Nocturne

by Louise Cooper

  Stead spread his hands in a dramatic gesture, and roared: “Light!”

  Mental energy surged from three minds together, and all around the square, the dark flamboy-poles flared into sputtering life. Illumination was hurled across the stage as the entire scene lifted from gloom to startling brilliance, and Esty caught Indigo’s hand in a quick, tight clasp that wordlessly communicated their shared triumph. Then Stead turned, and called out across the square.

  “Greetings, my friends! Greetings to you, and welcome to this revel! Tonight we bring you music and song, and laughter and tears—tonight, we, the Brabazon Fairplayers, will make your dreams come true!”

  He was magnificent. Undaunted by the bizarre setting, the emptiness and silence that gaped before him where his audience should be, he had stepped instantly and powerfully into his place as the consummate showman. He might not have learned the skills that would enable him to conjure illusions from the fabric of this world; but suddenly Steadfast Brabazon was the undisputed revel-master around whom all else must revolve. Now he spun on his heel, holding out one arm, and Esty ran forward. Glimpsing her face, Indigo saw taut fear in her expression, but she took her father’s hand and dropped a sweeping curtsy to the imaginary crowd; then her voice rang loud and clear over the square.

  “Good people all, we bring you greeting, And welcome you to this night’s meeting!” It was the traditional opening chant usually performed by little Piety, and Indigo wetted dry lips, glancing sidelong at Forth. He didn’t look at her, but he was holding his pipe, flexing his fingers as though in preparation …

  “Gather round, all grief forsaking,” Esty chanted, “And join us in our merrymaking!”

  Stead made a quick gesture, and Indigo and—to her intense relief—Forth added their voices to the chorus.

  “For we can dance and we can sing, And so to you our gifts we bring, With mirth and music, jest and play, To wish you joy this Revel day!”

  For one breathtaking moment, as her lips formed the words, Indigo heard the swell of new voices, children’s voices, raised with theirs in the chant like ghosts from another world. Her heart skipped with an erratic thump that made her gasp—and then there was no time for further thought, for Stead was stamping the beat, one, two, and harp and pipe swung into the lively skip of the opening dance.

  Indigo’s fingers flew across the harp strings, and her mind whirled with a new, eager surge as Esty leaped and whirled to the music. This was Bruhome—this was the Autumn Revels, and the Brabazon Fairplayers were on stage, to give the performance of their lives! And at any moment the other players would come in, and the music would swell to its full, joyful volume—hear it! she exhorted herself, make it happen, will it to happen!

  Suddenly there was a second pipe playing, threading a vivid harmony with Forth’s tune. Indigo’s face broke into a triumphant grin as the pipe was echoed by the ghostly strains of a fiddle, a hurdy-gurdy, the thump and rattle of tambourines. Yes! It was coming, it was beginning, gathering power and momentum. Her eyes snapped open again and she saw that Esty now had a tambourine in each hand, and her begrimed shirt and trousers had been transformed into an embroidered costume, the skirt flying about her thighs as she danced. Stead was clapping, calling the figures for a strip-the-willow as though his invisible audience were joining in the dance; and Indigo imagined the empty square filled with upturned faces, people shouting, singing, while others bobbed through the crowd in a weaving figure-of-eight. For an instant the torchlit square seemed to lurch and flicker, and she thought she glimpsed—no, she saw them, like ghosts in a distorting mirror; the throng, the revelers—

  Suddenly Esty gave a wild, ecstatic yell and leaped from the stage, vaulting over the row of tiny flamboys to land lightly on the ground. Spinning like some impish sprite, she whirled across the square, then held out her hands as though to an imaginary partner. And suddenly a masked man, dressed in leaves and with a tall, antlered headdress was dancing with her, their crossed arms linked as they stamped and jumped together.

  Forth’s eyes widened, and he shouted to Stead, a word Indigo didn’t know but which sounded like “Kirnoen!” Other forms were materializing around the dancing couple; Indigo glimpsed tiny, humanlike figures with foxes’ heads, a beautiful woman with the eyes and wings of a hawk, another brown-faced horned man—

  Stead swung round and, cutting across the music, began to clap out a new beat. “Change tune!” he bellowed. “Hunters to The Harvest—NOW!”

  The pipe’s shrilling note veered sharply, then swung into a new and more urgent melody. Indigo swiftly followed, the harp thrumming out the rhythm of a galloping horse as she recognized the song; and seconds later the ghost-instruments, the fiddle, the hurdy-gurdy, the drum, added their emphatic support. The antlered figure caught Esty about the waist, lifting her high into the air, and suddenly the square seemed to be filled with dancing figures—masked men and women, small, eagerly jumping dogs, and a myriad of creatures whose forms celebrated both the human and the animal. A cry went up from massed throats, a mingling of human shouts and animal barks, shrieks and yelpings, and Forth, his face afire with wild excitement, yelled over and again, like a war-chant, “Kirnoen! Kirnoen!”

  Suddenly Indigo remembered. Kirnoen—it was the south-westerners’ name for the wild huntsmen, the supernatural servants of the Earth Mother who rode out under the blood-red orb of the Harvest Moon to cleanse the land after the last days of gleaning and prepare it for its winter sleep. They had such mythic figures, too, in the Southern Isles, though they rode under a different name; and they were celebrated at the great hunting feasts when the first frosts came and the great winds began to blow out of the south …

  A cry quivered on her tongue, screaming at her to give it voice. Images surged into her mind: of Carn Caille, her long-lost home; of the tundra, and the great forests, and the winding horns echoing their litany to the sun that blazed on the horizon like the Goddess’s pulsing, life-bringing heart. She could hear the baying of the great hounds, the snort and thunder of the horses as they breasted through the bracken like ships cleaving the sea, the twang and thwack of bows, the joyous shouts of the hunters—and the cry burst from her lips in an ululating scream of release and fierce triumph. The harp fell from her hands, its protesting discord lost as the leaping, whirling celebrants answered her, and she felt the change coming, felt herself growing taller, her hair cascading like a stream in spate, her rough garments stripped away to leave her clad in leaves and in light and in the warm, rippling earth. Her eyes had turned to gold and silver, and the cry went on and on, pouring in a torrent from her throat as new forms erupted from the square’s blazing night to join in the wild dance. Huge brown and chestnut horses reared and pranced; lean grey deerhounds bayed a deep, melodious chorus, and the vivid, shouting laughter of the Southern Isles hunters, brown-skinned from sun and salt winds, rang like bells to echo from the empty houses and shake the square.

  “Indigo! Indigo!” Someone was calling her name, and though from another time, another world, she knew the voice, Stead’s stunned face and corona of red hair meant nothing to her as she turned her golden eyes on him. She felt the power within her rise anew, and Stead fell back as though buffeted by a gale. Part of her mind tried to reach out to him, but another part, by far the stronger, was beyond such considerations; beyond even her own control. She didn’t know what he’d seen; all she knew was the glorious energy that was rising in her as the music swelled and the dancing celebrants leaped and whirled in the square. Faster and yet faster—and suddenly the joyous noise was punctuated with shrieks, whistles, screams, roars, as out of the alleys and the side streets, from doors and windows, a new throng of celebrants came racing and tumbling. Indigo’s heart leaped as she recognized their own illusions, the creatures which had driven off the phantom wolves. Massive bears, brown as the forests or white as the icebound polar wastes; giant owls; chimerae—even the Scatterers were there, whirling like dervishes and screeching their maniacal delight. Her vision seemed to bur
n into spectra beyond human limits, and in the middle of the mad dance she saw Esty, partnered now by a giant shadow that changed with stunning speed from man to horse to cat to sprite to hound. The girl seemed to blaze with a rainbow aura, an earthbound star of real and physical life among the illusions; she was laughing, her head thrown back, and from her upraised hands streamers of light flew across the square to explode like celebration flares among the flam boys.

  And then, in the heart of the bobbing, leaping throng, Indigo saw another star, another blaze of life. It was moving, threading its way towards the stage, but erratically, as though torn between fear and desire. A wild, irrational hope clutched at her—whatever this might be, it was no illusion. It lived: her heightened vision could see the life pulsing within it; her heightened senses could feel the beating heart, the roiling consciousness—and suddenly she knew, knew without a thread of doubt, who came towards her.

  She turned, and a rush of wind flung itself across the stage, swirling her cloak of leaves, whipping her hair. Stead—but he was gone into the dance, carried away like a twig on a tumbling current. Forth—but there was only his reed-pipe, abandoned on the boards. She was alone. And when she looked back, the pulsing light was poised at the foot of the stage—and within the coruscating spectrum that betrayed the living, breathing flesh was Grimya.

  Mad eyes stared into her own. Grimya did not know her; yet the she-wolf recognized the golden-eyed creature that Indigo had become, and her hatred was distorted by fear and by another emotion, as yet unrealized but struggling for existence. She drew back her lips, exposing fangs that drooled hungrily. And then she sprang up on to the stage.

  They stood two paces apart, facing each other, neither moving. Indigo felt the red surge of Grimya’s mind probing her. Hating. Ravening. Yearning to feed, and yearning for revenge. And yet somewhere beyond the demented glare, beyond the warped consciousness, something else was pleading to be heard; something that cried out in pain and misery, heal me!

  Grimya … Indigo projected the wolf’s name with all the strength she could muster; all her love, all her protectiveness. Suddenly the boards of the stage dissolved away; there was grass beneath her bare feet, and a tree towered at her back, its leaves molten gold in the torchlight. The wolf began to tremble and a snarl died stillborn in her throat.

  “Grimya.” This time she spoke aloud, and with the gentle authority of utter confidence. The voice that came from her lips wasn’t her own, but she knew it well. She had the power; she knew it now. She was the power. The power to take control. The power to heal.

  Ah, my little sister of the forests. She dropped to one knee, and a golden-brown hand, her own hand and yet not her own, stretched out towards the shuddering wolf. Know me, beloved one, and come to me. Be healed. Be whole again.

  Grimya whimpered. As the being who was Indigo reached out, she bared her teeth again and tried to snap at the outstretched fingers—but paused. Her shivering redoubled, and for a moment Grimya’s sane, anguished mind stared out in desperation from the manic lupine eyes.

  P … please … The weak mental cry struggled across a vast gulf. P … please help me …

  The golden-brown hand touched her head, and a massive shudder shook the wolf from jaw to tail. Indigo felt a violent crimson pulsing, and a black core beneath the crimson, vampiric, malignant. Disgust and contempt filled her, and for an instant she seemed to be looking down from a great height at the tableau of herself and Grimya, seeing them through other eyes, another mind. A rod of blinding light flared within her; her fingers flexed once, and Grimya howled like a banshee as the black core, the cancer, the evil fragment of the demon’s influence, disintegrated. And as it shattered out of existence, the scene about Indigo seemed to twist and collapse in on itself. Impossible colors erupted across her line of sight; the world splintered to fragments, reformed—

  And she was kneeling on the bare boards, sobbing as she hugged Grimya with all her strength, while the wolf licked her face, whining—

  Whining. Shock made her skin crawl as she realized that Grimya’s frightened whimpers were a lone sound against a backdrop of total silence. Quickly, pulse pounding, Indigo looked up.

  The square was empty. The flamboys still burned on their tall poles, but the wild, dancing celebrants had vanished. There was no music; there were no shouts and cries and yammerings. Only the isolated figures of Stead, Esty and Forth, standing helplessly on the cobbles and staring about them in bemusement.

  Very slowly, Indigo rose to her feet. Grimya pressed hard against her thigh, still too shocked to speak or even project any mental message. What had happened? Surely Esty and Forth hadn’t banished their illusions? Or—

  The thought collapsed as from the darkness of the street that led to the river-bridge came echoing, measured footsteps.

  “Stead!” Indigo’s voice cracked across the square as premonition rapidly shifted towards certainty. “Bring the others! Get back to the stage—quickly!”

  All three Brabazons had heard her, and they came running. Forth jumped up on to the boards then turned to help Stead, while Indigo hauled Esty hastily over the footlights.

  “What’s amiss?” Esty was breathless and flushed. “Everything just vanished! And—” She stopped, her eyes widening as she saw Grimya for the first time. “Indigo—” she cried fearfully.

  “It’s all right.” Indigo cast a swift glance at the she-wolf. “There’s no time to explain now, Esty, but Grimya’s safe.” Esty obviously hadn’t seen what had taken place on the stage; but as Stead scrambled up, Forth caught Indigo’s eye for a brief instant, and she knew immediately that he had witnessed the scene. The look he gave her was angry, but the anger was tinged with uncertainty and a measure of fear.

  Stead, however, was oblivious to the momentary silent exchange. He clambered upright, and turned to stare at the street’s dark maw. “If that’s what I think it might be …” he began grimly.

  Indigo was still suffering from the aftermath of her experience with Grimya: her senses felt distorted and her mind sluggish and unclear. She had to pull her wits together … “I suspect it is,” she said, breaking through her confusion with an effort. “And it’s sooner than I anticipated.”

  Esty had quietly crossed the stage—carefully avoiding Grimya—to take Forth’s hand. Stead treated them all to a fierce glare.

  “Well, then. Time for the second part of the show to begin.”

  “Not yet.” Indigo gazed at the street entrance. The footfalls were louder now, though they had slowed. And she could feel eyes, an almost tangible sensation, regarding them from the darkness.

  A shadow moved out from the street’s maw. It approached the first of the flamboy-poles, and as it passed by, the torch guttered and went out. It passed the second flare; that, too, died. Esty made a small, nervous sound, and Grimya whimpered.

  By the light of the remaining flamboys Indigo could see now that the shadow was human in shape, but without feature or substance. It was a silhouette, devoid of detail. But still she could feel the cruel intensity of its gaze.

  A third torch flickered and died, then a fourth. The demon approached the stage, and the tiny footlights began to gutter.

  “No!” Indigo said sharply. She saw Forth and Esty shut their eyes, concentrating, willing; and the row of lights brightened once more. The demon halted.

  Then the thin, abysmal voice that she remembered so well from the rotting hall said, with sweet and pitying contempt:

  “I applaud you all, and I thank you for the entertainment. But oh, you are all such fools.”

  •CHAPTER•XXI•

  “Fools, is it?” Stead’s voice exploded into the deathly silence that had descended. His face was reddening, and a vein in his neck pulsed with suppressed rage. “We’ll see about that, you aborted whore’s-get! We’ll see who’s the fool!”

  “Da!” Esty tugged at his sleeve, horrified by his complete lack of caution. “Don’t provoke it!”

  Stead shook her off and swaggered to the fro
nt of the stage, staring down at the shadow with fists clenched on hips. “Give me back my daughter!” he roared. “Or, by all the good harvests the Mother sends, I’ll see your fragments scattered on those cobbles and fed to your own squalling followers!”

  Soft laughter issued from the shadow’s invisible mouth. “Steadfast Brabazon, you are truly a revel-master,” it said. “You will nourish me well when I feed on you. Better than the feeble souls of Bruhome. Better than their crops, and their animals, and their children.” It glided to one side, until it stood directly opposite Indigo. The silhouetted head tilted fractionally downwards, and Indigo felt Grimya shift behind her. A thin, fearful snarl bubbled in the she-wolf’s throat, and again the demon chuckled.

  “Your companions found, and your friend freed from my little spell. I congratulate you, Indigo; you have achieved a great deal, and learned much about yourself in the process, I think. How sad that it has all been to no purpose.”

  “Oh, there’s a purpose,” Indigo said icily. “And our show isn’t done yet.”

  “More entertainment? How gratifying. It will cheer me further in my unhappy sojourn. And might I enquire”—now the featureless head lifted again, and Indigo felt the near-physical intensity of its stare—“what form this new diversion is to take?”

  Indigo couldn’t be certain, but she thought she detected something more than laconic mockery in the question. The thin, inflectionless voice gave nothing away, but she suspected that the vampiric entity was a little more concerned for her answer than it cared to admit. She smiled.

  “Such curious interest, when your sorrowful burden denies you even life’s most modest pleasures? You surprise me, demon.”

  The shadow-shoulders lifted in a weary gesture. “Even the saddest of us are sometimes prone to whim.”

  “Or to fear.” Stead was watching her keenly, and Indigo hoped fervently that he wouldn’t attempt to intervene; she needed this hiatus to continue a little longer, for something the demon had let slip was burning in her mind. You have learned much about yourself. It sensed some change, some quickening of her abilities, and she recalled the dizzying sensation that had overtaken her as she strove to bring Grimya out of her enchantment. She had had the power then; she was the power …