by Prue Batten
‘I asked for your favour, Maeve. I was young and wanted to have you. I should have taken favour first and then given the cloak back. One lives and learns. Besides I am glad you were not my first. There was another and she was, shall we say, warmer and more willing than you would ever have been.’
The maid hissed and spat at him.
‘Maeve, Maeve, can you not bear a little truth?’ Liam mocked but then plucked a feather from the cloak and as he did, Maeve Swan Maid gasped and grabbed at her shoulder. He plucked again. She grabbed for her arm, moaning and crying. Again despite her pain, perhaps because of it, he plucked at the cloak. She writhed, casting hissing cries at the Other who towered over her, holding up three black feathers.
‘Three reasons for you to do my bidding. I don’t trust you so the insurance will work admirably. You know as long as I have these you are in my thrall. So you can no longer promise the world and an oyster to have your cloak back. I would not have you fly off this time before my wish is carried out.’
‘Faeran is cruel.’ Maeve grabbed at her throbbing arm and shoulder as though she had been pierced with red-hot splinters. ‘So much pain! What is it thou wishes?’ Her voice moaned like a nasty little breeze.
Liam held up one of the feathers. ‘Tell me the truth, Maeve. Have you seen a mortal woman in these lakes last night or this morning... remember, I can crush this feather.’
‘Thou heart is hard.’ She wrapped her arms around her shivering body. ‘I did see a mortal. But for the hair, I would have thought it was a boy.’
‘Where?’ Liam curled his fist over the black quill.
‘What carest thou for a boy?’
Liam began to squeeze the feather.
‘No, cruel man, no,’ Maeve held out her hand as she took a step forward. ‘To the southeast at the Bog. And the Limnae were there. The mortal had lost its reason. Eyes as vacant as a swan’s nest out of season.’ A satisfied glimmer flashed across her face as Liam gasped at this last. ‘Dost thou have affection for this boy, Liam?’
Liam’s voice slashed the air. ‘Enough. How far?’
‘Why, tis a she,’ the swan-maid expressed surprise. ‘And thou feels love for her? Poor man, poor mortal woman.’ Again she mocked. Unwisely. ‘AAH!’
Liam had closed his fist on the feather. ‘How... far?’ He spat the words at her.
‘Less than half a mile as the swan flies.’ The swan-maid’s face paled, small beads of sweat glistening above her lip.
Liam held out the cloak. It shimmered in the daylight and the tips of the feathers ruffled in the soft dawn zephyr. Maeve Swan Maid grabbed it in taut fingers. Tearing it over one shoulder, she hissed at the pain of the plucked plumage, turning a bitter face toward Liam as she sneered. ‘And so thy first ever was a mortal.’
‘As it happens. So?’ He fingered the feather.
‘Liam of the Faeran should remember what eventuated before he seeks most recent lost mortal woman.’
‘Why?’
‘Thy lovemaking destroyed thy mortal plaything. She was insensible in her home. Neither eating, nor talking, nor sleeping. One night she left, wandering the countryside seeking her Other love.’
‘Maeve,’ Liam warned and took a step forward but the swan-maid swung her head towards him, hissing.
‘Listen and learn. She was overtaken by a rade, radiant progress thy people make into mortal territory. Thinking every male was Liam, she became utterly mind-shot. She died where she lay days later, of hunger, thirst and with heart broken. That is what happened to thy first mortal love, Liam of the Faeran. What shall happen to this one?’
Liam was momentarily speechless, cut in half by warring emotions - distrait at the death of the innocent girl and fury at feeling such distress. Then fear. That Ana, the sought-after prize and possession may so end her days. He stared at the divine face of the swan-maid for a moment only, holding the feather up. ‘Show me, Maeve. I will follow you and remember I have the feathers. I can crush them, cut them or burn them. Each pain you will feel as if it were you that was incinerated or stabbed and it will diminish you and make you so weak and ill that you can neither feed nor fly. You will die. Now get you gone.’
The swan-maid cast such a look of humiliation, anger and pain on Liam, a small wave of guilt rippled. But reason stepped in. I am Faeran. We feel no guilt at all. He watched the beauty paddle into the shallows, pull the cloak up over the other shoulder, shape-change and launch to the skies with a gutteral cry. He leaped for his horse, thrusting the feathers in the pocket of his riding coat. Two wishes left, maybe two weapons. Either way, he knew he would find Ana.
***
I knew the moment Liam set off after Ana that I was indeed the other player in his game. The way he had looked at me just for a minute, as I said I would curse him. I could see him on the other side of the board strategising with his black entourage, as I, poor white shah that I was, floundered with the details of a game I had played but once in my life.
But enough of this; you and I are at the end of this tiny book so you must find the next embroidery, retrieve the instalment and enlarge. Oh but of course you ask which embroidery? I am sorry but I am tired and my gaoler has been very demanding. The design I am working on is not to the woman’s liking and I must unpick and begin again, so my mind is not as sharp as it should be.
You may ask, when do we hear about this prison and how it happened? But you see I am telling you. This whole story, my story, is how it happened. So you must be patient and read on.
Find the deer, infinitely fat and well fed in Eirish forests. It sits beneath an oak tree laden with lace and satin stitched acorns, all expertly applied with lace-stitched oak leaves. There is a tiny fawn suede booklet under the flank of the stag. You must unpick very carefully. And I have a special surprise! You are going to receive two for the price of one, because you will notice a peacock sitting on the bough above the stag. Beneath the turquoise tail of the peacock is another book. I beg you lift that tail with sensitive fingers. The real fringe of feathers is exceedingly fragile and the wire of the tail-shape more delicate still. Read on.
Chapter Eighteen
Star on the Stair bustled. After a week in the wilds, unvisited by journeymen of any sort, Kholi’s and Adelina’s senses reeled under the bombardment of people and noise. The town angled sharply skywards, lanes and paths cobbled and narrow, certainly not made for dragging caravans and camels around. Thus a very large mews existed at ground level at the point where roads converged. A journeyman could leave his beast of burden in the mews and for small cost have it well tended for the duration of his stay in the town. Enormous and grandly positioned, the mews dominated the foot of the Stair. Arched wooden beams spanned the width of the halls and motes of dust and straw floated in the golden beams that streamed down to the cobbles from the high fenestrations.
It reminded Adelina of the story of Noah and his Ark from Travellers’ tales. The mews housed not merely camels and horses but elephants, donkeys and oxen, alpacas, llamas and yaks. The place hummed with the sounds of many hooves on cobbles, of camel groans, the bubbling rumble of contented pachyderms and the low nickers that indicated horses at peace. Adelina never tired of it and had been known to walk for hours with a bag of apples and nuts, feeding any friendly animal whose head turned her way.
She and Kholi had stabled their animals and left them in the care of the ostlers, and with a bag each they began to climb the lanes into the town. The day glittered brightly blue and quaint cottages and shop fronts climbed up the inclines by their sides, stone walls whitewashed and window frames stained black, with window boxes full of tumbling scarlet and pink pelargoniums. Doorways coloured red, bright blue or black invited journeymen and merchants inside and each small inn had its name on a swinging sign with an appropriate design: the Pig and Whistle, the Ox and Cart, the Ram and Ewe. Kholi and Adelina made for the one place their families had always used - the Inn of the First Happiness.
Its sign swung joyfully in the breeze, occasioning a musi
cal, if faint squeak. The depiction of a fat little man sitting at the table with one glass of ale in front of him and a beatific smile on his face was well known in Eirie. Not least because as the Celestine Stairway climbed up and over the Goti Range, the only comforts any journeyman could count on were from the chain of inns bearing this sign, so that subsequently there existed the Inn of the Second Happiness, the same fat little man sitting at table with two glasses of ale. Then the Inn of the Third Happiness and so on until at the Raji end of the Celestine Stairway and at the foot of the Goti Range and just before one began one’s interminable journey over the Amritsands, there squatted the Inn of the Sixth Happiness. The fat little man sat with six ales spread out and if one could smile even more beatifically, he did so.
The two friends pushed open the bright red door and entered a small room with chairs and tables squashed cheek by jowl and where a bar tender, fat like the man in the sign, stood polishing glasses. He beamed. ‘Well! Well, well, well, well, well! Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?’
‘Hola, Buckerfield.’ Adelina stretched over the bar and kissed the ruddy cheeks. Kholi reached out a hand and shook the meaty palm.
‘On your way back then?’ Buckerfield held the tankard he polished up to the light and satisfied it had the required sheen, hung it from a hook on a beam alongside a dozen others glistening like stars.
Kholi nodded as Adelina butted in. ‘We need a room, Buckerfield. We might need it for a while. We are waiting for two friends.’
‘That’s fine. I have two rooms yet. You can have ‘em.’ He grinned as he uncorked a barrel, tapped it and then picked it up as if it were a piece of sugar floss and placed it on the end of the bar.
‘We only need one room, Buckerfield. A double.’ Kholi spoke quietly, almost shyly.
‘Oh ho, so that’s the way of it then. Well that’s alright, a double room you shall have and I couldn’t do it for two nicer people.’ He boomed with the kind of voice one would expect from a landsman or a longshoreman, preferably not from an innkeeper where a whisper would sound like a shout in the confined space of the inn. Kholi looked around. The assemblage had listened to the loud exchange and were smiling, raising their glasses, joking coarsely as pub regulars do. He shrugged his shoulders, occasioning a cheer.
Buckerfield edged his bulk around the counter and showed them to the stairs. ‘Second door up there,’ he jerked his head sky-wards. ‘You know the one. Bath-cloths on the bed, you look as though a bath’s worth more than an ale right now.’
They thanked him and clattered upwards, the cosy whitewashed walls touching their shoulders until they came to a narrow passage and the second door wide open before them, allowing a strip of golden light to shine across the bleached floorboards of the hall. They entered, Adelina throwing her bag on the bed to rush to the window whilst Kholi pushed the door shut and leaned back against it, wearily swiping off his travel caplet and running agitated fingers through hair.
‘You know,’ said Adelina, ‘my mother said this town was built by a man from the coast far to the south of Trevallyn. People there live in little villages that cling impossibly to rocky coves and shorelines and they are all painted white and have names that sound like the lyrics of a Faeran song... Porthcawl, Porthkerris, Polcarrow. Have you been that far south, Kholi?’ As she talked, she gazed out the window at the town spreadeagled against the mountainside. Across from the walls of the inn, the cobbled Celestine Stairway climbed doggedly skywards. The Inn was in a perfect position, its steep walls forming the town ramparts and lining the edge of that noble path.
Kholi came across and put his hand on the nape of her neck under the warmth of the heavy copper hair. She didn’t move. ‘No, I have never been there.’
‘Then shall we go together one day?’
‘Yes we shall.’
He felt her tension under his fingers.
‘She is out there somewhere, Kholi.’
‘Faith, my dove. Faith.’ He rubbed her neck softly.
The black swan flew as high as it dared, neither wishing to be too close to the Faeran, nor wishing to tempt Fate and have him squeeze another of her feathers. As she flew she scanned ahead, her black eyes opened wide, afraid to miss a thing. The wind pulled at her and the updraughts and gusts stroked and pushed. Her body stretched in a long black line from beak to tale and it undulated with each flap of the midnight wings.
The Limnae had vanished as daylight brightened - their hours the darkling hours. If the mortal was doomed as Maeve believed, the Limnae would wait patiently until the mud, muck and mire had filled every crevice and orifice of her body. Thus embalmed, they would spirit her amongst them, to become one of the snail-bedecked, grey and rotting phantasms that lured more and more mortals to their foul world. A spirit of anger and hatred festered in the Limnae for they resented any who bloomed and walked in living light. They had one aim: to besiege and drown any mortal who crossed their path and then absorb them into their mouldering fellowship.
The swan mused. It was not such a bad death. By the time they drowned, mortals had invariably lost their reason. They felt nothing. It suited her to forget the marauding terror beforehand, before reason left. Such callow forgetfulness was always the way of the Others. A movement ahead caught her eye. There, a flap and a splash. By all that is impossible! She banked and flew lower. Her harsh call flew behind her, dropping to the ground so that anyone amongst the button-grass and puddles could hear. She began to circle as the mortal woman sank, chin resting on the mire as it bubbled and fussed around her. One arm lay across the turgid surface of the bog, flapping weakly like the broken wing of a marsh hen. It was almost within the heart of the swan to feel sorry for the woman. But then she remembered she would not be in this invidious position if the mortal had not been in trouble. She hissed as she flew over Ana’s muddy head, spying the chit’s eyes. Empty, vacated of all life. A shell; the kind the Limnae crave.
Maeve flew round and round as Liam drew closer. Why does he want her? She is dirty and ugly. Look at her; empty of thought and sense. He will never repair her. Why waste himself? If he wishes to join with a mortal woman there are plenty more. Stupid man.
Liam had seen the flapping arm and the horror of its weakness propelled him out of the saddle to land at Ana’s side, water and mud splashing high. He waved his hand and shouted a preventative charm, something to stop the drag and crush pulling at her. Around the two of them, Limnae began to rise uncharacteristically into the daylight like a filthy grey fog. Angry with the Liam, furious their prize may leave their midst, they moaned a banshee wail, pulling at Ana’s hair and at her arms. Morbid visages scowled and screamed, the kind of thing to tip any mortal over the edge. Snails and slugs crawled out of ears, leaving a silver trail as they entered mouths and empty eye-sockets, whilst lank hair hung wetly in the mouldy folds of wrinkled skin.
Above this mob, Maeve Swan Maid circled tightly, shrieking as if to wake every waterfowl in the lake. Liam motioned again and an invisible barrier sprang up around he and the girl as he pulled her inch by inch from the boggy confines. The bestial army howled, their black, empty eye sockets portraying an endless horror of ghastly ruin. Ana offered no resistance to Liam. Her head lolled on his shoulder as he hoisted her into his saddle, leaping behind her to hold tight. He waved an arm, snarling a further spell and the barrier fell away. The Limnae rushed in to grab at the horse and its passengers but the animal leaped over the dank heads to clear them and land on firmer ground on the lake bank. They cried out in frustration but began to recede into the muddy waters until presently the lake was calm and quiet and no sign of Ana’s life and death struggle existed.
Liam allowed Florien to stand for a moment as he shifted Ana to a more comfortable position in his arms. He watched her sightless eyes slide back and the lids shutter down. There was no hint of recognition, of anything. She breathed to be sure, but that was all.
Maeve glided onto the shore, her wings folding and her tail feathers twitching. Once again the cloak slid down her
white arms and she began to transfigure. Florien snorted loudly, backing away. ‘Thy lover is mind-shot, Liam. What dost thou plan to do? Thou cans’t hardly care for her thyself.’
‘She can be mended.’ He smoothed muddy hair from the girl’s forehead as if she were a baby.
‘Thy head must be addled by thy heart. Too much time will it take. Leave her where her friends can find her. She is not thy concern.’ Maeve hissed, her distaste for the mortal evident in her curled lip. ‘Thou wastes time on this mortal. Methinks thou has departed from thine own senses.’
‘I shall take her to Jasper, not that it is your business. But this is.’ Liam reached into his pocket and grabbed a black feather, squeezing the end hard and relishing the sharp intake of breath from the swan-maid. ‘Second feather, second duty. Go to Star and seek out the Traveller, Adelina and her friend the Raji merchant, Khatoun. Tell them I have found Ana and that I take her to a healer and that I will return as soon as I am able. Tell them, she is... tell them she needs treatment for a wound. Give them this and say it is on my honour.’ He held out a wrislet that had he had worn. ‘The merchant knows what it represents.’
Maeve’s eyes narrowed as Liam leaned forward from the saddle. ‘Honour? Since when do Faeran pledge honour to mortals.’ She sneered. ‘Why dost thou want to heal the chit? What prompts thou to do such a strange thing?’
‘It’s a unique experience, Maeve. Something different to do.’ Liam’s face emptied. ‘Life can get damnably boring sometimes.’
He lifted his reins and touched Florien’s flanks with his heels, calling back, squeezing the feather again. ‘Do it, Maeve.’ The horse and its cargo walked away as if Florien knew the life of the mortal hung by a thread so slender the slightest jolt would tear it asunder.
