would be a Princess in nothing but her name. And this, they reckoned, was to be the last Great Hope of the gentle folk, that the uniting of the Moon and the Hill should make a place and a county strong enough to withstand the assaults of the World. Even the Moon Princess placed the kiss of her lips on this agreement, and nothing in all the gentle places was looked for with such eagerness as this uniting, and the offspring of the union, though the promised spouses were still no more than twinklings in their leafy cribs, and each had yet to endure its fostering abroad in the arms and houses and homes of men.
Into the world and homes of men went Prince Og, but it was into the world and lairs of the beasts that Princess Maeve was meant to go, and for seven years she was brought up as a beast of the field and the woods. But it was only the curse of the Moon Princess awaiting Princess Maeve when those seven years of the World had passed.
‘Now,’ said Agnes, closing up her book, and kissing its spine, ‘are you thinking your lot is so bad, and your service here an exile, an ionarbadh? Then think on poor Princess Maeve, and count yourselves lucky at that.’
So she was sending them back to their cots, with dry eyes and soothed hearts. Then all at once Agnes looked up,
the way the witchlight had swum away, and a long, thin shadow was falling out of the mist across the low eye-shaped window of the low, long hall. The shadow stirred, and moved away. Into the darkness Agnes went, but only nine dim witch-lights were swimming there, and no one else.
‘Who were you, now?’ Agnes murmured. She looked up at the ruined bell-tower dark in the mist. But then the weariness of her work was weighing on her, and she went back to her lonely cot inside the doorway.
* * *
THAT DARKNESS was a long one. And Agnes dreamed the old servant of her lord, Mac Bride, came and stood over her cot. He held a witchlight by the tail.
‘Come with me, Miss,’ he was telling her, ‘and I’ll do you a service.’
She smiled at him in her dream, and went out of the hall, across the lawn, to the gleaming abbey. Mac Bride led her up the steps and in by way of the open gates.
‘Turn now,’ he told her, ‘look to the lough.’
It was late in the darkness. At the water’s edge the Swan Boat was bumping up to the mooring pole, and nine men and women in wild attire were leaping up aland.
Mac Bride in her dream said, ‘These are the lady’s robbers back from their kailees. They are the first back this darkness. Look to their boots, now!’
And she saw their boots blackened with mire.
Then she might hold her peace no more, but in her dream addressed them.
‘Gentle sirs and ladies,’ she said, ‘I know you are wearied from your hunts, and that your joints must be chill from the damp. Your one desire is to return to the fire-warmed rooms, array yourselves, kiss your sweethearts and attend your lady.
‘But think first of what you do here, when you return with boots and shoes full of the black mud of the bogs. See your trail up the outer steps; look on the steps you mean to mount! They are black, but the foremost ones are white, and clean. It was myself cleaned them, and it was all I could do, during the hours you were abed, to scrape the mud from six of them, and make a start at the seventh. Six, of a hundred and one!
‘If you go on as you are, then these six by next moonrise will be blacker than the other ninety and five. Have pity on me, I beg you, for my heart is breaking from the uselessness of all I do, that is as quickly undone, by you. My years will go for nothing, and I will die here as I started. As if I had not lived at all. Do not rob me of my life, do not murder me, but take care, I implore you, and tread lightly on my dreams.’
