by Asotir
For a moment, Lady Agatha’s eye brightened at the beauty of it; then the lost look came back into her face. He left the cloth in her room, and every moon she was looking on it, but she never would touch it.
The old man, Mac Bride, was tending to the house. He hadn’t time to see about the grounds, and they slowly growing wild. Lady Agatha was passing many an hour with him. She spoke his name as the cottagers had, ‘Mac Bridey,’ and ‘Mac Birdie.’
As a man Mac Bride had been summoned to the manor to attend the old lord’s birth. It was a custom to foster a rich man’s son on a countryman. The child was sent to stay with his foster family until his seventh year. The odd thing about this fostering was that it was Mac Bride had come to the manor. He had been there ever since. He became the old lord’s godfather, and it was said the child’s luck resided in his godfather.
‘You served him for so long,’ said Lady Agatha. ‘How can you serve this one now, who took his place and came into our house as if he were the lord? Do you not condemn him all to Hell?’
He answered, ‘I served Aengus once before. Now I’m serving him again.’
‘You’re waiting for our lord’s return, and watching for your chance,’ said Lady Agatha.
‘No, it’s not that I’m doing now,’ answered the old man.
It snowed now and again, lightly melting on the sun-burned ground. In spite of the snow the airs were mild, and the snows were melting as soon as ever they fell, and mist rising out of the fields, warm and sticking on the skin. They called it the Fire-Warm Winter, they that woke in it. For though Heaven spun cold where the bright Moon rode, the ground underfoot was as warm to the touch as the floor-bricks of a hearth, and the lough waters were warm, and the Sea was warm as well. It was as though a secret fire burned on deep in the dark soft bosom of the Earth.
Lady Agatha stole out across the dying lawns to a dale where the rill of a spring made the mud black, and a broken tree attacked the stars. She sat buried in the huge bearskin her lord gave her when he wooed her.
But Master Aengus left the empty house, and he went to the dark valley. He knew where to go.
She knew him first by the one white lock on his left temple, and crouched down in the bearskin, hoping he would not see her. But he did.
No words of greeting passed between them. Master Aengus pulled the jeweled pins from the veil spun round her eyes; and he kissed her dark and enigmatic hair. And he caught Lady Agatha by the waist, and the bearskin fell open on the mud, baring her body, milky as the moon, baring her breasts, delicate as the caps of mushrooms quivering in moonlight. Her back he was pressing against the rough tree bark, so that it was like to cut her.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he said, and she cringed.
The same question was in his brow, but he told her only, ‘There are other colors of the Night.’
For two moons and a darkness more he worked in his attic, and brought her down a second bolt.
Red was that cloth, all but unseeable, sensible rather by the touch. The red of blushing or of tears, of nudity, of the bedrock still glowing, secret and rebellious, from the blood-dark fires of the fallen Sun.
Lady Agatha reached for the cloth, and it was bleeding its warmth into the palm of her hand. But she let her hand fall, and she turned away.
Master Aengus had a pet in that house, a long-haired cat, white with a small face and dark blue eyes. She was ever following at his heels, mewing after him. After every dinner Master Aengus would be having the cat on his lap, combing the snarls out of her fur, so that her purring droned in the hall. Lady Agatha disliked that cat.
Lonely she was, except for Mac Bride. She missed her friends dearly, and Lady Felicia especially.
When the Moon rose, she saw the countryman walking down the drive, and she put on her cloak and followed after him. She was walking as fast as she might to catch up, but the countryman’s legs were long, and they were on the far side of the village before she caught sight of him. She was on the point of calling him to stop and wait for her, when she saw that he was following the crooked lane up to Master Aengus’ ruined farm. Then she bit back her call, and went after him quietly.
At the end of the lane she looked out around the hedge, and saw Mac Bride.
The old man was walking round the ruins of Master Aengus’ farmhouse, withershins west to east and south to north, and muttering something every time he passed the broken gate. She was straining her ears to grasp at his words, but this is all the sense she could make out of them, though she heard them three times over, once each time the old countryman passed the gate:
‘Sleep now and stay sleeping, the way we’ve no need at all for you to be slipping your spoon into our porridge again.’
After the third time he said these words, if those were indeed the words that he said, the old man locked the gate, looked sternly at the ruins, and turned back. She was only just able to conceal herself in the hedge as he passed.
Lady Agatha crept out after Mac Bride had passed, and walked up to the ruined farmhouse. She stopped at the gate, and was looking a long time, and all the same she could see nothing stirring there, and wondered what it could have been the old man had been addressing.
‘What is Master Aengus, Mac Bride?’ she asked, when next she saw him. ‘What kind of a thing is he, the way he could do all he did?’
‘He calls himself,’ he answered, ‘a man.’
‘Well, but what was he like as a boy? Mac Bride, you know all the secrets of the county, tell me his.’
‘Ah, he wasn’t the best-loved boy, Miss! He studied and read, and was the oldest child you could think of. Not a bit like his brother, now,’ he mused.
‘A brother!’ she said. ‘I never heard he had a brother!’
‘Och, yes, and a fine scamp of a lad he was.’
‘Whatever became of him? Surely he wasn’t living in the county these past three years.’
The old countryman seemed out of sorts at the question, and not disposed to answer. All he would say was, ‘That the tale of it was he fought the English, and was outlawed: skipped away across the sea one jump ahead of the hangman, and passed into the kingdom of France.’
They were quiet for a time. She was waiting to see if the old countryman would say more; but he could hold his tongue, could old Mac Bride. Then she asked him that question she had never dared before:
‘What became of our lord then, in the evening of the last day when he rode away?’
The old man put down the turf-bundle beside the hearth. The sods Mac Bride gathered were the finest sort, the way he knew the best places to be getting them. He let the white cat rub her chin against his fingertip.
At length he said, ‘When the heat rose, and the clouds seemed like they caught fire, your old lord took it ill. It was the look of him, like a man dreading something for a long while, and finally sure it will not come: then it comes.
‘ “Mac Bride,” he calls, running from the house, “Saddle my horse, there’s quick work to be done!” I brought him the horse, the earth-colored one. Sure, it was a younger man’s steed, and he too old and weak to master him; but he was ever the one to fight against the truth of himself.
‘Round the house he rode, gun in hand, searching every shadow. He went up on the hills, and I following after, I cannot tell you why. The wind is fierce and hot in my eyes, and his horse’s tail is shaking wild as flames, and the white of its eyes gleaming in the sooty dusk. He spins the horse round with a curse, but the thing is done in a moment: a great fire ball swoops out of the sky and strikes him in a blaze. There was only the stallion left, burnt bloody dead, and of your lord’s body nary a sign.’
‘Och, why did you never tell me this before?’
‘Sure, you never asked before.’
Lady Agatha blushed. She had not dared to ask before, for the joy in her had blent together those last hours; she thought she had not heard her lord ride out until she lay in Master Aengus’ arms.
* * *
MASTER AENGUS left a
ll the keys to the house with Lady Agatha: all, that is, but one.
‘What’s mine is yours,’ he was telling her. ‘Only do not go into that room.’
He took her into the attic, and pointed out the door to her. Then he went and locked himself into that room. It was where he studied. It was where he made the cloths. She went into the yard below and gazed up at the room’s one window, and it round, and seeming broken by the Moon.
Lady Agatha said to Mac Bride, ‘Mac Bride, be opening now the door to the room in the attic, for I would go in there.’
But Mac Bride shook his head and answered, That the master had left her all the keys, and Mac Bride none, so he couldn’t let her in.
She smiled.
Neither Master Aengus nor Mac Bride knew she had her own keys, from the time before the Night. And when Master Aengus was gone away hunting, she went up the stairs, locking all the doors behind her. At the top of the stairs lay the white cat. Lady Agatha took the cat by her collar and sent her down the stairs; the cat mewed, but she went.
Lady Agatha crossed the attic to the little locked door. Every key of hers she tried upon that lock, and at the last, the smallest and darkest of the bunch, the lock turned.
And in she went.
There was moonlight glinting off the broken glass, and there was her candle gleaming.
On a little table beneath the window were a stone cup of wine, an inkwell, a bundle of quills and a small jeweled snuffbox.
On either side the walls were bending in with shelves of old books, and great cracking parchments curled inside leather bags. One parchment lay open on the table, held at one edge by a small white stone, smooth and rounded as a hen’s egg.
Lady Agatha drank the wine in the cup, the way seeing it reminded her of how thirsty she was. She looked on the parchment, but she could make no sense of it. The charactery, all crabbed and bent, looked as though the quill had been slashing and tormenting the flesh of the parchment. She took out another parchment, but could read that one no better. She fetched her down a third, and another still: And the last one she could read.
By this wisdom he trapped me, she thought. I will read it too.
She tried the jeweled snuffbox, but could not open it.
She was closing the door behind her, when her eyes fell on the stone cup. It was full of wine again, though she hadn’t filled it. She smiled and thought ‘Good, now! He won’t be missing it!’
Coming down again, she saw a small black spot in the hollow of her hand. Some soot or ink on the doorlatch must have rubbed off on her palm. She tried to clean it, but the spot remained, like a plague spot. She kept it out of Master Aengus’ eyes, and went on visiting the room all the same.
And she found at last the Smaragdine Table etched upon a yellowing parchment. And she studied that book as though all her life hung by it, and it held her faster than novels.
She was eating with him now, he at his end of the table, she at hers. She ate her stew piping hot, clanging her spoon in the copper bowl. And she chose her prettiest dresses, and wore fragrance in her hair and cachets in her bosom. It pleased her, the way she knew she was breaking his pishogue spell. She felt his eyes burn after her, and was glad.
And it was many a moon since she had last gone into his bed. How he was wanting it! But Lady Agatha was free again. So free she snared herself.
It happened in the darkness, when the Moon was hid. Lady Agatha was in her room, bathed in the light of nine candles. In the light his bolt of red cloth caught her eye.
And she held it over her, letting its touch cascade down her body. She looked at herself in the glass. What a daring dress that cloth would make! She did off her dress and regarded herself proudly, naked in her shift and that sheet of flame. It was like hot breath on her and hot wine within her.
Aengus, she knew, was resting in his room. She had never watched him dreaming. Setting down the cloth with care, she took a candle and stepped into the hall.
Soft as smoke she passed the bedchamber doors shut fast on the sleeping lords and ladies. Until she reached the hall’s end, and the great groaning door of the lord’s room. For a moment she paused, and the wanting to go in was like a tongue of flame tickling the insides of her.
She thought of him lying alone in the great carved bed. But was he dreaming, now? Perhaps he was thinking on her and wanting her. Was he staring at this same door – laughing perhaps, in that proud silent way of his? Did he know she was standing there, her hand touching this cold brass latch? Was this only his spell after all?
She shuddered. And she fled down the hall and down the stairs, out into the quenching Night.
* * *
LADY AGATHA was walking steadfastly, with no thought but to be going, as quickly and quietly as she could, and be never coming back again. From the upper window in the manor she appeared a straw doll in her shift. Round about her the long darkness rolled away, away.
A little cold light soon appeared in the southeast, from the rising moon. The hills and fields wakened strangely gentle to her light. Stark warm it was, being Oimell, the starting of Spring. The cottagers had said that oi is a name for sheep, and that is when sheep would come and be milked.
Lady Agatha had surely trod this same path a hundred times during the day, but she hardly knew it now. The world of Night was nothing like the day. This was his world. He’d made it for her prison, to trap her in her need.
She slowed her pace. Panic snatched at her. Where was she to go in this Night-Land of his? Where in this darkness might she be free of him?
The fear was not leaving her until she bent her knee. The auburn rings of her hair fell about her eyes, and her fingers curled through the short, stiff grass burned in their bones like ice.
She saw in the hollow of her hand a small black spot.
She looked up, and beheld the manor before her.
She sighed, stood up, and walked in.
The house was watchful, dark, and still. The candles had guttered and died in her room, clouding it with the perfume of their deaths. The acrid odor harried her.
Lonely she was, and lonely she stayed, all alone in his Night-Land.
She shut her door and locked it. Soon he would be rising, and might knock at her door. Weak and wearied, she slid into bed between the ice cold sheets. She ran her hands lightly over her curled-up legs, her arms, and her trembling body, hugging herself, kissing her knees. She was colder than the sheets, cold as a dead girl fished from a pond. She felt hopeless and spent.
Sounds reached her from below. He was waking and eating. Soon she heard the door open and close, and steps on the stones. There were two sets of them – his and Mac Bride’s. They were going out hunting, making a noise of it – did they think to mock her now?
Weak as she was, Lady Agatha went to the kitchen, heated water, and hauled it up to her room. She set the pitcher down beneath her window, where moonlight danced in the bath, rippling round the room.
Before yielding to the steaming waters, Lady Agatha saw herself in the glass.
She saw her silver, slender legs, her thin shoulders, her shadowy hair, and the spiral of her back, clear now of those marks of the tree-bark.
But the black spot on her palm still marked her, and the other mark, the shameful one he had put upon her, that was there still: a small red star like the marks the tattooed sailors wore, and it seeming to say, This one, she belongs to Master Aengus.
* * *
FOR A LONG WHILE Lady Agatha was alone in the house. Beltane came and Winter’s end; Lughnasadh came and the harvest start, when handfasting weddings were commonly made, and still she abode in the manor house alone.
Then Master Aengus came back alone to her. There was blood on his breeches.
‘I need you,’ he said, and she hated him for it.
And he drew from his bag his seven Moons’ work, a third bolt of cloth, and the last. And it was black.
Black of the skies behind the stars, of the hills in rainstorms when the moon is hid below ground. Black
of great age, of hidden places, secret thoughts, untold things. The blackness in the belly of a woman when first she puts her hand there, and feels a certain stirring.
And that cloth Lady Agatha took from him. She was looking down in it as if gazing in a deep, deep well.
He took her to bed, and she let him. She hadn’t the strength to fight. It was like breathing again after having her face held under water.
When he loosed her she thought, I cannot stay here in his bed like this. But somehow she might not go, and fell into dreaming at his side.
She dreamed she was crawling through a wood, bending under brambles, and the thorns catching and tearing her clothes, and she calling, ‘Aengus! Aengus! Come down to me here!’ In the dream she could not hold back her tears, and the pillows were wet with them.
Master Aengus sat over her, watching. When she woke it was his face she saw first. There was wariness in his eyes. A bit of anger, too. At last he asked her, that question he had not asked before:
‘What then do you want of me?’
She answered through her tears, defiantly, ‘If you loved me you would know. O, you should know!’
‘I know. But I’ll not give it to you unless you ask.’
She shook her head on the pillow. She wanted that last of all, to be asking him for anything. She bit her lip to hold back the words. But at last, ere the Moon rose, she said:
‘Bring back the Sun, bring back the world of day again!’
‘You will rue it,’ said Master Aengus. ‘It is here and now that we will find our only happiness.’ But he no more than she would ask for any kindness now.
Lady Agatha went on looking at him, unspeaking, the way she didn’t dare speak.
‘Very well,’ said Aengus.
And for the second time that Night the stars touched the Samhain mark, when all souls and dreams are loosed. And for four and twenty hours the Moon did not rise nor shine.
The Third Year of Night
In the third year of that Night, the Waking in their wanderings felt drawn to certain spots.
Hilltops and glens and bends in the river, inlets on the coasts, some islands, ancient ruins in the wild, forest thickets, tall bare outlooks over the great cities. There was something about those spots, something nameless and beyond describing in any words from the Day, that in breathed the Night more fully than the other places in the world. They called these the Strong Places.