Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  But the Wild Hunt heard. The riders out in front, so close on Edric Davies’s heels, swung away from him, banking straight down toward Tamsin. The others followed as they caught sight of her, filling the sky with their spears and their skulls and their screaming laughter, lunging forward over their mounts’ necks as if they couldn’t wait to get at that small white figure in the cornfield. But she never took one step backward—she kept on beckoning, challenging them down, away from Edric to her. I was too dazed and too scared to be proud of her then, my Tamsin. But I dream that moment sometimes, these years later, and in the dream I always tell her.

  Then the Pooka dumped me. Nothing dramatic about it—he just stopped dead and I shot over his head at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and landed on my butt in soft mud, practically at Tamsin’s feet. I jumped right up, howling like the Wild Hunt myself, but the Pooka actually bowed his head to me and I shut up. He said, “Here is your friend, and here is the Wild Hunt. This is your affair, not mine. Tend to it, Jenny Gluckstein.”

  And he was gone, exactly that fast—I thought I spotted a frog hopping away through the cornstalks, but it was dark and crazy, and you can’t ever tell with the Pooka, anyway. Tamsin hadn’t turned her head for a moment, because the first of the Huntsmen had touched down, the wet earth hissing under their horses’ feet. The rest were circling like stacked-up planes, coming in one by one, as they must have done when Judge Jeffreys called them to the cow byre where Edric Davies waited for Tamsin Willoughby. The corn was smoking where they trampled it, and I wondered, somewhere far off, what I’d say to Evan when nothing ever grew in this field again.

  They didn’t keep up their racket once they were on the ground. Even the hounds quieted down and dropped back alongside their masters, and the horses—or whatever they were—stopped foaming flames, though they kept on growling very low, meaner than the dogs. Tamsin just stood there, solid as a living woman, smiling as each rider dropped to earth and moved in on her. You’d have thought she was welcoming company at the front door.

  I didn’t know what the hell she had in mind, and the Wild Huntsmen were as hung up as I was. They kept advancing, but they did it slowly, fanning out a little bit, as though she were Sir Lancelot or someone, ready to leap at them and mow them down five and six at a time. I was just behind her, shaking so hard I could barely stand, watching them come on.

  I’ll never know who they were. Who they had been. I’ll never know how you get to be a Wild Huntsman, nor if you have to be one forever. What I remember—this is weird—is their smell. If Tamsin smelled of vanilla, you’d have expected these guys and their beasts to smell all meaty and hairy and blood-sticky, like the lion house at the zoo. They didn’t: Close to, even the worst of them, the ones with no real faces, but only a smeary collection of holes and skin and cindery snot—even those had the faintest smell of the sea, of fishing boats, and sails drying in the sun, the way you see them at Lyme Regis. Maybe they were all old pirates— who knows? The one thing I’m sure of is that I can’t ever be afraid of anyone again. The Wild Hunt gave me that.

  Tamsin spoke to them, proud and clear over their fearful stillness. She said, “I take back what belongs to me. You have no claim on him, nor did you ever. The evil was mine alone, and long will I be in atoning for it. I take Edric Davies back from you now.”

  The Huntsmen didn’t do anything. They sat their horses and stared at Tamsin, and not one head turned when Edric Davies walked between them to her side. I’d lost sight of him when the Pooka dumped me, so I’m not sure exactly where he’d been, but I can tell you that he walked as though he were afraid the planet would buck him off at any moment, back into the sky. Tamsin hadn’t glanced at me once in all this time, but Edric did as he passed me; and although he looked like an entire train wreck all by himself, he winked at me! He winked, and I saw what it was that Tamsin had loved three centuries ago. She took her eyes off the Wild Hunt for the first time, and she and Edric stood there looking at each other, and they didn’t say a thing. Not a hello, not a cry of pain or sympathy, no apologies—not one single word of love. They just looked, and if somebody ever looks at me the way the ghost of Edric Davies looked at the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, that’ll be all right. It won’t happen, but at least I’ll know it if I see it.

  By and by, Tamsin turned her attention back to the Huntsmen. “We will go,” she said, haughty as could be. “You will pursue Edric Davies no further, nor me neither. You have no power here. Go back to your home beyond the winds—go back to the bowels of the skies and trouble us no more. Hear me, you!” And she stamped forward, right at them, and swung her arms the way Sally does when she’s shooing Mister Cat out of the kitchen.

  For one crazy minute, I thought she was going to get away with it. The Wild Huntsmen seemed paralyzed, in a funny sort of way: They might almost have been human, ordinary Dorset people, sitting their shuffling horses in the rain, sneaking sideways peeks at each other to see if anyone had a clue about what they ought to be doing next. A couple of them even backed away, just a step, but that’s how close she came. I really thought she’d make it.

  Then Judge Jeffreys screamed.

  Twenty-six

  You wouldn’t have thought that soft, scratchy voice—a dead man’s voice—could make that sound. He was hanging in the air over the cornfield like some awful glowing kite, and he screamed like someone losing a leg or having a baby—there was as much pain as rage in the sound, maybe more. I couldn’t even make out the words at first, simple as they were. “Never! They’ll not walk free of me, neither of them, never! The Welsh bastard fell at my hand, there in the muck of the byre, which was nothing but his vile due—and I did enjoin you by certain cantrips to harry his spirit away, which was his due as well, as it ever shall be! Obey me! Living or dead, I command you yet!”

  When I think about it now, I’m sure even the Wild Huntsmen must have felt anyway the least bit bewildered and pushed around, what with Tamsin running them off on one hand and now Judge Jeffreys badgering them to get after Edric Davies again. They weren’t making any sound among themselves yet, but their beasts were growling and shifting, and I saw the riders who had edged away from Tamsin nudging their horses back toward her. Judge Jeffreys saw that, too.

  “No!” he rasped, and the Huntsmen were still. That’s when it struck me that he’d maybe had dealings with the Wild Hunt before Edric Davies. They knew each other, anyway—I’ll always be sure of that much. Judge Jeffreys said, “The woman is mine, as God yet wills her to be. The Welshman is yours, as I mean for him. As for that one—”

  He glanced over me, not at all as though I weren’t there, but as though my being there was something he’d always meant to take care of and kept forgetting about. I got one last clear look at his eyes—dead as newsprint, they would have been, if not for the hatred that had been holding him together all these centuries, the way Tamsin’s memories kept her who she was. All his memories were of pain and vengeance, and—I’m really ashamed of this— there was one moment, just one, when I felt sorry for Judge Jeffreys. I’ve never said that until now.

  I never did find out exactly what he had in mind for me, because Tamsin cried out, “Jenny, fly, on your peril! ”—and the next moment she and I and Edric Davies were abandoning ship and heading for the hills. Or for the wheatheld, as far as I could tell, because I can get lost in a phone booth. Even in daylight, even when I’m not being chased by the Wild Hunt.

  And I just might actually be the only living person in England who’s ever been chased by the Wild Hunt. They made one long sound together, like a fiery sigh of relief, and came after us, not yelling now, but silent as the Black Dog. Which was much worse, strangely, because of course I couldn’t keep from looking back, and they always seemed nearer than they were. But they weren’t racing through the clouds now; they were on the muddy Dorset earth, like me, and if it sucked at my skidding shoes and made me fall twice, it slowed their horses, too. The Huntsmen may have been ghosts themselves, but those beasts were alive
, wherever they came from. Maybe in the sky the wind and rain didn’t touch them, but down here they were as soaked as everything else, and having to pick their way over the crops they crushed and the ditches and irrigation pipes under their feet, and they didn’t like any of it. As long as the fields kept slanting uphill, I actually had a bit of an edge.

  Tamsin never left my side. She could have flown on to be with Edric, even if it meant running from the Hunt with him forever, as she must have known it would. But she stayed close to me, leading me through the storm, that glimmer of hers almost bright enough to see by. Every time I stumbled, she reached out to catch me, and couldn’t, but the terror in her eyes always got me back on my feet right away, yelling at her to go on, the way Edric was calling, “Tamsin, beloved, hurry!” He’d have abandoned me in a hot second, if he’d had the choice—I know that, and I can’t blame him. He’d had the Wild Hunt after him for a lot longer time than I had—or Tamsin either—he knew what we were dealing with, and all he cared about was getting Tamsin the hell away from them. But she wouldn’t leave me.

  I don’t honestly know what kind of danger I was in. They’d been ordered to get Edric back on the rails, and to bring Tamsin to Judge Jeffreys, but I’m not sure even the Huntsmen knew what he had in mind for me. But Tamsin did—I’m sure of that—and she kept driving me on when I could have lain down right there and gone straight to sleep in the rain and mud. Absolutely crazy, when you think about it: scrambling and stumbling through what people here call a real toadstrangler of a storm, with a ghost who couldn’t even touch me trying to protect me from another ghost—who maybe could—and also save her ghost-boyfriend from the pack of immortal hellhounds hunting us all. But I think if not for her I could have wound up where Edric had been, and with no Tamsin to come and find me. I think so. I don’t know.

  I remember the maddest things about that flight; in fact, the mad stuff is about all I do remember. I’d swear I remember Tamsin singing to me, for one thing—just snatches of her sister Maria’s nursery song——.

  “Oranges and cherries,

  sweetest candleberries—

  who will come and buy… ?“

  I know Tamsin had us running through a deep place called Digby’s Coombe—that’s where I lost my shoes—and I remember Miss Sophia Brown running with us, bounding along like the Pooka, and keeping up, too. The rain was flashing through her as she ran, turning her blue-gray coat to silver.

  And I couldn’t tell you for certain how we reached the Alpine Meadow without crossing the wheatfield, because you can’t, but we did. The name’s just a joke of Evan’s: It isn’t alpine, and it isn’t a real meadow at all—maybe it was long ago, but now it’s useless to anyone short of Wilf’s billygoat. It’s just a huge stretch of brush and sinkholes and twisted, nameless shrubs, with a few dead cherry trees left from some Willoughby’s vision of an orchard. It’s a blasted heath, like in Macbeth, and nobody goes up there much. Evan says you could still do something with the land, but Evan always says that.

  I’ve never gone back to the Alpine Meadow since that night. I do dream about it once in a while: me scrabbling along out there in the storm, with the rain bouncing off me like hail and the Wild Hunt on my track—sometimes they’re right on top of me, sometimes not—and it’s so dark that all I can see is those two lights fluttering just ahead. Tamsin and Edric, twinkling away like Tinker Bell, for God’s sake. My legs are unbelievably painful, and I can’t get my breath at all—it’s like my lungs are full of broken glass— but Tamsin won’t let me give up, so Edric won’t either, even though there’s no point, no hope, no damn reason. I’d rather breathe, I’d rather breathe than anything in the world, and those damn ghosts won’t let me. In the dream I’m always angrier at them than I am at the Wild Hunt and Judge Jeffreys.

  The Huntsmen’s horses were still having trouble with the mud and gaining only slowly, if they were gaining at all. But Judge Jeffreys was on us all the way, swooping and howling, popping out of the dark so close to my face that I’d jump back and fall, and then slashing in at Tamsin or Edric when they came to me. And he was hurting them, though I couldn’t see how. I don’t know what ghosts can actually do to other ghosts, but when the light that pulsed around him even came near them, their own light would go dim for a few seconds, or whip around and flicker as though the storm wind was almost blowing them out. I was really scared to see that, really frightened that they would go out and leave me alone; but they always came back, bright as before. It just seemed to take a little longer each time.

  The next-to-last time I fell, I tripped over one rock and turned my ankle, and my chin hit another one, or something that hard, and I didn’t know where I was, or who, until I heard Tamsin saying my name. “Jenny, you must get up, Jenny, please,” over and over, like Sally trying to rouse me for the school bus.

  “Can’t,” I mumbled. “You go. Catch me anyway.”

  The Horsemen were coming on, still not making a sound themselves, but I could feel their beasts’ hoofbeats, lying there. Beside me, Tamsin said, “No. No, they will not catch us, Jenny—not if you can only make one more effort. Only one more, Jenny.” I didn’t move. Tamsin said, “Jenny, please—I promise thee. One more.”

  It was the “thee” that did it, of course. She’d never called me that before. I got up with my ankle hurting and my head swimming worse than the one time Marta and Jake and I got stupid drunk on Jake’s mother’s Courvoisier. Tamsin was on one side of me, saying, “Oh, brave, my Jenny—only a little now,” and Edric on the other. He still wasn’t a bit happy about my entire existence, but he was practically polite when he growled into my ear, “Girl, for her sake.” And I put my weight on that bad ankle, and I started on.

  The one thing the storm hadn’t had much of up to now was lightning and thunder. That all hit about the time the ground leveled off and the Wild Hunt really began gaining on us. Tamsin told me not to turn, but I twisted my head around once, and saw them in the flash, as though someone in heaven was taking pictures. The lightning made them look motionless, frozen in the moment, like the dead cherry trees, or the shrubby thicket coming up just ahead. Not Judge Jeffreys, though. He was divebombing us worse than ever, and he was screeching continually now. I couldn’t make out all the words, but most of it was Jesus and God and the King, and Welsh traitors a stink in the nostrils of the Almighty. And Tamsin belonging to him through eternity—that one I got, I heard him right through the thunder. And all the while he kept smothering Tamsin and Edric’s ghost-lights with his own, and every time they’d be slower coming back. Dimmer, too, now.

  “Jenny, my Jenny—canst run only a little faster?” I didn’t even have the breath to answer Tamsin, but I think I maybe got an extra RPM or two out of my legs. I like to think so, but probably not.

  But it wasn’t any good. The wind had switched around so it was blowing straight in my face, and between that and my ankle buckling with each step, we weren’t even going to make that thicket before the Wild Hunt caught up with us—as though we could have hidden there for one minute. The Huntsmen had started baying at us again the moment the wind changed, which makes me think maybe they actually hunted by smell, not that it matters. They sounded different than they did in the sky: not as loud, not whooping maniacally, but precise now, united, calling to each other. Like the West Dorset Hounds blowing their dumb horns when the poor fox is in full sight and they’re closing in.

  And I couldn’t run anymore. The last time I went down, it wasn’t a question of getting me back on my feet, and Tamsin didn’t ask me again. All she said was “Here,” to Edric; and to give him credit, he didn’t ever suggest that they drop me and head for the border. At least I didn’t hear him say anything like that, because things were starting to slide away from me now, leaving me peaceful and sleepy, with my ankle hardly hurting at all. I did hear Tamsin say, “Twas this place, this, exactly this. I am sure to my soul of it, Edric.”

  And Edric, with a sudden laugh that sounded very young, considering he can’t have do
ne that for three hundred years: “Well, dear one, you are my soul, so there’s naught for me to do but bide with you.” Miss Sophia Brown sat calmly down beside me, looked in my face and said “Prrp?” just like Mister Cat, only small and faraway. Edric was saying, “—there’s no knowing or compounding her, nor there never was. She might as easily—”

  Thunder and the wail of the Wild Hunt drowned the rest of it, just as Judge Jeffreys’s last gobbling squall of triumph seemed to drown Edric and Tamsin’s lights together. Far away as I was, numb as I was, I could feel them going out this time, as though a phone line between us had been cut. It hurt terribly—it hurt a lot more than my ankle—and I think I called for them. I know I tried to get up—or anyway I wanted to, but that line was down, too, and the Wild Hunt was on us. On me, their beasts rearing right over me on their spider legs, monkey legs, goats’ hooves, hawks’ claws… and the weird thing was that I didn’t care one damn bit. Tamsin was gone, Tamsin and her Edric, and I didn’t care what the hell happened to me now.

  That was when I heard Mrs. Fallowfield.

  Heard, not saw, because I was lying the wrong way, and I couldn’t even raise my head, but I knew it was her. She was speaking in a slow, buzzing language that sounded like Old Dorset, but I couldn’t separate any of the words from each other; and I hardly recognized her voice, the way it rang on the syllables like a hammer on a horseshoe. All around me the Huntsmen’s beasts dropped down to all fours—or all eights, or whatever—and the Huntsmen got really quiet, a different quiet from the way they’d first been with Tamsin. Then they’d been puzzled, uncertain, practically embarrassed—now they were scared. Even in the state I was in, I could tell the difference.

  There was another sound under Mrs. Fallowfield’s voice, and it wasn’t any of the Huntsmen. Or Judge Jeffreys, either—he was watching silently from one of the dead trees, wedged in the branches, a snagged kite now. The growl was so low it seemed to be coming out of the ground, and it was so cold and evil that the thunder just stopped, and the lightning shrank away, and the whole storm sort of sidled off, scuffing its feet, pretending it hadn’t been doing anything. I got my elbows under me, and I dragged myself around to look at Mrs. Fallowfield.