Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  She started when he began to sing.

  I wandered the corridors of Time—

  Those gilt-decked ancient halls of yore

  (far off loomed the future’s door);

  Gazed on marvel here, and there still more,

  When a wall rose up on the watch’s spine:

  A sudden obelisk rising square,

  Like Babel, but taller, and still more fair,

  Bricked with diamonds, sealed with gore.

  What is this horror, what this sight—

  Which seems to pierce the very night—

  Fades pomp of kings to moth-wing grey,

  Turns empires into a blank Pompeii;

  From light is born and births more light?

  I stared and could not say.

  He leaned forward a moment and squinted at the page, fingers fudging beautifully on a complicated series of interconnected spirals, circles, and dots.

  Pompeii I had passed, and Rome too;

  This column topped them and still grew.

  Its mortar was blood, its seams were stone—

  I thought at times I heard it groan,

  As flesh-and-blood is known to do,

  As if its bricks were bone.

  A mason came around the bend,

  All covered with diamond-grit and sand:

  Ill-omened guide, but the chance I grasped,

  And said, “Hark! what is this mast

  With stone sails set—for what land!—

  Which all pillars has out-classed?”

  “Da da-da da dum da da-da dum…I don’t remember the rest.”

  Margaret finished the accompaniment and put her hands in her lap. “Why, what was it?”

  He smiled sheepishly into the page. “Only a little song I was making once when I was on holiday here. By the twelve houses, that was years ago! I must have been only a little lad then, and reading some very fine epic literature, too, by the sound of it. I am mortified that I dug it back out at all. An’ sure it is no Shiggaion. My memory of it was better than this.”

  She took the page from him. “The music was very pretty. You play well for someone who is several years out of practice. The poetry leaves things desired, though I feel—”

  She stopped, suddenly, a blush of confusion rushing up her cheeks. A hundred painful memories flooded her mind and she wondered if she dared say the one word which fit in the keyhole, that unlocked the door behind which she strove to hide her unpleasant life.

  But Dammerung was probing. “You feel what?”

  Her thumb brushed the coarse, heavy paper. “I feel Rupert would not like it.”

  Dammerung laughed, harshly, soundlessly. He took the paper back. “No? No, he wouldn’t. I wrote it about the kingdom of heaven. He would not be so fond of that.” With a casual gesture he let it go. The paper slipped on the air, circled, notes spinning, and came to rest on the polished hardwoods in a broken patch of sunshine. Sliding his hands into the back of his trousers to be sure the long tail of his linen shirt had not pulled loose, he said, “What can you do? Do you know anything by heart?”

  “Hmm!” Margaret moved to command the centre of the instrument. Dammerung swivelled, straddling the bench, to give her room. “Life has taught me harsher things by heart, but I might be able to remember something.” She sat a moment in thought, passing completely over the last few months at Marenové House, past the Leeds railway station, past her mother and the nagging, to single, quiet moments she had stolen in order to make something beautiful out of the tedious task of learning an instrument. Those had been moments of respite for her and their memory touched a tender place, a place which smarted if she pressed too hard—as Spencer, she realized, must smart if Dammerung thought too closely on him. Time did not heal such wounds.

  Lest he should somehow catch her thoughts, Margaret chose a song at random and began to play. She found she was rusty and that it did make a difference to be playing in the sitting room of Capys Lookinglass, in Plenilune, where they wrote their notes down in curious script. The European way of music, superimposed in her mind over the piano under her hands, confused her and muddled her notes until she was able to find her balance. She played a few bars of an old Welsh hymn and Dammerung, listening to the way of it, seemed greatly to enjoy it.

  “It is different,” he said when she had finished, “and yet very like us. So they see our way in music there on Earth as well as our way in literature? That makes for good hearing.”

  As it was a hymn, Margaret chose not to mention that, where she came from, the Welsh were not much thought of—but she was startled by a sudden bang of the keys as Dammerung got up, palms on the ivories, a look of surprise and worry on his face.

  “Skander!”

  His cousin stood in the doorway—he winced at the jangle of discordant notes as if they had struck him in the face—and his face, which had been battered but pleasant last Margaret had seen it, was drawn and white with horror. He had a piece of unfolded letter-paper clutched in one hand. He was looking blankly, horrified, at Dammerung, and did not seem able to hear him.

  “Skander! What the deuce is it? You look as though you have seen my ghost!”

  The joke, half-heartedly made, failed to touch Skander. He looked down at the paper, staring through it, then crossed as if in a trance to put it in Dammerung’s waiting hand. Dammerung did not look at it at first. He followed Skander with his eyes as the other went to the window and stood staring out blindly at the garden. Skander put his chin in his hand, covering his lips; his hand was trembling.

  With an effort Margaret got up and leaned into Dammerung’s shoulder to look at the letter, but Dammerung shied away and read it to himself. She watched his eyes flicker over the lines, then widen and pale; his lips moved a little, but so little that Margaret could not read them. Then, “Shuh!” he gasped, disbelieving. “What—” Sitting back down hard on the bench he handed the letter to Margaret, staring, as Skander stared, blankly, unseeingly.

  She turned the letter into the light and began scanning it, expecting a death. But it was worse than that. The beautiful script, etched in atrament and gold, breathing with formality, was an invitation—an invitation to the wedding of Woodbird Swan-neck and some man called Sparling. It struck Margaret like a physical blow. The paper slid; her fingers did not respond. Blankly she watched it drift between two long fingernails painted rose-gold and flutter softly to the floor, a pale, skin-coloured leaf against the dark-stained carpet.

  “The cow!” hissed Dammerung.

  Skander snapped round. “Dammerung!”

  “Not her. Black Malkin.” Dammerung got up and stepped away from the piano as if to start pacing, but caught himself at the last moment and stood still, thinking so hard Margaret could see the green sparks snapping in his eyes.

  Skander had turned back to the window. He leaned heavily on the sill, his forehead pressed against the cool glass. “Damn,” he whispered. Margaret laid her fingers on the warm ivories and shut her eyes—as if contact with the instrument would lend harmony to the world. There was a long, uneasy, creaking silence…then: “Damn.”

  “Yes, it is,” Dammerung snapped back. Margaret’s eyes jumped open in time to see him pivot toward Skander. “When you told me about the situation,” he asked with merciless deliberation, “did you tell me everything?”

  Skander pushed off the window. “Yes!” he cried. His voice was audibly shaking and Margaret realized with horror that he, Skander Rime, was actually on the brink of tears. The man turned away and pressed his fist to his lips, hard, trying to get a hold of himself. It was a moment before he could continue. “We pledged ourselves as children. We were dedicated to each other—she was too,” he added defensively. “But when my father died and I inherited Capys, and I brought the matter up formally, there was an enormous outcry. I had known of, but had not agreed with my father siding with Feyfax—and I thought that would count for something! But no,” Skander laughed scornfully. “The iniquity of the fathers is revisited to the third
and fourth generation!” He was quiet for a while, still staring off across the lawn. Dammerung waited, hands on hips; his brows were hard, his lips narrowed into an uncompromising line, but his flint-pale eyes had softened and bore a look of agony.

  “Black Malkin opposed me,” Skander went on at last. “Black Malkin opposed me, and of course Grane backed her up. Well I knew then that I had no chance. Woodbird was the youngest, and though strong-minded she knows what it is like to have one’s family torn apart by dissension. She was…persuaded to see me no more.”

  Suddenly he swung back round, anger clouding his fair face. “She might have let it be! Black Malkin forgets nothing done by friend or foe. She might have let it be, well knowing the grief this would cause me.”

  “She might not have known you are a man, and prone to pain in these matters,” said Dammerung in a dead-level tone. His cousin swore softly and turned away. With a heavy sigh Dammerung swooped down and caught up the letter, crushing it in one hand and, at the same time, extending the other to lift Margaret out of her stupor. “You had better see Aikaterine about looking through Aunt Mairwen’s trunks,” he told her. “You’ll need a serviceable gown.”

  “What?” barked Skander.

  Dammerung ran a hand through his hair and looked about him as if he expected the gown to be produced out of the air. “Well,” he mused. “It’s a rummy long way to Thwitandrake…Anyone got a horse?”

  19 | Believed On In the World

  “You said there was bad blood between the houses. How did that come about?”

  Skander was ahead of them in the train, well out of earshot. Margaret and Dammerung rode side by side down the sparsely wooded road among the northern foothills of the fell country, the plain of Thrasymene before them. It was a bright, bitterly cold day, brighter and colder than any thus far in their journey. Margaret was bundled up in a white stallion-skin against the harsh wind, and Dammerung, save for his bare feet slung idly by his stirrups, was dressed in a thick black doublet scored over with blood-coloured patterns which Margaret could never quite make out, and wrapped against the wind in a panther-skin. They were well furnished and well fed; the ride had been easy and the weather, though often overcast, had held fair. But it was still winter, and it was still cold, and Margaret was looking forward to the heated wine and spiced meat that Dammerung told her would be waiting for them at the end of the road.

  He dropped the reins on his horse’s neck and tucked his hands under his arms. “Do you know the Carmarthen?”

  “I have heard of them in passing, yes.” Margaret ducked to avoid a low-hanging beech limb.

  Dammerung pointed wide, over the far-flung knees of the fells, over the vale and woods, over the rivers blurring in the evening spring light. “The Carmarthen live on the steppes to the northeast. Thrasymene territory abuts their land—if you can call it their land, for they are nomadic and own nothing but what travels with them—away north, though you cannot see, where the fells end and those woods begin. Thrasymene, we must all admit, has never been a great Honour. They are great seamen but their land is poorer than that of the other Honours, their resources less, their voice smaller among the voices of the other landed men; so they know not to pick fights if they can possibly help it. Unfortunately the grandfather of the three ravens fell afoul of a nomad band of Carmarthen when his hunting led him over his border across what they believe is ‘holy ground.’ “

  “They are not Christian, I take it.”

  “Shao! Had they been a little more coherent in their culture they might have invented crucifixion themselves.”

  He left off a moment as they reached the low sloping edge of a stream and waded through the churning, chilly surf to the other side. Skander was still mutely at the head of their train, head up, eyes ahead. Margaret, following Dammerung’s eye to his cousin, felt her heart flinch: the man had spoken little and had not smiled since the day the letter had come. Dammerung had made a bold effort to soothe Skander and had tried, with the other hand, to pull away some of the worry so that Skander would not be burdened with it. But in this the War-wolf had not prevailed. His cousin had remained steadfastly stony, internalizing, nursing a hatch-egg of agony where his heart had been.

  “Where was I?”

  Margaret came back to their horses with a start. “Some kind of holy place and the grandfather hunting.”

  “And the grandfather hunting. The Carmarthen killed him without warning—how swift man is to quash all blasphemies!—and gave his body back to the crows of Thrasymene. He had left behind a wife, two sons, and three granddaughters. He had a third son, an elder one, by whom the three ravens were fathered, but he had died some years before along with their mother and had left the girls in the care of the old Lady. Richard de la Mare, my own father, told me once that she was a very great woman, quiet and full of steel, and she might have taken her husband’s death well and soldiered on to make something good of Thrasymene for her husband’s sake and for the sake of her people. But her two surviving sons fell out over the matter. The second eldest, Feyfax, was a man disused to patience and had fire where blood ought to run. He might have been a great man himself—certainly he was a formidable warrior and ever such a one as men will follow gladly—had his father lived longer and kept a hand upon his reins. Feyfax wanted vengeance. Feyfax wanted remuneration by blood.”

  Margaret smiled to hide the pain of someone else’s memory. “Can you much blame him?”

  And Dammerung, too, smiled, as if to hide the same pain. “Not much. But his brother Ring had a point when he opposed him, for their father had worked hard at making something great of Thrasymene, and a wholesale war upon the Carmarthen would have damaged their Honour badly. Poor Ring. He was a quiet young man, promising, as like to Hector as his brother was like Achilles. They were each other’s downfall, for Ring would not let Feyfax go on, and Feyfax would go on only over his brother’s dead body. In the end, through sheer desperation, Ring gave up the ties of kinship and took his own brother down, himself down too, all to save his precious Honour. And he did save it, though, as you can see, at a bitter, bitter cost.”

  He seemed to conjure a wind, cold and smelling faintly of salt, which whirled around them and lifted panther and horse-skin alike, black and white like a lapwing’s plumage.

  Would any of us die, Skander had asked, to keep what looms before us from happening?

  Odd, thought Margaret, that people were willing to die for what they considered worth living for. How curious a creature man was! how full of light and darkness and paradox, the heart as of a devil and the power in his crafting hands of some sort of god. Level westward sunlight sparked on the gemmed headstall of Dammerung’s mount and flung out notes of light on the dun-coloured air. How odd…

  “Skander’s father, in all other things a worthy man, backed Feyfax once in a kind of desperate council, unofficial, and cobbled together by well-meaning neighbours. I remember that my father went and said nothing and saw all, and came back with a sore heart. Black Malkin, who is the eldest of the three ravens, was old enough then to understand, the three of them shrewd enough to realize, that their family was being torn apart from the inside. They had to watch that, and watch their guardian grandmother break under the strain as her two surviving sons killed each other. They grew up quickly in those harsh, forbidding circumstances, and Black Malkin, whose temper is prone to bitterness, has never forgot that Capys sided with Feyfax and not Ring. Though I sometimes wonder if she would have hated Skander all the same had his father chosen her uncle Ring instead. Women are very fickle.”

  Margaret almost reminded him that she was a woman, but for no clear reason she was glad he had not lumped her in with the rest of her capricious sex. It was an off-hand, almost unconscious thing, but she was glad.

  They reached Thwitandrake by sundown and found they were not the first merrymakers to arrive for the wedding which was scheduled for the morrow. In the huge wooden-stockade compound of the house, dark and as implacable as a boar, torches burned i
n the brown shadows, throwing up great smudges of black smoke against the burnished rose-gold sky of evening. The stables were full and smelled heavily of warm horse bodies. Margaret had a confused impression of people everywhere, everyone chatty and happy, everywhere a purl of wine-dark cloak or jink of yellow light off an earring as someone turned her head to see who the newcomers were. Hid inside her panther-skin, a small purr of courage reverberating under her breastbone, Margaret passed them by, breaking her horse off from the rest of the train to come alongside Skander’s and Dammerung’s. Skander was so much occupied with his own thoughts that he slung down and went on at once, leaving the two of them behind. Sympathetic, but stung, Margaret frowned after him as he mounted the house steps and was swallowed up in the light coming through the open doorway.

  “I dare swear the holy of holies is more accessible than he,” grunted Dammerung as he shed his hooves and reached up to lift Margaret down. From under the shadow of his hood his eyes gleamed out like moonstones. “Best let him be for now.” He looked for Aikaterine and the blue-jay man and, seeing neither of them, mused, “It appears we must shift for ourselves. I am for supper and a bath and bed. And you?”

  She looked over her shoulder at the many people gathered in the dark, torch-shot cold of the yard. “I am not in the mood to be sociable just now. I like your programme.”

  “Simple pleasures. Canst walk!” he added laughingly as, trying to go with him, her muscles cried out in agony and her knees buckled.