by Greer Gilman
Margaret, stoning raisins for a century of tarts, heard them singing, to and fro in the long low kitchen, rolling out paste for the cheesecakes—thin as tiffany—and raising coffins for the warden pies. Sad tales of the deaths of maidens to a set of tunes would make a widow skip; and mirth in a doleful key, modal and minor and elegaic:
Here's the pink and the lily, and the daffadowndilly
To adorn and perfume those sweet meadows in June.
If it weren't for the plough the fat ox would grow slow,
And the lad and the bonny lasses to the sheepshearing go.
Ah, but it had a dying fall, as if the petals were a thought embrowned, even in the blooming.
Our clean milking pails, they are fouled with good ale
At the table there's plenty of cheer to be found
We'll pipe and we'll sing, love, and we'll dance in a ring...
Margaret had faded from the room. Thought only of the silent dance, the dancers all in cloth of air, of darkness but for scarves of light, faint silver, and the flashing of their crescent feet. They wore the seven planets for their diadems, bright fire at their hilts. Unmasking, they did put aside their brief eclipse. The sun, moon, stars cast off their mantles of the cloud; took hands about the pole. I was but out of measure with the night, she thought. Ill-timed. But if I go before full dark, wait midnight at the stones?
The Fiddler raised his bow.
* * * *
Toward midnight. From her window, Margaret saw the stars of summer westering: great Hulver in Ashes and the Scythe sunk deep in grass. Past moonset of a cloudless night.
Time.
With her starglass hidden in her petticoats, she crept down the winding stair, unbarred the wicket in the door, and slipped like shadow into shadow. Breathless with expectancy, she trysted with the Nine. At the sill of heaven, on their Law. She walked as soft as if the moon were owling her, as if the Raven at her back could spy. Death's daughter's child, she feared nought else, no ghost nor witch nor traveller. How brief this summer's night: an island in the rising tide. Even now, it glowed with intimations of the dawn, not stark midnight but owlgrey. Scarce dark enough to see the Lyke Road, faint as foam above her head. She met no stranger but a started hare.
On Law, the greycloaked sisters huddled, sparser than in memory. Her master and Barbary did say they walked. And here, here only was a flawless prospect of the east; as if the circle of the stones were built as frame to it: night's lantern that the east would kindle. Through it, she looked eastward to the harbingers: the Fool, the Knot of Swords. Toward Ninerise. Soon. She wiped her starglass, fogged with gazing. In and out, she walked the maze of shadows, turning Nineward always in her restless hey. Barbary's song was braided through her mind. A summoning:
You have three silver mantles
as bright as the sun,
Light down the stair, lady,
by the shining of one...
A star? Still naked-eyed, she gazed until it dazzled. Yes. A knot of stars. She waited as they rose; she bowed and raised her glass. Come, Nine. They swirled to her, a skein of swallows—O a crowd, a dazzlement. At once her world was cracked, fell shining. What new stars were these? Dark sisters dazzling. As if her seeing were a breath that kindled, blew the ashes of the sky to embers.
* * * *
Now Margaret dreamed no more of journeying. Against her night-closed eyes, she saw as through her glass: a coin of sky that trembled, fogging even with her careful breath. A vision circumscribed and yet enlarged: bewildering, glorious, aswarm with stars. She walked starblind, like a traveller in a snowstorm, in the whirl and sting of revelations.
Lying in the dark, on Law, she told the Nine, with pebbles, great and little, on a stone. A henge within a greater henge; a mirror of the smallest, highest of all. A spiral she could cover with her nail. Eighteen. Nineteen. A gemel? Twenty-one. At dawn, she swept them up like jackstones.
It was all to learn again. Not chains and carcanets of stars, but a scattering of stones, unset. She sifted for them, as for diamonds, in a drift of silver sand. There, the Owl's Eye, unblinking; there, the Tabor at the Fool's knee; the Clasp in the Necklace like a clew of light, woolgathered, wound about a spindle of thorn. Torn fragments of a text she'd read in full, an alphabet ungrammared. Notes of music played by one and one that made no harmony.
But there were stranger things to see in heaven.
She'd begun to write them down on scraps of paper: a mouse's nest of them behind the wainscot, with her sketches and her notes.
"Hulver in my Lady's house. He hath a train of Boyes about him, lillywhite: small Starres within his Orbe that dance attendance."
* * O * * * O * * * * * * O *
Remembering, she smiled; then bent the closer to her page.
"The Moon in my Glasse is old.” She stopped there. Light enough to blow the candle out, to play at sleep before they waked her. Light enough to write by, and a stub of blacklead: she went on. “Happely she doth go disfigur'd, in the guising of a crone, as Ladies walk abroad in Maskes. If it be not for the sake of Modestie (for all may gaze on her), then perhaps ‘tis Vanitie: though she fear not being Sunne burnt, yet she may be Winter chapt. Or else there is a Cloudiness within my glass, a sorte of Cattaract or web. Or else with looking nearly on her radiance mine Eyes be witcht. But she is flawed of Face, like one unpolisht with the Smallpox, who doth white herself to Seeme the fairer...” Looking up, she saw the moon itself, of lucid gold, of honey, melting on the tongues of morning, in the blue of air. Her light transmuted into song. “...yet she wanes."
* * * *
Grevil walked out beside his meadows, lifted dazzling from their douse. They glittered in the wind, white aureate. A water green, wave green beneath. Blue undershadow, and the sweetness of the mingled flowers. Fine hay, but if ... (No hailstorm, blackrot: he had paid the charm.) Still green but golder, eastward to the rigg, his stripling barley stood, as yet unbearded. At a rippling in the grass like a running hare, he turned. A skylark shrilled its swiftlinked spiring music; but no bird rose. He followed.
* * * *
"The Road,” she wrote, “is made of Travellers.” Her book was stitched of gathered leaves, no bigger than her pack of cards: the left hand to its right. She wrote as in a mirror, backward: not in Cloudish nor the old tongue, which her master somewhat knew, but in her cradle tongue, in Norni's language—and in Scarrish runes. No words for half what she would say, so she'd made them up: starglass. Slantstill. Notes, conjectures, observations. Reckonings and sketches. Margaret dipped her pen. “...faint Starres and numberless. The Nine...” Eyes shut, she saw a swarm of stars. “...if they bee Sisters, they are many as an Hive of Bees. What Honey they do make of Ayr and darknesse, I know not. If they be not Nine, I know no Tale of them; and if the Heavens be untold—"
* * * *
No more. The stars were fading as she gazed, the brief night bleeding into dawn. So brief a night that none had risen, nor had set, but waded to the knee in half-light, dreaming, deep as mowers in a field of grass. All the bright, unlearned stars of summer.
Margaret looked down from the heavens’ Law and saw the figure of it standing on the earth. The heavens’ rune of stars was mirrored, backward, in the ring of stones. But even that had changed. Like stars in her glass that crowded, riddle beyond rede, the stones had thronged with fainter stones. New monoliths. The glass has vexed my eyes, she thought, and rubbed them. Half-light still. But now she saw the new stones were a knot of men and boys, bareheaded, silent. Waiting.
In the bush where she lay, a bird woke, chirred sleepily. None answered.
But the hele-stone walked. It strode from northward, from the wind's eye, with a naked blade: a tall pale moonwitch in a stormcloud of hair. My lady? No. Margaret drew a sharp-edged breath. No witch: her image in a bleared glass. A knife-blade eidolon. Thou mole. ‘Tis but a bugbear witch, a shadow on a wall. No woman even, but a guiser, all in stone-grey, ashes on his head. A man-witch played the part. He wore a hawk-nosed, faintly smilin
g mask, small atop his lean long body, smaller still amid his storm of hair; he bore a scythe.
The others hailed him, louting low. Crooked knees to him, bowed shaggy heads. Crouching, Margaret shrank, and stared him out of part. No witch. A ropy, ravelled fleece; a mask of bone. A man. What's that but shank and tallow? But a wick for an unseely fire. Whet! Stone on steel rang. Thrice and thrice, the guiser edged his blade. Slow tinder to that spark, he changed. The witch was in him, sightless as a fire by day: a shaking of the air. He shrank, annealed and vitrified by power. His reek of hair rose billowing. Cold fire. Margaret shivered in its blast. There are witches still on Law, said memory. The bloodstones in my lady's chain. Her crows. Lie still. They hunt what flees them.
Now his daemon roused herself, she mantled in his body. Stalking long-toed in the grass, she turned, now this way and now that. The men stood still as poppyheads; she trod a maze among them, fox and geese. And yet whatever way she turned, her blind mask bent on each of them, it rode unmoving in the rack of time. She danced: the old moon, with the new moon in her arm.
Then all at once, she swung her scythe. And open-armed, the man she struck at leapt the blade. Blazed up, as if he were invulnerable as flame. A challenge. At his cry, his fellows wakened from her spell. In and out amid her trance, they slipped and shadowed, at her very heels: like birds that brave a taloned hawk. Like hares amid the standing corn. Again the witch struck, higher; and another dancer leapt. Bare legs, a bladeswidth from the naked steel. They danced with death. No music but their measure and the wind of her knife. No spell but their serpentine. Always, at the back of it, the rune of blood, unspilled.
The hay's the dance.
By turns, they leapt the scythe. Now high, now low. Stiff men and wary; lightfoot and limber. Stag leaps, goatish capers. A lop and tumble, like a hare. A wallow, like a weltered porpoise; a bogged heave like a sheep. Mute cockcrow. All in silence, quickening toward dawn.
With every swing the light rose and the shadows lay in swaths, as if the moonhag sheared the dark.
By one and one, the men fell back, dropped out. Now three still danced with her; now two. A crowblack fellow and a ragged boy, whiteheaded as a weed. And on this swing, the scythe flashed for the first time, glinting like a gull's wing. The dark man sprang and cleared it. Blood? Petals from a crown of poppies, lighting after him. As if her blade had rent the sky. He grimaced.
The boy's turn. Barely made. He staggered as he lighted.
Now the man's. He waited, coiled as a crossbow. Sprang. It was splendid. For the first time, they cried out. A sun! A sun!
Swift now, the scythe flashed all about the witch, re-echoing about her like a pyre of lightning, like a bonefire kindled of the moon. It blazed amid the whirl and fury of her hair. Too bright for leaping. Yet the boy jumped, his white head flaring in the risen sun.
He fell like thistledown, to silence. Dazed, unhurt. No man called to him, nor clapped his shoulder. He got up, dusting his torn jacket. Shrugged.
The witch let fall her blade. Her hair drooped mournfully like smoke in rain; her robe clung, dark with sweat, against her body; clung and parted to disclose the naked man. Uncharred and unconsumed. Still passionless, the bone mask smiled. She beckoned to the sullen boy. He came to her; the moonface bent. A kiss. An accolade. And it was ended.
They were scattering to their labors, silent as they came.
Margaret hid.
He passed by her, the witch, long after all the rest. Burrowed in the underwood, she saw him, weary and dismasked, unwitched by daylight, with his bundle of guising. He stank of sweat and sorcery, green rank and acrid as a fox amid the thorns.
* * * *
Leapfire
The brat lay like windfall in the grass beneath the ragtree, bruised with birth. He puzzled at the light, the leaves, the dappling of their shadows, doubling as they fell. When Brock came by, the boy was sleeping, nearly covered up in leaves. No fox, no crow, no witch had found him, cradled in the old moon's lap. His blood was not to spill. Not yet. And yet the earth would have him. Crouching by the thorn, she lifted him. He scented of his mother, blood and milk. The down about his head was white as barley. Naked as he came. Piss-wet. She sained him, eyes, mouth, heart; she happed him naked in her coat. Soul in earth in air in fire. He woke and wailed. “Here's a bagpipe that plays of itself,” she said, and danced him. “Here's a thirst.” Will Starvecraw, she named him. And off she strode with him to be the Sun.
* * * *
Grevil's study was all shade, a box of drowned green light. Beyond the open window stood the orchard, deep in grass, downsloping to the water-meadows that lay white and shorn. The air was sweet with hay.
Grevil laid aside his flute. As if in Arcady, he'd loosed his bands, laid bare his wrists and throat. A sultry morning. Not a bird. As he studied, he ate cherries pensively, with ink-stained hands. The bowl was wreathed with dragons, blue and white. A rarity, but clouded now, a little crazed. Beside it lay a pair of ivory compasses, a bundle of blunt quills. Drawings of the stones at Askrigg and at Imber Lap.
Margaret at his side was elsewhere, by a river overhung with trees. Ash Beck. The wood above, said dreaming. Here's the Lyke Way in thy glass. She stood barefoot in the pebbled shoals, and watched the endless seine and shiver of green fire. What the Nine are weaving. Light in leaves. It flickered down and down the river, dazzling and a-dance. A riddle in the rune of light. If stars ... She waded out into the shallows, in the glint and dapple of the stream. It sang. A slow leaf fell to touch its shadow, rising from the air. Rimed. Drifted, eddying; was whirled away. She stooped and flicked a pebble up the stream. It skipped and started, skipped and sank. And at each leap—O wonderful, beyond all hooping—worlds began. As in her glass, enhaloing and interlaced. A skein of stories.
She was happy; and in shadow.
And yet more worlds, unbidden, came. There. And there. Outspreading. How—? Ah, rain. She heard the pattering on leaves. The river dimpled with the dint of rain. Rings wakened. Crossed and fretted and recrossed, until all the beck was one grey breadth of cockling silk. She lifted up her face. Unweaving rainbows—
The red squirrel called her back with scolding.
All gone but the travelling, fading at the limb of thought. Map falling stars...? she thought. Sleave skein? All writ in water. Gone.
Whisk, her master's squirrel, flounced from table to book-press, book-press to sill, chittering. The birds in the ivy racketed and slanged. She tipped the sanded page. “Your pardon, sir. Go on."
But her master was gazing out the window, a bob of black cherries on his hand like rings. Margaret followed his glance, puzzled. A cat in the currant bushes. Cheesecloths, sweetening in the sun. A mower, scything in the orchard grass.
* * * *
O I am slain, thought Grevil. I am grass.
Burnt brown as a warden pear, his shirt laid open to the waist. At every stroke, he strides, he wades through downfall. O brave, the tyranny of youth.
Hard as a green pear, hid among leaves.
Soft as a sleepy pear, brown-sweet and bruising. Butter to the knife. Rough skin, the russeting. The bite of blue-veined cheese.
Brown warden of the trees. That mocks and vanishes.
At dawn. The brush of branches, wet against the face. Further. White as bloom.
* * * *
Coming down by halflight over Nine Law, dazed with stars, Margaret never saw the boy till he called out. She started, casting wildly for a way to run. Sheer rock fall: not up there. Slough and hag behind her. No. Swift stony water: a long leap. She wavered. And the boy before her in the heather, watching.
"See'd a hind leap yon water. Not i’ petticoats,” he said.
Margaret faced him warily. He was crouched in a cave of bracken, paunching a hare with a streak of knife. After a moment, she knew him: the whiteheaded boy, the leaper of scythes. The moon's thrall.
"I saw you jump,” she said.
Setting had dwindled him: no leapfire, but a starveling boy. As black in grain
as a goblin, imp-ragged, stunted as a scrog of thorn. Half naked, but for sharded rags. His hawkweed hair, that sunstruck was a burr of light, was clagged and sallowy, a ravel of rope-ends. He stank, beneath the reek of blood. He looked at her with cool eyes, green as hailstones.
"I see'd thee skulking. If my lady heared on it, he'd lesson thee."
His lady: the man-witch in robes. Not Annis. “He knows naught of me."
"He could. Thou's awd Noll's fey."
"Master Grevil? Do you know him?"
He stripped the fell from the flesh. “Knaw him? Aye, toyed him for a jacket but two days since."
Puzzlement.
"Jigged him. Danced his dawcock.” Blue bone-end, luminous. Raw meat. He looked sidelong at her, mocking. “Thou sloe, thou greenery. Dost knaw what I mean?"
Coldstruck, suddenly she did. “You cheaped yourself."
Now he bent, straking his worn blade in the grass. “'Twas he ‘at spilled, not I.” He tied the hare, leg through leg. “Cried out. I driven him."
With a cold qualm, she remembered Morag's hands on her: contemptuous, efficient. “Let me go.” She gathered up her skirts to get past him.
"Odd on.” As if he'd caught her by a trailing leash, she turned. “I see'd thee, owling after stars.” There was something in his blood-creased, blacknailed hand. He held it out: a snail shell, whorled and brinded. Tenantless. A coal of fire, it seemed: as if he could blow and it would brighten on his stithy. Night and firelight. A house. A heavens. “Bonny, in't?"
With her hands behind her back, she stared. Said nothing; stayed.
"Called Nine's Bower. Same as stars."
A hand before a candleflame; wreathed hair. A dream? A candle in a cloud of stars.
He closed his hand on it. “Yon hall.” He quirked his chin. “Thou's in and out like t'cat. Hunting t'moon."
"So?"
"Eggs.” He tossed the shell to her. It lay in the heather at her feet. “Milk. Meal. They's a kist full and ower. Thou could leave ‘em by Owlstone, nights."
"They'd be missed."
Impish suddenly, he grinned at her. “Thou say it's for hob."
