Colum was a handsome man, and used quite often to being made much of. He was accustomed to going into a room, or a dance hall, to a crowd of eyes that turned and whispers behind hands.
But never from such as these.
He turned to stone himself, stood there growing sober as a pain.
However, she, his Speir-Bhan, she turned and took both his hands in her cold-fire fingers.
“Now, Colum, it’s your night. Haven’t I told you. What is that you’re carrying?”
And looking down, Colum saw that now in his left hand, which she no longer held, was a small curved harp of smoothest brown wood, with silver pegs and strings the light had gilded.
“Fair miss,” said Colum, “if I’m here as the harper, you’d better know, I can play ‘Chopsticks’ on my granny’s piano, and that’s the sum of my parts.”
But she only shook her head.And by then, somehow, they had got to the centre of the room.
Directly before Colum on four great chairs knuckled with gold, sat two kings and two queens. No mistaking them, their heads were crowned. “I have never known enough of the history to describe those clothes they wore,” said Colum, “but I thought they were from the far-off past, before even the castle had come up there out of the rock. And one of the queens, too, she that had the creamy golden hair falling down to her little white shoes, I think she was not only earthly royal, but of the Royal Folk, too.”
“Well, Colum,” said the king to the right, “will you be after playing us anything, then?”
Colum swallowed.
Then he found his hands—the hands the Speir-Bhan had held—had each opened, like his neck, an eye—not visible, but to be felt.And he put both hands on the harp and a rill of music burst glittering into the many-colored room, and everywhere around was silence, as they listened.
This was the song that Colum sang, written as it is in his book:
Woman veiled with hair, shaming the gold of princes,
In your sun-bright tresses dwells
A flock of sun-bright cuckoos,
That will madden with jealous unease
Any man yearning to possess you.
So long and fair your streaming crown,
It is a golden ring,
And your face set in there like a pearl,
And your eyes like sapphires from a lake.
This is your finest jewelry,
These yellowest ringlets,
Which have caught me now in their chains,
Shackled, your thrall indeed.
No wonder then the cuckoo
Winters in the Underlands,
To sleep in the heaven
Of your veil of hair.
Colum struck the last chord. The silence stayed like deafness. And in the quiet, he heard over in his mind what he had sung—the musicality of his voice and art of his own playing—and the unwise-ness of his words that none could doubt he had addressed to a woman of Faerie, sitting by her lord.
Now is the time, thought Colum, to take my leave.
He had forgotten the right of harpers to praise the beauty of any woman, royal or not.
Then the applause came, hands that smote on tables, feet that stamped, and voices that called.He saw the Royal Ones were amused, not angry.
The king to the left got up.His tunic was the red of blood, and his cloak was made of gold squares stitched by scarlet thread to yellow. He was, Colum thought, a human king, and from long, long ago.
“You are the one to do it, Colum,” said this king, “as heroes have before you.”
Colum, who had blushed with relief, and pride, changed over again in his mood.
“What would that be, that you want doing by me, your honor?”
“Why, that you rid the land of the threefold bane that’s on it. For only through a song can it be done.”
Colum gazed round wildly.
The Speir-Bhan poised at his elbow, cool as Sunday lettuce.
“What do I say now?” he asked her. “Tell me, quick.”
“Say yes.”
Colum cleared his throat. She was his muse, but he knew some of the old tales, in one of which he seemed presently to be snared. A “bane” could only be something bad, some fiendly thing, and it was “threefold” as well. And he was to tackle it?
Before he could speak, either way, the noise in the hall, which was still coming and going like waves, died again in an instant. The hall doors shot open, and in trudged a group of men, and they too were patched in bloodred, but now it was not any dye, and it was wet.
“They are out again,” cried one.
Another shouted, “My wife they have killed! My lovely wife, and my child in her body!”
“And my living son!” cried another.
Then all the group roared out examples of death, even of whole villages laid waste, doors and roofs torn away, and babies dragged out on the track, rent and devoured.
“No pity, they have none.”
Shadow fell in the gleaming hall of Seanaibh. The candles faded. Colum stood in the dimness, and the fey woman he had sung to, she with the hair of golden shackles, she stood there before him, one last torch that blazed.
“Those they speak of are three uncanny women, Colum, that with every full moon become three black foxes, each large as a boar. They roam the hills and do as you have heard, killing and eating humankind. The one geas on them they must obey, makes them love the music and song. If any goes where they are that has great skill in these things, he will live. Oh, warriors have gone out against them, with swords, and been brought home in joints, what was left. But you are the harper. Once they were slain before, in this way, this sort of way. Listen, Colum, if you will do this, I will gift you a sip of Immortality from under the hills.You shall live a happy hundred full years in the world of men, and die soft and peaceful in your bed.”
IT WAS AT THIS POINT in my great-grandfather’s story that I had to turn a page of his book.What should I find on the other side, but this:
“I woke at the roadside in the dusk before the dawn.My head was sore and the road looked as you would expect. So I knew I had dreamed it.”
And then; “Next week, in the town, I noted a very taking girl.Her name is Mairi O’Connell.”
There follows the list of young women I mentioned before.
WHEN I READ THIS, over the page, I thought at first other pages had been torn out. But there was no evidence of that.
Then I thought, Well, he spun his tale but had no idea of how to go on with it. So he leaves it in this unsatisfying way—as if someone had set a rare old meal in front of you, with meat and fruit and cakes and cream, tea in the pot, wine in the glass, and a little something stronger on the side, but as you pull up your chair, the feast is carried off, a door closes on it, and there you are, hungry and thirsty, the wrong side.
Madly I thought, If it was a dream, still he did it.
For she promised him a hundred years of life, and he wrote of that in the faded ink of his youth, as of the promise of a soft death—and both of them he had.
Then, that night when I had my own dream that I met Colum in Ireland, in the stone house, he told me this, the very matters that should have been there on the following pages.
He said, once the fey woman had spoken, the castle faded like its light, and all the people with it, human and un, and there instead he was, on the savage hills that ran behind the cliff. The moon had put off her handkerchief, and was round, and pale as a dollar.
Up from the ancient woods of oak and thorn there ran three shapes, which cast their shadows before them.
He thought them dogs, then wolves, then giant cats. Then he saw they were three black foxes, black as the night, with white tips to their tails and eyes that smoked like sulfur.
And he struck the harp in a panic, and all that would come out of it was a scream, the very one you can hear a fox give out in the country on a frosty autumn night, the cry that makes the hair stand up on your head.
No one else was there with Colum. H
is muse, he noted, had deserted him, as sometimes, in the worst extremity, they do.
It seemed to him that after all the royal lord in the castle had sent him here to punish him for his impertinent song, and Goldehair herself, she had been glad enough to see him off. And all the while, those three black, long-furred things ran nearer and nearer up the hill, and they screeched as the harp had done, a cry like the Devil himself, and Colum’s hands were made of wood, and his throat shut.
“It was plain fear woke me up,” he said, as we drank the dreamwhisky in his house, “So I believe. I could no more have stayed there in that mystic horror—be it sleep or truth—than held myself down in a pool to drown.”
“Yet,” I said, “she gave you your hundred years.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “I was no harper, no poet. Speir-Bhan though that one was, she went to the wrong fellow, so she did.And for that, I think, they let me wake, and gave me a present for my trouble. But you,” he added to me, “now you have the means.”
“What means?” I said.
“Is it not,” said Colum, sad and resigned, “that you can play and sing a little?”
I scoffed. I said, pointedly, “But the Speir-Bhan is the muse of male poets and bards. And all the heroes are men.”
“There is Maeve,” said my great-grandfather, “riding on her raids in her chariot. There is the nun, Cair, who sang like the angels on her isle.”
In my dream, the magpie was on the roof again. I heard what it said now. “Give it up! Give it up!”
So giving up, as Colum did, I woke.
THE FLAT IS IN BRANCH ROAD, ten minutes walk from the last stop of the underground train at Russell Park Station.
I work in English London four days a week, a dull job to do with filing papers, making and taking calls, and preparing coffee for my betters. It pays enough to keep the flat, and leaves me free on Thursday night till Monday morning. Those between-times then, I go to play in the clubs and pubs—by which I mean play music. It isn’t a harp I carry, but my guitar, shiny brown as a new-baked bun. The name I use for myself on these occasions, is Neeve, which should be spelled Niamh, nor is it my given name. But there we are.
This life of mine is curious. It feels like a stopgap, a bridge. As if one day something will change. But I’ve passed my thirty-ninth birthday, and nothing has, so perhaps it never will.
It was Thursday night, and I was coming home on the tube from London, deep in the hollow underground that catacombs below all the city and half its suburbs.
I was sitting there with my bag of groceries, reading my paper and thinking how the world was going to hell in a hurry, just as it always has been, since the Year 0. Then the lights flickered, as they do, and there in the tunnel, also as they do, the train halted. As I say, that happens. There was a small crowd left on the train, for we were still five stops from the end of the line. The visiting tourists take a stalling tube in their stride, used to the efficiencies of the New York subway and the Paris Metro, but we locals look about, uneasy, distrusting what is indigenously ours.
After a moment, the train started up again with a cranking hiss. That was when the old woman came staggering between the seats and sat herself down beside me. I thought she was drunk, she smelled of liquor, I thought. I have some sympathy. In my bag there waited for me, with the bread, cheese, and fruit, a green bottle of gin. On the other hand, when she turned her face to me and spoke, I deeply regretted she was there, let alone drunk and there, and myself her chosen victim.
“It’s cleaner they are now, the filthy worms.”
I smiled, and turned away.
Insistently the old woman put her claws on my arm.“The trains it is, I’m meaning. Like worms, like snakes, running through the bowels of the earth. Look there, a paper on the ground—” And leaning over she scooped it up. It was the wrapper from a chocolate bar. She read the logo ponderingly, “Mars,” she breathed.Not for the first, I confess, I, too, considered the notion of a chocolate named for a planet or god of war. A delicious smell rose from the wrapper—but died in the wall of alcohol that hung about the old woman and now me. Everyone else, of course, stayed deep in their books, papers, thoughts. They weren’t going to see the old woman. She was my problem.
For a moment I wondered where she had come from. Had she been on the tube all this while, and just got up and come staggering along to me on a whim? She spoke in the musical lilt of the green land, but I do not, for I’m only an Irish Londoner.
Then off she goes again.
“What’s there in your bag? Is it of use? Sure, it looks nice to me. A rosy apple and a bottle of green glass.Well, we’ll be dancing, then.”
We?
I read my paper, the same paragraph, over and over. And she kept up her monologue. It was all about me, and the bottle, and what the train was like, and how it was a snake, and that we would soon be home, so we would.
Well, I thought of calling the police on my mobile when I stepped off the train at Russell Park, and she came lurching off with me, clutching my free arm to steady herself. Should I ease away? Should I push her, shout at her—or for help? No.Nobody would pay attention, besides she was a poor old inebriated woman, in quite a good, clean, well-made, long coat, and boots of battered leather.And her long grey hair was a marvel, thick as wool and hanging to her waist; and if it was all knotted and tangled, no surprise, she would need to groom such a mane every day, like a Persian cat, to keep it tidy, and obviously she’d had other things on her mind.
Before I could think, we were on the escalator, riding up toward the street, and her still on my arm as if we were close friends, going to the cinema in 1947.
Embarrassed, I looked around and noticed two or three Goth girls were on the escalator behind us. They had the ferocious, look-at-me beauty of the very young, all in their black, and liquid ink of hair. They wore sunglasses, too, the blackest kind—all the better not to see us with. I only gave them a glance, relieved really they’d have no interest in me or my companion.
“Where is it you need to get to?” I asked her, politely, as we arrived in the ticket-hall.
“Here I am,” she said.
“No, I mean which station do you need? Or is it a particular road here you want?”
“Branch Road,” said she, in a stinging puff of whisky.
Oh my Lord, I thought, oh my Lord.
But it wasn’t until I went through the mechanical barrier with my ticket, and she somehow slipped through exactly with me, which is impossible, emerging the other side—not till then that I began to see. But even then, I didn’t. I just concluded she was criminally adept, though drunk as a barrel.
So out we go on the street.And the dusty summer traffic roars by, and she clicks her tongue in fascinated disapproval.
“Well, now,” she says,“well, now, cailín, let’s be going where we’re to go.”
Then she winked.Her eyes were blue, but as she closed one in the wink, they gave off a flash of daffodil yellow. So then, I had to know, didn’t I. It was only seven days before, mind you, I had found and read Colum’s book and talked to him in my dream.
OUTSIDE THE FLAT, the trees in the street were a green bloomed by dust and pollution, but they filled the front windows like flags of jade. All was as I had left it, messy, cleaned four weeks ago and not since, the washing machine full of washed and dried washing, the cupboards fairly bare.
I put my bag down and watched the Speir-Bhan as she pottered around, peering into this and that, craning into the tiny bathroom, lifting the lid of a pan of baked beans left on the stove. When she managed to undo the washing machine and most of the load fell out on the floor, I made no move. I couldn’t have kept her out of the flat.
I couldn’t stop her now.
“What do you want?”
I knew. But there.
She was at the fridge by then, cooling herself with sticking her head, tortoiselike, forward in among the salad.
“Well now, look at this, they keep winter in a box. That’s cle
ver,” she congratulated me. Then she shut the fridge door and turned and looked at me with her blue-saffron eyes. “Ah, cailín,” she said. She, too, knew I knew what she was there for.
“Calling me ‘colleen’ isn’t enough,” I said. I added, “Your High-ness—”It’s as well to be courteous. “I’ve never been over the sea to the Isle. Colum made a bargain, or you did. It isn’t mine.”
“Yes,” she said.“How else did you get your talent? Oh, it was there in him, but he wouldn’t work for it. He preferred the desk behind the leather shop and then the boss’s desk at the factory in Dublin. Oh, the shame and waste of it, when he might have made his way through his voice, and by learning a bit of piano in his grandlady’s parlor.He kept his music for talk, to woo the women.Well and good. He was not the one. But it’s owed,my girl, for that night.”
I hovered in the kitchenette. I said, “And when he was on the savage hill, and they came running, where were you?”
“Where should I be and all? Up in his fine skull, waiting for him to hear me inspire him.”
“There’s the gin,” I said.“Have a drink.”
I went and ran a bath. I knew she would never come in to plague me there, nor did she. She was from a forthright yet modest age. But when I was out and anywhere else in the flat, there she was.
She sat, like my own geas, across from me at supper, eating apples. She sat by me on the couch as I watched TV, drinking gin. She lay down at my side—somehow, for the bed was narrow—when I tried to go to sleep. And all night long as I stretched rigid like a mar ble figure on a tomb, she chattered and chanted on and on to me, telling me things that filled my head so full, I myself couldn’t move about there. Near dawn after all I slept, hoping to find my great-grandfather again and have a word. But if I dreamed, I didn’t recall.
Emerald Magic Page 6
