“The Promises were not revoked with regard to you,”M ike continued with an even more blinding smile.“Moreover, you have in fact been involved in the very work you said you did not want to do. Unasked, you supervised the Good Friday Agreement. I’m sure the Other was pleased.”
“Someone had to do something,”Mac waved off the compliment. “On occasion we have done good some things in Ireland of our own freedom.”
“Once a Seraph”—Gaby giggled—“always a Seraph.”
“That’s all the Other expects of us,”Mike continued, flashing his absolutely best smile. “The important point is that nothing much has to change. The war in heaven is over, if there ever were one.”
“And we’re back in?”Maeve said skeptically. “If we want in?”
“Even ifyou don’t want in.”Gab y spoke the core truth.
“That’s what I don’t like at all, at all. The Other doesn’t even ask us politely if we want back in or if we are sorry we ever slipped out. Both are assumed. That’s not fair.”
“And what ifthe Other did ask both questions?”Mike wondered. “How would you answer them?
“This is the best port I’ve ever tasted,”M ac interrupted the flow of the conversation. “Where’s it from? Seraphic vineyards? Are they at home or here on earth?”
“Both places,”M ike replied easily. “We’ll send you some. We’re rather proud of some of our vintages.”
Seraphic life givers, like the human ones, were given to boasting at the wrong time, even the shrewd and tough Michael.
“You didn’t answer Mike’s questions?”
“We might not say no, and then again we might,”M aeve answered for her companion. “And we’ll not be bribed by your private wine stock!”
Laughter around the table, for the first time.
“Don’t you see, Maevie, the Other loves you so much that the return is made easy for you.”
“As much as we love one another, Gabychild?”
Seraphs are essentially creatures of love. They liked to think that they were the best sacraments in the universe of the Other’s love. Their most intense love was for their companions and their offspring, of course. But their love for others, of either gender, was also overwhelming. They were smart enough to make the proper distinctions, so jealousy was rare among them.
“You know the answer to that Maeviekid.”
“The Other’s love,”Michael laid out the party line, “is implacable. As we all know, the Other wants no one to get away from that love.Or even to think they have. That’s why we’re meeting tonight.”
“To tell us that we’re not demons?”M ac asked with a touch of bitterness.
“We have searched much of the cosmos, Mac, not all of it, mind you, but most of it.We have not found any bad angels. There may be such, but we have not discovered them.”
“It would be nice to be able to visit home again,Mac,”Maeve said sadly.
“We would have a grand party!”Gab y promised. “The best in many millennia.”
“We’ll have to think about it,”M ac said, ending the discussion. “And talk it over with the others.”
That was as far as they would get that night, about as far as Gaby had hoped, maybe a little more. The Shee did miss home and their old friends more than they were willing to admit. Progress had been made. The Other presumably would be pleased. The embraces at the end of the dinner were much more passionate than those at the beginning. Again, in the blink of an eye, the dining room was filled with dancing lights. As they left, Gaby scattered more of her love magic on the other diners. This All Hallows Eve would be a night that they would never forget.
Back on the street, they bid farewells.Mike and Gaby reabsorbed their surrogates into themselves. They would surely couple almost at once. Would the leaders of the Shee? Gaby hoped they would, but doubted it.
Then they heard cries from the dark and foggy Green. People were being attacked. Maeve and Mac darted into the Green. Gaby heard two splashes. Someone had been tossed into the pond. Mike and Gaby materialized at the edge of the trees, hidden by the fog. Two young thugs had been dumped into the pool and were shivering in the November cold. A handsome Irish couple was assuring the victims, two traumatized middle-aged Americans, that the two louts would never attack anyone again and indeed would never use drugs again.
Faerie magic.
“Well,”said Mike, “it looks like we’ve made a little progress, doesn’t it now? Aren’t they acting like Guardian Angels?”
“The Otherer will be pleased”,Gab y agreed piously.
Later, the two of them were dancing on the top of the Millennium Needle in O’Connell Street. Dancing was always a preliminary to lovemaking among the Seraphs. Gaby had an age-old reputation for dance of invitation.
“Well, we’re the answer to the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,”Mike said as he overpowered her with his magic.
“Point of a needle,”Gab y corrected him before she succumbed completely.
LITERARY
Fantastics
The Lady in Grey
BY JANE LINDSKOLD
WILLIE
Sometimes, as now when he watched her pouring out the tea for himself and George Russell, Willie found it difficult to remember that he had only met his beloved Maud a few years before.
Meeting Maud had been the transforming experience of Willie’s life. From the day she had first come to his father’s house in Bedford Park, her beauty, her grace, her passionate involvement with Irish Nationalism had haunted Willie’s every waking hour—and many of his sweetest and most troubling dreams as well.
Willie had written poetry to Maud and for Maud, had dragged himself from literary seclusion into public life for her. Yet seeing Maud as he did this day, weighted down with sorrow, her apple blos- som loveliness nearly quenched by the unremitting darkness of her mourning attire,Willie felt he knew her as he never had before, and he knew, too, that he loved her as he never had when she was light prettiness surrounded by her birds and dogs.
The waves of sorrow are the waters which shall lap us close, he silently recited, framing the thought for poetry, discarding it, giving the image other words. This flood tide of tears upon which we sail.
Better, but not right, though it would be easy to find a rhyme for “sail.”Too easy, perhaps.What if he broke the line after “tears”? Two good rhymes, then, building toward an alternating rhyme scheme.Yet he must take care.Would the lines then be too short, too choppy? The difference between doggerel and true poetry could be as narrow as the cadence given when the poem was read aloud. The poet must be in control of all possible readings.
Seeing Maud completely engaged with Russell,Willie made a surreptitious note of the potential line on his shirt cuff.He could not work at poetry just then, even though his finest inspiration was before him, her slender height bending over the teacup cradled in her hand, her voice—a voice he had so frequently heard raised in exhortation—sweet and mellow.
Maud was quizzing Russell about reincarnation, and that good man, so knowledgeable about things on the other side of the veil, was reassuring her that a child who died young was frequently reborn, often into the same family.
Willie opened his mouth, about to express his skepticism regarding reincarnation. Even if reincarnation did exist—and the matter was one open to ample speculation—would a child be reborn to its birth mother or simply into the same family? How might one recognize such a reborn child? Russell had said a child might be reborn “soon,”but what was“soon”t o a spirit freed of physical referents?
Yet even as Willie shaped the words he would speak so readily in one of the discussions that followed meetings of the Golden Dawn or the Theosophical Society, he realized the pain they would bring Maud were he to speak them aloud.Willie knew that Maud was not questioning Russell at random. She was thinking of the little French child, Georgette, whom she had adopted and who had recently died in France.
Maud had been at Georgette’s sickb
ed, and when the death bird had tapped on the windowpane Maud had sent for doctor after doctor, striving to the end against the death her inner eye had told her must come. Shouldn’t Willie permit this woman he adored whatever slim comfort Russell’s mystic wisdom might bring her?
Yet,Willie admitted honestly to himself, there was a part of him that envied any—even a dead child—who had so held Maud’s love. Would Maud mourn him so extravagantly? Hadn’t she refused his proposal of marriage not long before her latest departure for France?
While she had been away,Willie had teased himself with fantasies that she had fled the intensity of her feelings for him, that she had left rather than admit she had been wrong to refuse his proposal, that she would return and confide in him her love and her fear. It was a deflation of his hopes to discover she had gone instead to this child’s deathbed.
MAUD
Maud was aware, acutely aware, ofWillie listening to George Russell’s expostulation on reincarnation.
Willie was unwontedly quiet, by which sign she knew he was brooding. When nervous, dear Willie chattered. He also chattered when he was happy or engaged with an idea. The only times he was silent were when he was composing—and even then he drummed his fingers on the table, trying out meter and rhythm—or when he was unhappy.
When Russell departed, promising to send several books and articles on reincarnation around to her rooms,Willie maintained his brooding silence.
Although Maud herself was so weighed down with misery that she hardly knew herself (George, my dear baby, how could I have left you?) she strove to find some item of interest with which she might distract her friend—as means to draw him from himself and back into the world they shared.
Once before Maud had offered Willie a fragment from one of her dreams. In that dream they had been brother and sister in the Arabian desert, sold together into slavery. Now she began to tell him of another dream image that haunted her, remembering too late that the intimacy created by that first dream confession had led Willie to his very awkward proposal of marriage.
That would be an easy way to make Willie happy—accept him, but that she could never do, not with her sins so heavy on her soul. She could not even bear to tell him the truth about little George—had told him the child who had died was “Georgette,”a nd even that name, once out of her mouth, had seemed too close to the truth.
“When I was small,”M aud began without preamble, “I repeatedly dreamed of a beautiful dark woman. She would bend over my cot and look at me. Her eyes were so sad they broke my heart.”
She spoke quickly, her inflection curiously flat. Willie stared at her, his ear quick to the difference in intensity between words and tone, but as she had known, the lure of something occult—and more than occult, information intimately linked to her—drove him to pursue the information rather than to query after her state of mind.
“A woman?”h e asked. “Old or young?”
“Neither,”Maud replied. “A woman grown, not a girl, but not an old woman yet.”
“Was this woman someone you knew? Your mother perhaps? I recall you saying your mother died when you were young.”
“No. It wasn’t my mother. I never saw this woman in life, though I looked for her among my mother’s friends and relations. Although I never found her, I felt curiously intimate with her—as if I knew her well.”
“This vision was of a modern person then?”
Maud thought Willie seemed disappointed. He did so love the exotic. It would have been more exciting for him had she dreamed of Joan of Arc in her armor or Deidre in her bridal robes. Maud called the image of the dark woman to her mind’s eye, unwilling, though she knew not why,merely to invent details.
“Not modern, no,”sh e said slowly. “The woman in my dream wore a grey dress, with grey veil covering the lower portion of her face. Over this veil I saw her eyes, large and dark brown, looking at me intently and with immense sorrow. Those eyes are what I remember most of all.”
“Ah . . . I wonder . . . What do you feel for this woman?”
“Pity, I think, and always a peculiar intimacy.”
Maud turned away, unable to bear any longer the keen, interested light that had come over Willie’s countenance, although she was the one who had sought to awaken him from his brooding. The curtains over the window she faced had not yet been drawn, and the glass cast back a reflection.
Two reflections, one laid over the other, so that the images were intermingled yet curiously distinct. Oddly, neither of the reflections contained Maud herself.
Behind her, Willie had raised his hand and was making several quick, elaborate gestures. Maud hardly registered his odd behavior, so overwhelmed was she by the other image—one she had at first taken as herself, only to realize that the woman reflected there was also the Lady in Grey.
In the reflected image, the black of Maud’s mourning had washed to dark grey. The eyes, so like Maud’s own in the misery they held, were darker and ringed with sleeplessness. What Maud had before taken for a veil was her own gloved hand, raised to her mouth in horrified recognition.
WILLIE
As Willie listened to Maud’s account of her childhood haunting by the Lady in Grey, he heard the strain in her voice. That tightness only grew worse as she sought to answer his simple questions. Intuitively, he knew that they were approaching one of the obstacles to the love he had felt should have been theirs from the very first moment of their meeting.
Overcome with her own emotions,Maud had turned away from him.Willie made up his mind with a swiftness that surprised him, for in all his studies of the occult he had always attempted to remain rational. Indeed, his rational desire to test magical theory was what had led to his expulsion from the Theosophical Society.What he was considering now was hardly the result of careful reasoning, but he felt it was right.
In his studies with the Order of the Golden Dawn, Willie had been indoctrinated into a wealth of magical lore. As surely as if he heard golden trumpets sounding to announce the coming of a king, Willie knew the time had come for him to put that knowledge to use.
Maud speaks of this as a specter from past dreams,Willie thought, rapidly analyzing what would be needed. Very well. First the sign for the Fifth Element.
He sketched it in the air, but felt no tremor in the veil between the world we know and those beyond.
Another element must be subordinate to the first, or we shall have no form. Maud is fire, so I shall sketch that . . .
The results were more certain than Willie could have imagined.
Maud had been facing the window. Now she reeled back a few paces as if confronting some figure standing before her. Her lips moved in prayer or entreaty, but Willie heard nothing but a moan of terror.
MAUD
“Who are you?”
Maud had meant the words as a challenge, but they sounded thin and timorous. Oddly, the very weakness of her own voice gave her courage. Hadn’t her father told her to fear nothing, not even death? Hadn’t she lived her life by this maxim, facing and conquering each fear one at a time until now she feared nothing?
“Who are you?”M aud repeated, and though this time her voice was stronger, she noted that the words did not reverberate in the air but were swallowed, as if she and the Lady in Grey stood within a fog.
The Lady in Grey looked at her, and those eyes Maud had always thought of as sad held a mocking expression.
“You know my face,”th e Lady in Grey replied.
“It is much like my own face,”M aud said, “but you are not me. Who are you?”
“You are wrong. I am you—in a sense. I am more than you and less. I am the myth and mystery of yourself that you have created, Maud Gonne. I am the Irish Joan of Arc, Cathleen ni Houlihan, Queen Maeve of Connaught. I am the Woman of the Sidhe who showers her blessings upon the poor peasant folk and who brings misfortune to their enemies.”
“This is not possible,”M aud protested, clinging to a rationality she did not feel. “I have caught glimpses
of you since I was a child. Those identities of which you speak are more recent dreams.”
“Since as a child of four,”th e Lady in Grey agreed, “clinging to your father’s arm in the presence of your dead mother you have seen me. There he said to you, ‘You must never be afraid of anything, even of death’ and you believed him, though he himself was trembling under the weight of grief and fear.When you took his words to you as a talisman, then I was born. Vows are powerful things, especially vows kept. They are absolutes, and so bring the world of the real to rub against that of the ideal. Today, your idealistic friend and his rituals provided the razor to cut away the barrier and bring us face-to-face.”
Maud did not wish to believe these words, yet she could not deny the evidence of her senses. This woman possessed her face, her bearing, and her features. Oddly, in those features Maud saw nothing of the beauty she knew was her own, a beauty she had used to gain her way since first she realized she possessed beauty and that it was not a gift, but a tool. But though the Lady in Grey had Maud’s features, she had no beauty. She was as hard as Maud knew her own soul to be.
The Lady in Grey reached out and caressed Maud’s face. Her hand was very cold. Strangely, for all the ways they were alike, the Lady was slightly shorter than Maud, but as Maud looked down into those eyes so like her own, she felt none of the confidence that her considerable height usually granted her.
“So Willie has brought us face-to-face,”Maud said, stepping back from that cold touch. “Why did he do that?”
“He is sensitive, your young poet, and rightly sensed that I am a danger to you—and even more, a danger to his dreams of someday wedding you.”
Maud shook her head, exhaustion, defeat, and sorrow flooding her like a tangible wave.
“Never,”sh e said.“I cannot accept his love.”
The Lady in Grey laughed mockingly.
“You fear his love. You fear the disclosures it would force from you.You fear . . .”
“I fear nothing!”M aud interrupted hotly.
Emerald Magic Page 20
