She rolled back her head on the snow. On the hill side near them a cave was opening. ‘We must go in there,’ she murmured. ‘We must go out of moonlight. But I cannot…’
It was bliss to cease even the little effort of speech. She had no desire. Sure, and this is what the angels feel.
Mutely the man knelt over her, hiding her face from the Moon. He watched her, but she did not move.
It began to snow again. He took off his chaplet of laurel and laid it on her hand. He picked her up, and took her into the cave.
From the hilltop a figure was climbing down after them. He was a dark man, dressed in a tricorn, a muffler, and a long dark gray cóta mór.
The dark man stepped down to the cave-mouth. For a time he was standing there. Then with a turn of his head he strode forward.
* * *
FAR AHEAD, deep in the hill side, among the warmth of the stones, the man carried the woman. The cave stretching on before him, and he following it, down and up again, until it was ending, and he coming out the far side, into a green meadow, into a grianan. There was the tang of the Sea in the air, and the mewing of sea-birds.
And it was bright there, with the glow of early evenings or of late nights; the sky ended in a pale band over the Sea, of rose and violet wherein the stars were drowned. The Sea was still, with expectancy, and the light of the sky shone off it green as copper. The land down to the Sea was covered with long dark grasses, bowing to the Sea, down to the cobbles of the surf.
The man nestled the body of the woman down into the grass. He straightened her coat, her breeches, and her braided hair. He wiped a bit of dirt off her cheek, and stroked her dry, cold brow, and murmured, ‘Agatha…’
29. Of the Grianan
ON THE FAR SIDE of the hill Master Aengus found a little hut built above the Sea. He rapped on the door with a stick.
‘Who’s there?’ was asked.
‘Someone is hurt,’ said he.
An old fishwife peered out of the dark door. She was offering him no pleasant failte. But looking him up and down, she grumbled, ‘You look well enough.’
‘It’s not me who’s needing your help. It’s my lady, lying yonder on the hill. Please, can you not help us?’
‘Ah, very well then,’ she said, none too surely. Drawing on a shawl she followed him up the sands.
For a long while the woman looked over the fallen Agatha, and she said never a word. Then she fixed Aengus with her eye.
‘Bring her along,’ she said.
Light and yielding was the girl in his arms. The rising sea-breeze caught at the stray hairs escaping from her braid, about the nape of her neck. Her cheek was so pale it was blue. It was strange not to hear her coughing.
The crone bade him place his lady on the hut’s one cot, covered over with dried sea weeds. How did this come to be, she was asking him.
‘It fell out on the journey,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know the tale of it too well. She was hurt.’
‘She is dying.’
The old fishwife paced round her cauldron where it hung on a chain, and round the dark embers of the fire. ‘I am old and weak,’ she was muttering, ‘What do you want of me? I cannot save her. No one can.’
‘Ah,’ said Master Aengus.
Not a tear, not a solitary tear, did Master Aengus shed. He only was nodding his head. All his life he’d been seeking wisdom, ever since his seventh year, when a beautiful lady had taught him the Moon’s first name. Now he knew that Sorrow was her name.
He picked up Agatha’s chill hand and placed it over her breast. He turned and left the hut.
* * *
THE OLD WOMAN went out of her hut after a time. Down the beach she found him sitting on a rock, looking at the waves.
The waves came and went and came again, eternally, and it was not hard to see what way his thoughts ran.
‘It’s sorry I am,’ said the fishwife, ‘for my rudeness. But it was plain truth I spoke.’ It might have been a stone she spoke to, he was answering her so little.
‘I’m Grain,’ said she. ‘People come to me when there’s nowhere else for them to go. I can help in little things. Sometimes in large things, too. But I cannot save your lady. Maybe,’ she was adding, after a bit, ‘maybe you can.’
His head turned, slowly, and his eyes looked over his shoulder to her.
‘Bring back the Sun, Master Aengus. It’s brightness and warmth your lady is needing now. In this Night she’ll die as sure as grass is green.’
He bent his head.
‘I can’t bring back the Sun.’
‘If it isn’t yourself, then no one can.’
‘Once before,’ he said, ‘I tried. That was near the death of me then, and look on me now! The half of what I did before would be beyond me now.’
Old Grain nodded. She put her hand upon his shoulder. Then she turned to leave.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Before you go, tell me how you would have had me bring back the Sun.’
* * *
DOWN THE COAST in a grassy inch, a stream was curling about a little island covered with quince trees, pear trees, and wild roses. The trees were in blossom again: it was that mild on the skirts of the Sea. Master Aengus waded into the smell of all that blooming, that weighted down his heart. Dripping wet he was, climbing up the bank.
And he heard a singing down the way.
In a grassy glen a girl was sitting on a stone seat, weaving blooms together. At her side were perched a swallow and an owl. Her back was to Master Aengus, and for a time he stood watching her.
She was wearing a white woolen kirtle, and her arms were bare and rosy. Her hair was a cloud of black threads floating on the breezes about her face. There was a grace in the way she held herself, like a girl who is knowing how to dance.
The owl and swallow hooted and chirped and flew off into the bushes. The girl turned of a moment, her eyes widening at the sight of the half-wild creature across the glen. She dropped her basket.
‘Stay, don’t run!’ he shouted after her. ‘I’m no stranger, Mielusine! I am Aengus – Aengus that you knew.’
Mielusine peered back through the branches. She looked at the man.
His eyes were wild and yellowed, his cheeks cut, hair dirty and tangled, beard bushy, clothes feathered and ragged, hands blackened, feet bare, nails but broken talons. Still, it had the look of him, somehow.
‘Yes,’ said he. ‘It’s myself you rescued from the abbey.’
‘And Agatha?’
‘In a hut kept by an old woman on the strand. She’s resting, but is ill.’
‘Cannot Grain be helping her?’
He looked away. ‘What do you do here?’
‘Grain gave me this orchard to tend. Here I’m growing flowers and tending to the trees. Women come to me wanting Grain’s help, and I give them dried flowers, and baskets of red fruit to entice their sweethearts. And when they win them, then they are blood-wed, as they say, though their marriage may be lasting a life, a year, or a moon.’
Then they sat on the seat, and spoke for a time about this and that.
‘I only wanted to know,’ he told her, ‘the mystery of love.’
‘When you know the mystery, you have no love,’ she said.
‘I only wanted to master it: when I loved, whom and how much.’
‘When you have mastery, you have no love,’ she said.
‘I only wanted forgiveness, for the wrong I did her.’
‘When you ask forgiveness for your passion, you have no love,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘Did Agatha tell you this?’
‘Ah, it’s not what she knows,’ said the dancer in answer. ‘My bare body told me this, when Vasquez touched it.’ She reddened, as though for shame; turned her face away. After a bit she was asking, ‘And you now, Master Aengus: she brought back your memory?’
‘Yes,’ said he.
‘And now she is dying. Is there nothing to be done?’
‘Only Day might cure her. I must go down the
well by the dun.’
The dancer shuddered. ‘It’s a horrible place.’
‘Will you help me? Can you?’
‘I might. But Master Aengus, yourself you are half starved. Have you strength enough to wake the Sun?’
He lifted his hands, and the ragged sleeves fell away from his wrists, showing the dark thin lines of his blood. Across the one wrist was the crescent of a scar, faded and tired. ‘I have all of this,’ he was saying, ‘and nought else.’
Mielusine was for a long time still. ‘You’re not like Agatha told me,’ she said at last. ‘If I said I’d followed you, and that I took the mask from the place where Agatha hid it, and that I have it still: what would you ask me?’
‘The White Hind is dead,’ he answered. ‘She died bloody murdered on my lap, a hundred and one moons ago.’ He looked on her. His eyes were hard. ‘You have the mask?’
‘It’s what I told you. Shall I don it?’
‘Do you want to?’ he asked.
‘I’m asking, is all.’
He answered, ‘Mielusine, Agatha is my lady. But if you wear the mask I will fall in love with you again, and stay here with you always, or go, if I go, only at your bidding.’
‘Then you wouldn’t be going into the dry well and braving its perils to bring back Day?’
‘Only if you asked it of me.’
‘No,’ she answered, ‘I do not believe you, Master Aengus. You are a part of Agatha, and she is part of you.’
She was so serene that he said, ‘I might have loved you had I known you. You are like some earthly goddess now, and worthy of all Lady Agatha’s teachings, the way you have gone past them all.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I’m only a dancer. But I can help you, I think, a little, with this.’
Out of her pocket she drew the leag lorgmhar, smooth and rounded as a hen’s egg.
30. Of Aengus in the Sea
OVER THE SEA was a bluff, driven up by thick slabs of stone; and the waves foamed over those rocks, and gulls and rooks wheeled in those airs. A pile of rubble stood on the bluff. Once it was a strong man’s dun. Folk said the Druids built it before the first grass grew.
Before its gates the well was sunk.
It was dry, that well, a low circle of the same gray stones, bleached by the casts of birds. Deep in the well the stones were black as hearthstones. And in the brightness of that county, with the sky bright on the glassy sea, Master Aengus looked down into the well. Dark and black it was. He thought he saw a little light far down in it flickering, like a candle. But there was no sight of the beast.
Aengus let down into the darkness a ladder of rope. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
Grain held a lantern in her hand. Mielusine was cloaked with a red mantle against the sea-breeze. The dancer nodded.
‘Och, my heart trembles for the two of you,’ muttered the old woman. ‘Are you sure you’ve taken all measures?’
Half was he swallowed up beneath the stones. Ghastly pale was his face in the lantern light; and his jaw was set.
‘I will do it,’ he told her.
The fishwife pressed into his palm a bit of trefoil.
‘If it’s hot you’re feeling, eat a stalk of this. But save enough for coming back.’ He closed his fist about the green.
And she was handing over to him the lantern, and he was going down into the well. Mielusine went after, bearing a basket of quinces.
Grain’s face shrank with the closing of the mouth of the well above them, but the moaning of wind was growing.
Deep down in the well the ladder ended, but that was near enough the bottom so they could climb down the rest of the way. The sides of the well were rough stone, hard gravel, and broken bits of pottery. It was dry as bone.
‘Aengus,’ whispered the dancer, ‘I’m afraid for you.’
Before them a tunnel led down into the earth. They followed it in silence, to where the tunnel widened, showing three dark, gaping mouths.
And stretched out before the three openings was a thing as big as a horse and white as dead bones: Henwen, the monstrous sow of men’s nightmares and fears.
Such a thing you never have seen in life. Her jaws could have gulped down a man’s head. Two of the cave mouths she lay across, growling, her breath rough as yew-bark. Directly the two entered her cave she started up and snarled and snapped at them. But Mielusine scattered quinces before her, and held out in her hand the white stone.
The huge sow snorted at the fruit, but she licked at Mielusine’s hand, and nibbled daintily at the quinces.
‘Do you see, Master Aengus?’ said Mielusine, patting Henwen’s great bobbing head. ‘She’s just hungry, after all, half-starved for love.’
But Master Aengus was already stealing down the tunnel Grain had told him of, moving swiftly in the black and brightness, catching and feeling the walls close around him.
Mielusine took the lantern and went back up the ladder. She and Grain rolled it up and carried it away.
The small, dark shapes of the two women walked slowly down the broad beach under the weight of the bright clouds in the sky, back to the hut.
Mielusine glanced back. ‘Who is that,’ she asked, ‘standing over the well?’
‘Where?’ asked Grain. The old woman shaded her eyes against the gleam of the waves and squinted. ‘Ah, but my dim eyes can hardly see a thing in all this gloom.’
‘He is standing over the well,’ answered the maid. ‘A tall, thin man hidden in a tricorn and a dark gray cóta mór.’
‘Could it be our Aengus?’
‘No,’ answered the Maid, ‘no, but it seems I know the fellow.’
Fergus, the dark man, watched the women pass. When the coast was clear, he stepped up to the well, and peered deep down inside.
* * *
IN THE HUT it was dark but for the dim glow of the embers. Mielusine and the old fishwife crouched over the cot, tending to the dying woman. From outside the hut came the sounds of wind and rising waves.
‘She is weaker now,’ said Grain. ‘She has been unwell that long a time.’
‘I shouldn’t have left them,’ said Mielusine.
All at once a great crash sounded from without, and the sod roof shook.
‘What wave is it?’ cried Mielusine, covering Agatha with her body.
Grain answered in a hushed voice: ‘He is there.’
The dancer rose, and catching her skirts round her legs with her hands, stepped outside the hut.
Agatha moaned, and twisted in her place. Grain had taken off the damp, mouldy shirt and breeches, ragged from the thorns of the wood, and dressed her in one of Mielusine’s shifts, and covered her with blankets. The old woman took a bit of straw, lit it off the embers and held it over the bed.
Agatha’s face was pale and flushed by turns, and the sweat standing on her brow, and her teeth chattering with cold, in spite of all the blankets covering her.
Then the straw burnt out, and shadows swallowed up the sight of her.
* * *
OUT ON THE SANDS the dancer twirled her skirts with her hand. She stopped on the cobbles of rocks above the wrinkling lace hem of the waves.
‘Hello, Mr Vasquez,’ she said.
The dark man standing at the well-side bowed to her with an ironic flourish.
‘Will you dance for me, Maid Snowflake?’ he asked.
‘Surely,’ she answered, ‘I’ll do that, Mr Vasquez, after we talk a word or two.’
‘What is it you’d be wanting to know?’
‘Why you’re here, and why you wear the mask you wear, and who you were, and who you are, and where it is you’re going, Mr Vasquez,’ she answered him.
He laughed, and ran his fingers over the fabric of the mask. ‘It’s not so much,’ he said, ‘you’re asking.’
* * *
‘THERE WAS A PIECE of the Sun,’ said the fishwife, sitting rocking over the lady in the darkened hut. ‘It was the very heart of the Sun, to tell by the heat of it. It fell into the Sea yonder; for the lon
gest time we lay buried by mist singing up out of the boiling sea; lobsters and crabs were tossed up cooked onto the cobbles and sand.
‘In time it cleared,’ she sang, soft and gentle like. ‘And some of the boys went out onto the water, to see what they could see. They dove into the deep. But only darkness was there, and a black heat rising from the seabed. The way we knew it had gone into the Earth, swallowed up forever. But later, in the darkness, we were seeing strange lights flashing out of the well up by the old dun.’
And another crash sounded from outside the hut, like a fearsome wave tearing round all the coasts of the Innis Fodhla.
A wind tore through the cracks of the hut, and the fire in the embers roused and sprang up.
Agatha’s dim lips opened, and she breathed, ‘Aengus…’
‘He has found it,’ whispered Grain.
* * *
THE WARM WET SPUME was draining away from Vasquez’ dark gray cóta mór, and Mielusine felt her gown clinging to her through the wet. In spite of the fearsomeness of the wave, he by his singing, and she by the quickness of her feet and the weight of the white stone, had held off being washed out into the deep.
‘Tell me then, and tell me true,’ said the dancer.
He answered, ‘Well, and I will.’ He held up his hand, considering; and it was plain that his thoughts went into the past and he was forgetting the well and what Master Aengus did there; and that was just what the dancer was desiring.
‘Once of a time,’ said the dark man, ‘old Tadgh and Maille May were visited: that fell out on an evening just at the moment the first stars come forth. A woman and a man, wrapped up in their cóta mór, shawls, mufflers, bonnets and hats, asked the cottagers if they hadn’t a boy, a dark lad, living with them? And they went on and told the shape of your Aengus, Maid Snowflake, to the last feature and trait. Tadgh and Maille May looked each other in the eye, and didn’t know what to say. When Aengus himself, a tall lanky boy, appeared in the doorway next to them. And it was just his seventh birthday, or near it, if you trust what the calendar says.
‘Then the strange couple were much relieved,’ said Vasquez, ‘and they told how they had heard such good things of the cottagers, and they said that they were the best of parents, “and we have here a lovely child,” they went on, “and we know of nobody who’d be better at raising it than yourselves,” and they handed over to them another boy. Of course, old Tadgh and Maille May fell in love with the child from the start, and raised it after Aengus, and those two got on so well together, that in after years they were swearing blood brotherhood, and sharing all the secrets in each other’s hearts, and went under the sod as one, and were of the same mind in all things; all things, that is, save for one. And it was said the second boy was a Tinker’s child, the way he was dark, with a red, red lip, and I know the tale well, having heard it enough, the way the child was myself.’