by Asotir
‘You don’t know love,’ muttered Lady Agatha.
Once on a time the maid could hold her tongue no longer, and she said, ‘Tell me of your love, Agatha. Do tell.’
They were alone in the hall, but Lady Agatha glanced about even so. ‘I knew love once,’ she answered. ‘I thought I knew. But he was untrue as a dream.’
‘But did you never love another? Did you never love?’
Agatha thought of the lord, the old rich man bent from the loneliness of his years.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I never loved. It was not love, or it was not I. Listen, Mielusine. It was this very Aengus, caught me in love. He murdered my protector and, come the Night, held me prisoner in his house.’
‘I hate him for what he did to you,’ said Mielusine. ‘I hate him!’
‘Oh, as for that, I’m much in love with hating him. But Mielusine! Even here in your house far away, and I not even knowing where in all the world he is, it’s my body calling out to him, and in dreams he’s coming mocking me. I’ll never be free, unless you save me.’
‘But how can I be doing that, Agatha?’
‘It’s unbreakable his spell over me will be, unless someone else should win his heart and break it. Be my arrow, Mielusine! That would end his power.’
‘I will try, Agatha. Let her help me! Tell me now, what must I know, what must I do, to be winning Master Aengus’ heart.’
And Lady Agatha set to telling her.
Maid Mielusine had her trees build a bed for Lady Agatha. They did that grudgingly; they made but half a job of it; but Agatha delighted in its rough planks and its straw closing about her body with barely room to turn. She had had no such lovely bed since she was a girl. It was cold that winter, but Lady Agatha made the little bed warm with her own warmth.
It was there, in the house of innocent Mielusine, that Agatha first began dreaming of Master Aengus. It was of his hands upon her body she was dreaming, in the first Moon of the Night, and of her mouth on his.
* * *
SPRING IN THE NIGHT-LAND was not far away off. The snows melted back to black. The women went out of the hut more often. The maid was ever asking after Master Aengus.
‘Tell me the way of him, Agatha. Tell me his weakness, and how I may be hurting him best.’
‘Here is his portrait, Mielusine. He is dark, and sometimes sullen; knows many a secret thing, and cares nothing for the shows of beauty or wealth. So he says.
‘And his voice is like a shiver of beaten iron. And there is anger in him, letting him know at rare times joy, but happiness never at all. His step is brisk even when he’s bound for nowhere. And what he sees when he looks on a field or hill or stone or woman, that is not what any other man would be seeing. If he think you shallow he will despise you, but if he find you pure (and that’s but another saying of the same thing), then he will love you, for an hour or a day, to distraction. Until a word or a look of yours will tear the veil of his delusion.’
They turned back by the way of the ring of nine trees then, and all the nine bending and bowing and smiling down on the maid, jealous of each little favor she bestowed on this one or that. Agatha was quiet for a time, lost in her own musings.
At the door of the hut Agatha came up to a stop, sudden-like, and gripped the maid’s shoulder, tight as an owl’s grip.
‘Never soften toward him, Mielusine! Whatever she may be feeling in her heart, no lady will show affection for such a man as Master Aengus. She knows that that would be the ruin of her.’
The maid was breathing hard, and biting her lip. Agatha loosed her hold, and the two went in. Mielusine pulled the door to behind them. ‘Is he so cruel then?’
‘He is worse than cruel, Mielusine. He is sincere. And he is capable of passion, that is more than longing and stronger than love. ’Tis the rare soul has the heart for it.’
‘Is passion finer than love, Agatha?’
She laughed, a woeful laugh, to see in her heart how easily she drew the maid in upon the toils of her web. ‘Perhaps for a few. But the passion of a Master Aengus is like a blow, like hatred, like murder. Such a man needs a lady equal to his challenge, taking his love and making it her own. It is war between them, Mielusine, and was I not telling you from the start, you’d not be liking my lessons?’
The maid was looking into the fire. And she was thinking, deep in her heart: He only loved her, after all. But aloud she said,
‘I think you might still love him, Agatha, no matter what you say.’
A dismal, delighted laughter was breaking from the lady’s lips; she answered, ‘Perhaps ’tis so, apprentice! But do not be taking my weakness for a strength!’
And Mielusine was thinking: All Lady Agatha said, of the great lady loving and suffering and loving still, is it not the very truth of her?
They went into their separate beds, those two, and bade each other fair sleeping. The Maid lay awake and still, pondering questions deep and dire. Agatha fell sleeping, deep and bitter sleep that would bring her no refreshment when she had woke; sleep full of dreams.
And last of all in that dark of the moon, she dreamed of the mark she had put on him.
The echoes of his song were yet lingering in her head, and the manor house still bright with fire, when Master Aengus held her red naked in the great carved bed, and kissed the hollow of her back. It was the last rising of the moon before the house fell still and cold; and he holding her as though knowing what was to come.
He was sucking in her flesh between his teeth, and the warmth she was feeling there turned hot as a poker. She broke from him, startled, and kneeled on the floor on the far side of the bed.
It was my mark I was putting on you, he said. I was marking you there where none will ever see, save you in your glass, and I.
She felt in the hollow of her back, the small upraised skin small as a fingertip, pointed as a star.
Now, he said, Let you mark me where all the world will see.
She cast back her hair and let her eyes wander angrily about his naked body. An odd stinging was burning the tips of her breasts.
He put out his arm, showing the wrist. Here.
She leaned over and pressed a quick kiss there. But she was shaking her head no.
Mark me, he said.
She put her lips on the skin so thin that even in the gloom she could see the dark veins joining and parting like streams in the bogs.
Draw in the skin with your lips and your tongue.
She was tasting the salt and the oils of him, the dark inexplicable life of him passing between her teeth. She was aroused, angry and afraid all at once, and she bit the warm blood into her mouth, until the rankness of it choked her and she had to turn away spitting and coughing on the floor.
He’d worn a bandage on his wrist for half a Moon thereafter. The mark showing there was sometimes ghastly and pale, like a blister’s dead flesh. Agatha hated it. Himself he seemed proud of the mark, as if it had been his mark over her, like a bill of sale, and for that she was hating and softening toward him all at once.
And now, lying in the rough, narrow bed, feeling the spot upon her like a birthmark, she was dreaming of her marking of him: the thin skin trapped between her teeth, the acrid sudden warmth. If she had bitten any deeper, he had perhaps died of it. His blood had tasted bitter, bitter at first. It was as if she might never be spitting out the last of it. As if the least drop of it had entered into her veins, infecting her with his madness and enchantments.
* * *
THAT SPRING Lady Agatha made a gown out of the red cloth for the maid. It was scarlet as Magdalena’s smile, and the way it was cut it left the girl seeming more naked than nakedness itself. She herself went scarlet, did Mielusine, looking down at herself caught in that gown.
‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Does it have to be indecent?’
‘I will make it fit you,’ Lady Agatha said. ‘Do not be hesitating or it will be spoilt.’
The girl stepped down the hall, glancing at the wonder of the gown hersel
f was wearing. The trees were staring as if their eyes would pop like corks: Mielusine was seeing herself in those knotty eyes, a wonder strange and daring.
Mielusine stepped out. The frosty air rushing in set the trees shivering. Mielusine smiled, and walked back in.
Returning, she wasn’t quite the same.
* * *
NOW, WHILE MAID MIELUSINE’S charms were blooming, Lady Agatha’s were withering. She would not let the least of Mielusine’s hairs be straying in any way unflattering; her own she left uncombed. She made gowns for Mielusine in the height of fashion; she left rents in her own frayed skirts, or patched them but indifferently.
And still the Night was lingering. Had he forgotten his vow to her? Had he perished on the way?
‘Nay now,’ she whispered, sitting hugging her knees in her bed. ‘It’s alive he must be, and I know it. I am not done with him yet.’
But his spell was now so strong over her, she was dreaming of him every darkness, her body taut for what he had wakened in her, those things unknown in the three full years she had been the old lord’s ward.
In the red fire glow, in the house of innocent Mielusine, Agatha would be warm and wanting him in her bed. But when she was rising, for very shame she planned out her retribution all the more severely.
Do you think you’ve prevailed, now? she was asking. Do you think you can despise me? Let you wait, O Aengus! You’ll see my Mielusine, and it’s weak you’ll be then, a common man again, and I’ll be laughing, free of the likes of you…
One night he had come below the manor windows singing songs of sorrow. Oh, they were horrid songs for he was no singer, and the misery in his voice murdering every note.
Embarrassed for the sake of Lady Felicia, Agatha was opening her window and casting down the first coin her hand came upon, and that a golden guinea. ‘Pray take that for your pains,’ she called to him, and shut the casement. The very next day she saw him in the village, and he wearing a chain round his neck, and on the chain her golden guinea.
He was a part of her life wasn’t ended yet. But it would be herself would be deciding when they next would meet, and how that should be.
I paid you for your song, my Master. And now you must be paying me for mine.
* * *
IMBOLC lay behind them, and Beltane followed after, and yet the Night-Land stayed cold, and the snows fell back across the hills. Winter lingered.
In the dark of the moon, Agatha went to the pond. It was frozen over still. She was wearing a broad cloak she had made of castoff woolen patches: warm it was, and she underneath it mother-naked without even a shift.
There was a cutting wind, and the sky beclouded, and darkness out of the sky above and the earth below, and all the Sleepers sleeping and the Wakeful dreaming, and Agatha crouching over the pond. For twelve Moons and a moon she had been fashioning the Maid. For twelve Moons and a moon she had been readying herself to do for the Maid what went beyond all nature.
She scratched away some snow, making the black earth show through. And she took those things she had been gathering, and set herself to work.
* * *
THAT DARKNESS Mielusine might not rest. But seeing Lady Agatha gone out, and herself all alone, she crept out of bed.
Hastily she threw off her bedshift and stepped into the red gown.
She stood in the center of the hall, upon a stone, stretching to her tallest. And the gown glowed in the emberlight, gleaming along the ridges of its folds, restively rousing as it rose to swallow the dim pale body of the maid.
Extravagantly Mielusine cast bundles of wood into the hearth. The fire awoke the scarlet of the gown; the crimson in the flames danced between the rafters, and Mielusine’s own nakedness within the gown cast back the same color.
If only one were here to see! she thought.
‘I am ugly now,’ Lady Agatha had told her, ‘but I know the virtue of beauty, that is the worship of the earth. It bears its moral burden, beauty. You must be beautiful to be good. Mielusine, it’s this you were made for. It’s a duty you’ve been shirking living here alone like a frog under the ice, charming trees to life by your innocence. It wasn’t chance led me to your door. On this Night you are of the Wakeful, Mielusine. Wake then!’
Now Mielusine knew the vanity of being pretty in a house in the empty wood. She was wanting the aching of love, the rapture in it, the wasting from it. She’d been heeding Lady Agatha’s lessons.
Where is one to find me now? she wondered. Who will see and claim me?
The fire was low again, the red gown put away, and Mielusine snug in bed when Lady Agatha, dark-faced and frozen, brought into the hall what she had made.
She touched the girl under her chin.
‘Behold the final seal of your beauty,’ she said.
Mielusine looked on it as a girl would have looked on the burning shrine of Saint Brigit. ‘It is the loveliest thing I ever did see,’ she said softly as a prayer. ‘But it is too fine and fairy-like for me.’
‘It is the likeness of the White Hind. And it is yours.’
It was a demimask with horns above, a braided tail behind, and for the throat a golden torc. Lady Agatha placed the girl’s hand upon the mask, making her feel its gentleness.
‘Three masks I made for you, Mielusine,’ Lady Agatha was saying. ‘The mask of manners, the mask of fashion, and this one last of all. When you will be wearing this, you will be as undeniable as Venus in Her zone.
‘No man but will be drawn to you alone. No hour will see him free of the longing for you. The sight of you will be wine in his brain, hashish in his blood. Gladly will he offer his life for but a smile and word of praise from you, his judge and his redeemer.’
But that talk frightened Mielusine. ‘Oh, Agatha, it’s in your debt I am, for all you taught me. But that is a power too heavy for me. Let her spare me, I cannot wear it!’
Even then the young moon was rising, and the trees were knocking at the door and vying angrily with one another, who would be first to greet the maid. Hastily Mielusine hid the mask in her chest before the trees might glimpse it.
The trees behaved themselves that moon, and did not bicker or fight, or trip one another with their rooty toes. They saw the maid’s distress and were wondering, each in himself, what bad thing he had done to trouble her.
The maid was quiet and pale, and no happiness in her. Softly Lady Agatha went among the trees, feeding them mead until they staggered out to their ring, leaning at odd angles, drunk in dreaming.
In the hob seat by the hearth Lady Agatha dried the girl’s tears and combed her hair. Mielusine sat with her shoulders half turned, and her head held away, in just the right way to be showing herself. Her eyes were troubled and far away, and her breast rising and falling.
Lady Agatha murmured, ‘Now you are beautiful.’
Slowly the maid bent back her head on her swanlike throat, and looked upon her friend. She looked at her with the look Agatha had been teaching her, the look of sadness, and of seeming to know the unknowable. And Agatha thought to herself, Mask or no mask, did Aengus see her now, it’s damned in love he’d be with her.
‘It’s still love I don’t know,’ said Mielusine, in a gentle, dreaming voice. ‘Who will teach me that lesson, Agatha?’
‘When the time is right, I will find you a man.’
* * *
THAT DARKNESS Mielusine lay in bed, and beneath the sheets her hand lay reaching for the touch of the mask of the White Hind. And the dreams were coming to her there, and she dreaming on a great house golden alive with candlelight, music, and dancing. Herself was walking in the road outside, not daring to go in though she wore her fine white gown. But something was drawing her up the road toward the house, slowly up to the dark, open gate.
Master Aengus met her there. He was only a figure in the gate, black against the gold yard, but Mielusine knew him.
In the darkness gleaming white as nudity, she curtsied and greeted him as Agatha had taught her.
You
are not my lady, he said angrily: Where is she?
His eyes were daggers, and Mielusine in her dream was stumbling, down the falling road, away, away…
She sat shivering in her bed, bowing her head. Through the veil of her hair, she glanced at Agatha in the rough bed. Something of youth and peace was softening Agatha’s face, streaked with dirt though it was.
All the same, I am more beautiful than she. I am! And yet my beauty is only what she made of it. Were I there in rags, dirty and coarse, would I be beautiful then? She is.
My prettiness is empty and vain. Her beauty is pure and passionate. It’s suffering ennobles her. She is walking the treacherous path. Her quality is proven. Master Aengus saw to that.
I want to be like you, Agatha. I want you to be proud of me.
She crept down out of bed, and quietly opened her chest. It was there for her, its gentleness so deceiving, its emptiness so magical. She lifted up the mask, and looked on it for a long, long while.
But even you are lacking this, Agatha. And I will follow you down that path. I will dare that adventure. It’s only because I love you so, Agatha, I must have a teacher no less than yours. I will have Master Aengus be teaching me of love.
9. Of the Bitterness of Beauty
IN THE NIGHT-LAND laws were forgotten, prisons emptied, and tax-men shut up snoring. Titles were tossed aside, armies disbanded, churches left locked and forsaken. The world of Day had been ruled by men pious and old; the Night was for the young, the charming, and the wicked. Courts were opening everywhere, round needfires lined with tents and rude wagons for now, but soon building palaces with tilting gables.
Outside the quiet wood, outside the ring of hedge, the land of Ireland was sparkling with thousands of such fires, burning into eyes brilliant with hopes, ambitions, wild desire. It was no world for the faint of heart. Only one law was dredged up out of the past. Pleasure ruled all their wild hearts; and the seat of their parliament was in the abbey in the mist.
Alone in all the landscape of the Night, alone of all the Wakeful, Master Aengus looked to summon back the Sun.
There had been a rock in his dream of bringing back the Sun; he climbed where the blind birds wheeled. There had been water in his dream; he crossed the sea into the dark continent of Europe. There had been voices in his dream; he stole through the ruins of cities, oppressed by the sleepfulness of the peoples of the Day. Through all that year Master Aengus searched.