by Kate Forsyth
‘If only …’
They stopped and looked at each other. Isabeau’s eyes were brimming over with tears.
‘I canna stay here, in this body,’ she said. ‘It is too much to bear. I will change into another shape and be free o’ the compulsion, for a few hours anyway. We must rest here at least a day or two. Thunderlily and Cloudshadow are both at the end o’ their strength. I will no’ be able to maintain a shape that long, no’ without risking sorcery sickness. But if I stay at least part o’ each day in another shape, I should be able to escape the madness.’
Dide nodded. ‘Have a care. This is no’ the world we ken. Stay close, so that I ken ye are safe.’
Isabeau reached up and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Ye too, leannan. Keep them all close. We must be ready to escape through the circle o’ stones at any time.’
‘Yes.’
‘I will keep watch,’ she said, then, in a blink of an eye, she transformed, flinging up great wings and taking flight, choosing the shape of the golden eagle, the mightiest of all the birds. Dide watched her fly higher and higher into the sky, till she was nothing but a black speck in the blue, and then he turned with a sigh, stoked up the fire, and wondered how he was to dig a grave without a spade.
Thunderlily lay quietly on her bed of bracken and leaves, wrapped in a blanket, staring about her, soaking up the sight of the wild green forest rolling away on either side.
Donncan hesitated, and then came and sat beside her.
‘Ye saved me,’ he said very softly. ‘If ye had taken me back to the time o’ Brann’s death, as she commanded, I would be dead now.’
No, she answered, humming very faintly in her throat. My mother and the Keybearer would have arrived on our heels, using the same configuration of stars to travel by. They would have stopped her. I just did not expect them to know where we had gone. I still do not understand how they came to find us.
‘Still …’ Donncan said, and then paused, not knowing how to express what he felt. They had travelled a thousand years back in time together, and they had faced what they had thought was certain death. He felt in awe of Thunderlily, and yet closer to her than anyone, even Bronwen, his own wife, whom he had left behind in his own time. There were no words to express such emotion and so he did what Stormstrider had done – he pressed both his hands together and bowed his head in reverence.
Thunderlily smiled and put out one finger to touch his brow.
Look, is it not beautiful? she asked, sweeping out her other hand to indicate the landscape. I have always wondered what it would be like.
Donncan sat down beside her, braving the displeasure of Stormstrider who was glaring at him from a distance.
It is beautiful, he thought in response. So wild, so green.
That was why I brought us here. I knew the configuration o’ the stars. I had often calculated them before, just wondering what our world was like, before humans came …
Do you dislike us so much? Donncan asked, hurt and surprised.
She smiled at him. You know that is not true. I love you. All you humans. You fascinate me. You live so very lightly. Perhaps it is because your lives are so short. Perhaps you just do not fear as much as we do. You seem to have no taboo. This is my tragedy, that I am drawn to this lightness and joyfulness and recklessness like a moth to one of your flames. I am not human. I am not free to love so lightly. Yet love I do, and I do not have your courage. That is why I swing the celestial globe and dream of a time when life was simple for those of my kind, and my life would have been laid out before me in the unchanging pattern of my ancestors, and I did not ever need to fear the loss and grief that comes from loving too much.
I too fear the hurt that can come from loving too much, Donncan thought with difficulty.
Thunderlily turned and regarded him with her three-eyed gaze. Do you think I do not know?
Do you think she realises?
Thunderlily looked away from him. There was a long silence, and then she said, with a soft strum of sound in her throat, Sometimes I fear so, sometimes I wish so. Of all the humans I know, she is the one that lives most lightly, most joyfully, most bravely. She is like a bright light that dazzles my eyes, like music that fills my ears. It is impossible not to love her. Does she know this? I think at times she does, and she revels in her power, and revels in her beauty, and cares not the harm her beauty can do …
She has harmed ye then, Donncan said unhappily.
Yes. But do I wish I had never seen her? Do I wish she had never laughed at me, and drawn her arm through mine and bid me to dance? Of course not! I have been harmed, it is true. I will never be happy with my own kind now. All my life I will remember the brightness and the music, and all else will seem dull and clanging. But I do not grieve. At least, not often. I will go back to the forest, and I will lie with the mate my mother has chosen for me, and I will bear him a child, so that my line and my people will go on, undamaged. Sometimes, it is true, in the dusk when the first star can be seen and the light is fading, I will think of her, and I will sigh and smile, and press my eyelids together for a moment. And then I will pick up my child, and I will lay him on my shoulder, and think of her no more.
Thunderlily was weeping, in the dusk under the tree, and wordlessly Donncan put out his hand and took hers, long and bony, with its odd-looking four-jointed fingers, and she clung to his hand, and laughed.
I love her too, he said.
I know. You will go back and you will be happy, the two of you, and one day you both will have a child or two, or three, or four, and once or twice a year you will glance at each other and say, I wonder how Thunderlily is, away in her garden?
I will think o’ ye often. I wish–
No, you do not. Happiness for me would be bitter unhappiness for you. This is so. You cannot change it, and I would not wish you to. You say that I saved you. Perhaps, in a way, there is some truth in that. If so, I am glad, for I saved you for her. You fear she does not love you. It is because of her beauty that you fear. And so you would harm her, your fear as cruel in its way as her fearlessness. If you are to be happy, you must not let fear blind you, but walk forward with courage and clear eyes …
Donncan was silent for a long moment. I will try, he said at last.
Then I will be happy too, she said, and turned her face to look at Stormstrider, who was regarding her with an intensity and darkness most unusual for one of his kind. Thunderlily smiled at him, her pale starry eyes shining and, taken by surprise, he smiled back, his whole face transfigured. The next moment he glanced away hiding his expression.
Thunderlily’s smile lingered. I wonder if he too has lived among humans, to feel so much and show it? Her mind-voice was so very soft Donncan barely heard it.
Isabeau soared high on the thermal winds, rejoicing as once again she left the white-hot cage of Brann’s spell.
She had chosen the form of a golden eagle with good reason, even though she knew Buba would be disappointed to be left behind, his broad, short wings not built for flying as far and fast as an eagle. Isabeau wished to see as much of the land as she could, though, and the strong wings and keen eyes of the eagle would carry her much further than those of an elf-owl.
She swooped round the whole basin of the river valley, seeing herds of satyricorns running wild in the woods, cluricauns playing through the trees, nisses diving and splashing in the rapids. She saw sand-lions basking on the dunes, and sea-stirks wrestling by the foamy water’s edge. Both had been hunted almost to extinction in her day, one because of the danger they presented to a growing colony, the other for their delicious fatty meat.
She soared far out over the sea and saw the Fairgean in their summer migration to the south, the warrior-lords riding the sinuous sea-serpents, their bodyguards following behind on horse-eels, the women swimming alongside, some pushing narrow canoes piled high with supplies.
All day Isabeau soared above the land, raking the horizons with her fierce golden eyes. Only once did she drop to earth, to
seize a donbeag in her talons and deftly disembowel it with her beak. She was hungry, and she had seen no coneys or rats or mice in her day’s flight. There was just enough of the human left in her to note the irony.
As dusk approached, Isabeau winged her way across the strand to a tall rocky crag that rose like a gnarled finger out of the sand. In winter, this peak was an island, but now in summer, with the tides at their lowest, it was surrounded on all sides with rolling white sands, littered with barnacle-encrusted timber, rocks, bones and dried seaweed. Writhing across one sand-dune was the long skeleton of a sea-serpent, its great fanged mouth wide open as if to bite the sky.
Isabeau had a reason for wanting to be perched on the tip of the rocky crag at dusk. She knew this was the day that Cuinn’s Ship arrived, the first landing of humankind in Eileanan. Thunderlily had come to this time, this moment, on purpose, wanting to see the land before humans came and wrought such change upon it, wanting to see the magical act that had changed the whole destiny of the planet forever.
Isabeau wanted to see it too.
She had been raised on the story. Her guardian Meghan had often told her the tale, pinching the fabric of her grey dress between the fingers of either hand and bringing the folds together. ‘It was a great spell,’ she had said in her rather wheezy old voice. ‘In their own land, which they called Alba, witches were hunted down and tortured and burnt to death on dreadful fires. The First Coven were determined to escape this horror and find a place where they could be safe and prosperous and worship their own gods. And so together they wrought this great, marvellous spell. They folded the very fabric o’ the universe, as I now fold my dress between my fingers, and they crossed an unfathomable distance in no more than the blink o’ an eye.’
As we crossed a thousand years in time, Isabeau thought to herself, and wondered if there were perhaps Old Ways crossing space as there were crossing the earth.
There were many tapestries woven to tell the story of the Great Crossing. They all showed a ship bursting through a flaming rent in the fabric of the sky, and crashing down upon the sand. Behind them was this tall finger of stone, pointing directly up at the first star of evening. The passengers on board that ship had sought refuge on the high rock, and Cuinn the Wise, leader of the First Coven, had died there this very night. It was said you could still see the very spot where he had died, for white heather grew there, the only place on Eileanan where such a plant could be found. He had carried it in his buttonhole from his homeland, it was said, and it had fallen to the ground when he was laid down, and taken root.
There were many more stories. Stories about how Sian’s Ship had been separated from Cuinn’s Ship in the Crossing, and landed on the far side of Eileanan, not knowing the fate of their companions. The descendants of each ship had settled and fought the native faeries, and built castles and walled towns to protect themselves, and in time had flourished and spread. And it was not until Cuinn’s great-great-grandson, Hartley the Explorer, had built a fleet of ships and gone exploring round the coastline of Eileanan that they had met with the descendants of Sian the Storm-Rider, Rùraich the Searcher, Seinneadair the Singer, and Berhtilde the Bright Warrior-Maid, and their followers, all of whom had settled the north coast of Eileanan, never suspecting there was another thriving human settlement on the far side of the impassable mountains.
There had been thirteen witches in total in the First Coven, and each had brought friends and family and servants, horses and dogs, goats and sheep, pigs, geese and chickens, sacks of seeds and boxes of seedlings, and trunks and trunks of books and tools and instruments and weapons. With them had come the invisible marauders, rats and mice and viruses, which had done more to wipe out the native inhabitants than their swords and pistols and arrows.
Isabeau knew all this history as well as she knew her own. She knew what incalculable damage the First Coven had done to the world they had pinpointed on a star-map because it was the world most like the one they had left behind. Yet Isabeau could not find it in her to be sorry. She knew no other world but Eileanan, and she loved it passionately. The First Coven had tried to build a world where they could be free. They had never meant to enslave others, or to destroy what had been there before them. The motto of the Coven of Witches had always been ‘Do as thy will, as long as thou harm none’. It was a grand ambition, and a thousand years in the future, people still strived to live up to its spirit, sometimes succeeding, and sometimes failing, as people always seemed destined to do.
Dusk fell like a silver snuffer. Then, without any warning, it happened. The sky above the sand suddenly tore across with a gasp of fire, and out of this blazing tunnel sailed a great ship, billowing with white sails from its four masts, and flying flags which flapped in a storm from another world. With it came a great slap of wild grey water, a swirl of foam, a howl of wind. The ship rode this swirl of sea down, down, down, to crash into the sand-dunes, the ship keeling over under the weight of its suddenly limp and dragging sails. Isabeau’s keen ears could hear screaming and the sound of cracking and splintering wood.
She took flight, soaring overhead. She watched as the thousand-odd people crammed on board were flung about violently, trapped under falling spars and sails, and crushed by rolling barrels and tumbling crates. Horses screamed in the hold. Sheep and goats bleated in terror, and a broken crate released a flock of pigeons into the sky.
The travellers from another world worked rapidly to return order to the ship, but fire had broken out in the stern, the consequence of a broken barrel of gunpowder. A young man and a tall dark-haired woman were shouting at each other. On the deck lay an elderly man wrapped in a cloak. Isabeau swooped down, curious. She saw the strong aquiline nose and olive skin of her guardian, and knew the old man must be Cuinn the Wise. The young man must be his son Owein, and that tall supercilious woman Fóghnan the Thistle, who would leave this beleaguered ship and take her followers to the land she would name Arran. In time, Owein’s son Balfour, the first human child born in Eileanan, would murder her and be murdered in turn by Fóghnan’s daughter, Margrit. So would begin the feud that would not be healed for more than a thousand years, when Lachlan MacCuinn and Iain MacFóghnan became friends, and swore to put the age-old rivalry aside.
When Isabeau changed shape, she did not merely assume the look of a certain creature, she became that creature. As Isabeau, the Keybearer of the Coven, she abhorred the eating of meat. As Owl, she would eagerly snatch up a scurrying mouse, and think nothing of coughing up a little pellet of claw and fur later. As Snow-Lion, she would use her strong jaws to disembowel a little deer, and lick the blood off her whiskers with great satisfaction afterwards. As Eagle, she could watch a long chain of weeping, exhausted and frightened people struggle across the sand, carrying what they could from the burning remains of their ship, with little more than a detached interest and a keen eye for the rats and mice scurrying away over the sand. She enjoyed a dainty feast and then circled once more over the settlers as they took refuge from the eerie fall of night on the rocky crag that would, in time, be called Cuinn’s Isle.
Isabeau was fascinated by their archaic clothes, their strange incomprehensible speech, and their unexpected lack of magic. She was most surprised to see them lighting fires with tinder and flint, and not with their minds, and illuminating their way with smoky torches and a few simple glass lanterns, instead of conjuring witch’s light as she would have done.
She had always been taught that the First Coven were sorcerers of incredible strength and power, but apart from Ahearn Horse-Laird’s obvious ability to calm terrified horses with a touch and a whisper, she could see no overt sign of their magical ability. She recognised Brann the Raven for his dark hair and mesmeric eyes, and even in the shape of an eagle felt a little thrill as she recognised the red hair and beard of her own ancestor, Faodhagan the Red. He was working side by side with his twin sister Sorcha to unload boxes of tools and weapons, and she was pleased when he turned and calmed the hunger of the flames with a broa
d gesture of his hand. She would have expected he and Sorcha together to have been able to quell the fire altogether, however, and thought to herself that perhaps, over time, the magical talents of humans had sharpened and focused, an interesting theory she would like to discuss with Gwilym and the other sorcerers some time.
At last it was too dark for even her keen eagle eyes to see, and she knew she had been too long out of her own shape. She turned and flew back towards the green hill with its crown of standing stones, finding it in the darkness by the bright eye of the fire Dide had lit by the pool. She landed lightly and let herself fall back into her own shape, feeling the usual bone-deep weariness fall upon her.
With the weariness came Brann’s compulsion, crueller and sharper than ever. She was able to wonder if it was so intense because Brann was here now, in this world, and glanced out to the other small red eyes she could see in the distance, the bonfires by which the new arrivals huddled, frightened and homesick. Would he be able to sense something out there, some link between them, some inkling that out in the darkness was a woman whose soul was riven with longing to raise him from the dead? It was said Brann had the power of prophecy, and that he had foreseen he would live again in a vision. Could it be her presence here, burning with desire and madness, that gave him the presentiment? If she had not come to this time, chasing a stolen rìgh, would he perhaps never have conceived the idea of living twice? If so, he might not have spent his life studying the secrets of life and death, and he would not have written the spell in the Book of Shadows. Then she would not have read it, nor Johanna either, and none of the last few terrible days would have happened. She would not be here now, staring out towards Brann in the darkness. It made her brain reel, thinking of it. Meghan had always said events cast a shadow before them. Who had cast this shadow, Brann or herself?
Naked, weeping, Isabeau crept into the circle of stones and found the long shape of Dide, sleeping wrapped in his blanket. She crouched beside him and shook him gently until he at last awoke with a cry of surprise.
