by Asotir
And the Sodality of Light found Master Aengus, in a ruinous abbey on the Rhine, and offered him a way to the bright shore, where the Black Sun was shining, if he would forsake the White Hind. He answered them, ‘Before your light I will take my darkness, because it is mine.’
Master Aengus went into the kingdom of France, and from France he went to the kingdom of Spain, and from Spain he went by way of the black, blind sea to Scotland, where all the children ruled, and from Scotland to Wales, where he found no way to summon back the Sun. At last, defeated, he sailed back to the Irish land, on the dark of the moon when Lady Agatha used his art to conjure up the Mask.
* * *
NOW THE FORMER HAPPINESS of the Honey Hall was gone. Maid Mielusine teasingly would be trying her arts upon the trees, and a jealousy sprang up amongst them they had never known before. Each boasted of the smallest duais of a kiss the maid granted him, until another won a more recent award, driving the first into the dark wood, groaning and hacking dead trees with his ax.
Agatha left the Maid and her trees, and she went out of the hall without her cloak. She walked up the top of the hill, where the trees were sparser, and the sky loomed over the dark. The Moon was just rising out of the south: the second moon after she had made the Mask, and the fields still spangled with the red embers of a hundred needfires. The brightness of the Moon and stars was glimmering off the snow, but clouds soon came, blotting out the sky again, and light, stinging snow began to fall. And for a space of three hours she was standing on the hill cloakless in the snow, shivering, looking out.
What had happened? Where was he?
She turned back down the hill.
Maid Mielusine was stirring the mash in her cauldron in the glade for the animals in her byre. Pigs and cows she had, that had come grunting and lowing to her in the darkness, lost, and she’d taken them in for pets.
Agatha stayed by the edge of the wood, watching the maid and wondering, Is she ready yet? Is she strong enough?
Already Agatha knew she had waited too long. The dream of the moonlight was troubling her. And yet she herself was putting off those words to Mielusine: ‘Come get your gowns, we will be going now, to hunt down Master Aengus.’
Lady Agatha saw one of the trees lurching across the glade, and bending over the maid. The Maid, alarmed, dropped her paddle and hurried away with the tree into the wood.
Lady Agatha watched them go. Not yet, she was thinking. She is too tender-hearted still, and harmless.
Straightway Mielusine had seen the terror on the wooden face. ‘What is it, Conn?’ she asked. ‘What has happened?’
‘Something – something awful, Miss. Let her spare me, it’s Owen. I killed him. Yes, I’m sure he’s dead.’
‘Take me to him,’ cried Mielusine. Along the way she coaxed the tree to be telling her what had happened.
‘It was my idea, Miss,’ Conn said. ‘We were digging, and Owen pulled out a big stone split in two, warm and beautiful. I said to him then, “This is just the right stone to hollow out, the way the birds will be coming and drinking from it. You know how Mielusine loves her birds.” It was my idea, Miss, and I only wanting to please you.’
‘Yes, Conn. But Owen?’
‘Well, Owen said that was just what he’d been thinking all along. He wanted all the praise for it, you see, to cut me out completely.
‘So I got mad and said, “Why, you termite nose! It was me came by the idea. You would’ve used the stone like all the others you get, to warm your rooty toes when you snore. Get another rock for that, but I’m taking this one, and it’s me’ll make the bird pool for Maid Mielusine!” ’
‘Does it matter that much who made it, now?’
‘No, Miss, I suppose not. Yes! You are so lovely now. We know we don’t deserve you. It was my idea. Why should that knot-nosed Owen win a kiss for it?
‘But he wanted it, you see, and wouldn’t let go. So “Owen,” says I, “I’ll take that stone now if you please, and if you won’t, then I’ll take it with your hands attached.” And I pull out my ax to show him I mean it. I was sure he’d back off then, Miss. Only he didn’t.
‘Next thing is, we’re on the ground kicking, and there’s Owen reaching for his shovel to give me a whack. That maddened me, and I went for him. I guess the ax was still in my hands, and when I came to my senses there I was standing and swinging, and Owen on the ground, and splinters flying out of him.’
Tears welled in the maid’s eyes. ‘Is that what happened now?’
‘Yes, Miss, and I’m ashamed for it. Straightway I flung down that curst ax of mine and came begging your pardon before my nerve failed. I’m hateful, and you’ll never smile on me again.’
His step slowed. ‘That’s it, Miss,’ he said. ‘Just over that knoll. I can’t go nearer, Miss, don’t ask me!’
‘All right, Conn,’ said Mielusine.
There was earth mounded up on all sides in the glade, strewn about with rocks from the pits in a tri-na-chiele. In the middle lay a broad round stone, and Owen.
Mielusine knelt over him. Her gentle hands ran up and down the knotty flesh. She was feeling the deep gouges in him, where the wood shone raw and fresh. On every hand the faces of the others were peeking from behind the piles.
‘Come, my lads, and help me,’ she called to them. ‘I do not think that he is quite beyond all hope, but I must have him back inside the hall.’
Charily they came down amongst the dirt-heaps, even Conn. They shouldered Owen’s body, and trudged the long way home.
Inside the door they laid him down. Great sugary tears were oozing from their eyes. Softly Lady Agatha stepped inside the door, watching.
Mielusine hung Owen’s belt on his peg on the wall. She took water from her cauldron and washed Owen all over, head to toe, root to crown, covering him with the bubbling warm foam. By his branching hair she held him, drying him with towels.
Then she made a paste with herbs and her honey, thick in the bottom of a dark old crock. And she filled in his wounds with the paste, squeezing the gashes together. With the last of her honey, she daubed his wooden lips.
Then, at last, she was kissing him. She was kissing his eyes and his honey-smeared lips.
But when Mielusine washed Owen he did not sputter. And when she daubed the honey on his lips, his mouth did not open. And when she kissed his lips there was only the taste of honey in her mouth, and under that a bitterness, of raw wood.
Tears were streaming from the Maid’s eyes onto the great, long, chopped-at log. She turned to the others; but at the look that was on her then they all shrank back. Last of all Mielusine’s eyes sought out her friend, Lady Agatha, standing by the door. For a still, soft moment the two women were regarding each other.
Agatha turned, and stepped out of the hall.
On the border of the Night, Agatha looked up to the Moon. Still was the air, silent and deathly the wood on the dark hill side.
From the beginning, the Maid had been pretty as the reflection of a star in a pool’s calm water. The difference is always this, the way prettiness is innocent, beauty is knowing, prettiness comes of nature and beauty of art. And all art is dangerous.
Lady Agatha had made her beautiful in the way Master Aengus thought of beauty. She knew and none better, what beauty he was seeking. She had made a country-girl into the embodiment of Master Aengus’ dream, the better to be snaring him and freeing herself. But at the same time she robbed Mielusine of her innocence.
Had Mielusine still been innocent, then the charm of her honey would have brought back Owen’s life.
It is almost ready she is, Lady Agatha thought. She begins to know, what a thing her beauty is. Now let her take pleasure in it.
Lady Agatha lifted her head, taken by a sound in the air. It was not the wailing from the hall, of the virgin Maid and her trees. It came from down the hill, from the deep of the wood.
It was the beat of horses Lady Agatha was hearing, and the baying of hounds, and the shouts of men.
Part II.
The Waxing of the Moon
10. Of What Lay Buried Beneath the Sea
DOES HE come to us now? she wondered.
Fifty horsemen rode into the moonlight, reining in their mounts. Their dogs swarmed around Lady Agatha, white as sows with blood-red ears, showing their teeth.
Gray were those men, steeped in old sins. They might have been King’s men in the Day.
The foremost tilted back his hat and laid his hand gently upon the stock of his gun. ‘Mary bless all here,’ said he in a foreign voice, shouting down the hounds.
‘Let her increase you,’ answered Agatha. ‘What can we be offering you gentlemen?’
‘Hunting a rogue, my girl,’ he said. ‘A thief, and a murderer no doubt. Have you seen aught of him? For he’s surely come into this wood.’
‘We’ve seen no one, the way you fine sirs are the first guests we’ve had since Day. But one of our men saw tracks in the snow down the way yonder.’ As well to be rid of them, she was thinking.
Grimly the men traded glances. ‘My thanks, girl. Tell your men to be keeping their eyes open, and you keep to your door. If we cannot find him before moonfall, perhaps we’ll be accepting your hospitality.’
Then ‘Away, my lads!’ he rumbled, and the pack of them turned. Only Lady Agatha called after them asking, ‘But just what is it this man’s done to you?’
At which the hindmost looked back at her. It was a murderous half-smile on his lips, and he answering her, but his foreign tones were beyond her ken under the crashing-away of horses and hounds.
The door to the hall was open a crack, and the cottager’s daughter looking out with reddened eyes.
‘What was it?’ she was asking.
Lady Agatha smiled and answered, ‘The last running of the law.’
Now the door opened wide and the trees appeared, bearing the chopped log between them. In the glade they dug and planted it, the fallen tree that had been Owen. Mielusine was weeping and moaning over him, and the knotty trees chanting, some last rites they were inventing.
Lady Agatha went into the hall.
Just at moonfall the sounds of the chase redoubled – screams, brays, and gunshots exploding in the quiet wood.
After a time the echoes lapsed away.
Lady Agatha sat at her sewing. Maid Mielusine sat by the door looking out at Owen, unable to eat.
The trees were in their circle again. Their branches were bristling now at those strange sounds, and what they might be meaning for the maid.
In the middle darkness shouts rang off the door and Lady Agatha went out.
‘You may tell your masters now it’s done,’ the gray man told her. ‘The traitor’s dead. We’ll not be troubling you more, the way it’s a hard track to be following, and a long way to be going home for us.’ He seemed tired and hollowed out, now his work was done, and he empty-handed from it all.
They all fifty rode away then.
‘It’s never they’ll be finding their home again, I’m thinking,’ Agatha said. ‘They played the Night and lost.’
‘What of the man they were chasing?’ Mielusine said. ‘At very least we can see him rightly buried.’
‘With what rites? Is it a priest you’ll be looking for now?’
‘Faith, it might be Master Aengus!’
Agatha looked at the girl. She had not seen such strength in the pale face before. It raised a touch of doubt in herself. ‘It isn’t him,’ she said. ‘It could not be. But if you must, we will go looking.’
In thin darkness they were wending their way down the hill, the maid and the lady, and the trees slowly catching up. Oimell Moon it was, the beginning of Spring by the old calendar of the day, and the hill still caked in snow.
It was fear was in the trees. They had been happy once on a time, alone with Mielusine. Lady Agatha had ended that. Now those horsemen were come, with guns and growling dogs. What other evil fortune would follow?
In a deep lost place they found a horse, its reins caught in a tangle of thorns growing from the snow. The skin of snow in the place was torn, and the black earth seeping through like blood. Not far off they found the man, face down in snow.
Agatha stared at him, fearful now. He was of a height and a color and a shape, could have been Aengus after all.
‘Is he dead now?’ whispered Maid Mielusine.
Lady Agatha soothed the horse and bent over the rider. She caught him by the shoulder, turning his head.
It was a stranger.
‘No,’ she said, breathing. ‘This one’s not Aengus.’
‘But how goes it with him?’ asked the maid, stepping closer.
‘He’s shot, and the hounds have worried at him,’ Agatha said. ‘And those are not his only wounds.’
The man let out a groan. ‘But not dead now,’ he said ‘—not yet.’
He tried a thin wan smile, but his face paled and his eyes rolled up and round. All the blood ran out of his head and he slumped back on the snow, moaning.
‘He is burning with fever,’ said Agatha. ‘And pale from blood loss … but his voice is from a land across the sea,’ she added wonderingly.
The Maid turned to the trees, only now arriving. ‘We must bring him to the hall.’
Grumbling, the trees set about lashing wythes and cípíns together. When they lifted the stranger up on the bier, the wet white snow under his body was black and red with blood.
* * *
HE WAS SHAKING and shivering with wet, was Master Aengus, when he stepped back upon the wet Irish sand on the dark of the moon. He put back his cloak, and raised his face in the snow and icicle rain, and looked up into the secret huddled masses of hills.
Now he was driven back almost to the place he’d started from. And now the dream was lost, and he knew not at all how to be bringing back the Sun.
‘What now?’ he muttered. ‘What now, and where?’
He shouldered his pack, and set off down a path. In thirteen darknesses Master Aengus journeyed round the coast, to the great cliffs of Moher over the Western Sea.
That was Imbolc Moon now, Candlemas, and the land was starred with a thousand needfires cold and white in the Night. During the Day, the land would have been greening, and Spring not far afield. But still the deep cold it was gathering, and at the back of the north the Sea was groaning and cracking with ice.
Atop the cliffs, at the very edge, Master Aengus stood, wind curling his hair, his head swimming with suaran.
He made a rope and clambered down the cliffs, and found a little strand hidden tucked away neat as a puffin’s nest. He limped along the strand, over rocks and cobbles chased with ice. The waves curled round him silver in the Moon’s pale light, like the combed manes of petted ponies; and the end of the Sea seemed far away.
And from the waves Master Aengus heard the sea-morgans calling out to him and singing, and their song drew tears from his dark face, the way the morgans sang to him.
He found a curagh caught upon the strand, and over it one wrapt in a seaman’s woolen coat, a tricorn low on his brow. His head was big as a pumpkin, and the collar and his muffler concealed his face.
‘Is it your curagh?’ asked Master Aengus. ‘What will you take to let me sail it out upon the waves?’
That one turned his icy eyes on him, and all at once Aengus knew him.
The muffled figure answered him never a word. He raised his arm, and one long finger pointed to the sea.
Aengus kept his eye upon the muffled one, while he put his bundle in and took the curagh into the sea’s bright foam. At that the thing upon the shore turned and started pacing slowly back and forth, its black shoes breaking the ice upon the sand, crack-crunch, crack-crunch. Thirteen steps north and thirteen south, slowly, like a clock.
The wind blew the waves between the floes to dancing wild reels, but Master Aengus on the moonpath stood up in the curagh, pulling the sheet taut in his fingers, and the little boat shot forth as if out of a cannon, skipping across the waves.
Th
e Imbolc Moon sank, and darkness swallowed up the little boat. Round about blind fishes came, souls of lost drowned girls, speaking girlishly:
‘What is this boat my hand is feeling? What man is here, so far from land?’
‘I am Master Aengus,’ he answered, defiantly: ‘Tell me the secret of the Sun. How may I do what I will do?’
‘We know, we know!’ said a second. ‘Let us help him now!’
‘Nay,’ said the third: ‘we are blind, now. What good would it do us, even if Aengus could do what he will?’
‘Go back then if you will, but we will help him on.’
And the blind girls caught the curagh with their cold slippery arms, two at the stern and one at the bow, lashing their long fantails with all their might, bounding forward faster than the wind.
Master Aengus heard their voices piping in the hiss-wash of the waves, and he thought of Agatha’s voice, the way she had been in the Sun.
Deep in the Western Sea the sightless fish-girls took the boat, to the island that was there.
‘Is this the end of my journey?’ asked Master Aengus.
‘Go ashore, and eat your fill!’ the fishes answered slyly. ‘Mind you don’t get burned!’ There west of all lands they left him, and swam back to the shallows.
* * *
AT MOONRISE Master Aengus stepped out on the shore.
On the island he found water and fruit, and it was warm there. He went up among the tall waving grasses, looking eastward for the way back: but the tidal waters came climbing after him, washing up to the trees.
Master Aengus climbed higher, but the waves climbed after him. Until he reached the top of the island and it all sank down beneath him, under the water, and Master Aengus with it.
The waters were boiling around Master Aengus’ head, bubbles bright as candles about his eyes. He sank straight down, holding his breath.
In the sea-light he could see plowed fields green with sea weeds, and the blue spires of lost churches, and folk working on the land.
Master Aengus felt warmth beneath his feet. The top of the hill was a ridge, and it rippled like a scallop’s shell. And through the cracks a light was streaming in thick golden ropes.
It was the Sun, buried in the seabed.
Master Aengus knelt and put his fingers to the ridge. With all his strength he strove to open the crack. But the heat burned his hands even in water; and the last of his strength went out of him like a drop of water on hot coals. Bubbles bursting from his lips, and he sinking on the ridge, and moving no more.