by Asotir
On that morning of November 29, 1757, the world wakened, as it always did. An unusual night seemed to have passed, the way so many had died, and so many births were to be recorded; but it was no great marvel, the way the odd facts seemed all to be applying only to the poor folk, Tinkers and such like trash; and whoever gave a Tinker’s damn for them? Governments took their seats and began another day of taxing their nations, judging their criminals, and sending them to gaols, prison, and hemp.
But the folk who had Wakened through Night into Day remembered, and carried a little bit of the Night about with them for the rest of their lives. And the ones who had been born in the Night were gifted with dreams for ever, and they looked on the world through eyes bred to the Night-land. They only came alive at the falling of the day.
With the help of Mac Bride, Lady Agatha took over the old lord’s estates. They hung up over the main door an arrow, and forbade all further hunting on the estates. The rich men and their ladies found her much altered, sad and dreamy-eyed; soon enough even Lady Felicia lost patience with her and went to lodge with other hosts.
But herself, Lady Agatha, voyaged to Italy, where for all that winter she bathed in the Mediterranean sun. Her health was coming back to her, but in the secret place in her back was still the small red star, and in the spring she went back into Ireland. On Beltane Moon, she built a Need-fire out of driftwood on the lawn, burning all night, the way Beltane is a favoring fire, for then the Druids had made fires with spells, driving cattle between them against evil. And there was merriment enacted there, and lovemaking among strangers, the way all there wore masks.
And on Midsummer’s Eve Lady Agatha rode down to the shore alone, beneath the dun at Knockadoon Head. She swam naked in the sea, and shivered beneath nought but a shawl, waiting for the dawn, that always came, always. And for this folly of swimming in the Western Sea she suffered her cough to come back.
November Eve came, Samhain, for suain is a gentle sound, and at Samhain gentle voices call. Lady Agatha found Mac Bride in a riding coat, his few belongings tied in a sack.
‘Faith, where are you off to?’ she asked him.
‘It’s to Lough Mask I’m going, to the Lady of the Lough,’ answered he.
‘Take me along with you.’
He looked at her sternly, shaking his head; it was plain he wanted to be obliging her, only the thing she was asking was forbidden. He said at length,
‘Yes. If you want it.’
And together in the sunset those two were riding across the fields, leaping stiles and hedges, outracing the Sun, until they rode over the ridge into the watery mist, that could be entered at no other time.
Master Aengus waited for them there at the bottom of the lough.
He had not died, but he lived as Arianna’s man in her abbey on the lough, where an endless twilight darkened into night. The bandits and wild ladies and the elder folk had flocked to Arianna in the mist; second only to her was the Lady of the Stone, the one they called the Dancer. She lived in the second tower of the Abbey, the Bride’s Tower, that was finished at last, with her sisters, Maid Grisalta and Maid Merrwyn.
And Agatha joined him in those darkling misty lands, under the orchards, and for one night they were together, speaking quickly, catching up on all their news. Holding each other with all their strength, beneath a quince tree, for one night.
When the night was brightening into dying, Mac Bride told her he would not leave that place again. ‘It was only to be helping you I went back into the foreign land at all,’ he told her.
Alone Lady Agatha rode over the ridge, out into the misty dawn, and found it was not a night that had passed there in the foreign land of the day, but a full month of the Moon.
In all the years after Lady Agatha was wintering in the Italian sun, building her Beltane fire, bathing beneath Knockadoon Head, and riding to her ghostly lover in the lough every November Eve.
As the years went by, she grew older at but half the quickness of those around her. But Master Aengus in the orchard aged hardly at all, the way he was living in Tir-na-n’Og. Soon enough Agatha matched him in seeming year for year, and after that looked older. Master Aengus did grow older, a little, the way he aged a month’s time every night she came to join him, and he took back a little of her age, and put it on himself.
Even so, Master Aengus never forgot the Princess Maeve, the White Hind. He saw her prancing in the wood in white moonlight on Midsummer’s Eve, even as Agatha in the foreign land was diving in the sea-foam. It is not to be thought he was so utterly faithless as that, to be forgetting her. But he kept his faith after his own fashion, as he did all other things.
Once riding to him Lady Agatha mistook the height of a stile and was thrown from her horse and killed.
She was old then, but the grandchildren of her friends were fully grown, and their children old enough to have danced their first mask in the Need-fire light.
They did not bury her in the church with the rest of her kin, but put her under Earth on her lawn, beneath where the grass was dead and the ground bare, the way she had been building there her Need-fires for nigh a hundred years.
Master Aengus waited in the watery mist below the ridge. And when he saw she would not come, then he broke out across the ridge and dared steal even over the fields of the foreign land, going only by night, and hiding himself by day. He went to the manor house, now falling in ruins, ill maintained for all Agatha’s extravagance in keeping about her vagabond poets and wild-souled beauties who cared for nothing at all but love and pleasure, and only their own loves at that: were they not the children of the Night?
All fallen in ruins was the manor house, and the grass grown up wild about it, and the hedges of its mazes tall as castle walls. It was almost fallen beyond all recognizing.
But Aengus knew where to go.
There was a little marker there. It was of wood as she had wanted, the way it would soon be gone, burnt beneath the driftwood of the next year’s bonfire, and the next year’s after that.
Master Aengus had aged a day for every step he had taken out of his mother’s land. He sat by the marker all the night long, weary and breathless. Once he had stood beneath her windows yonder, and cut a bloom from her garden, a single bud of the night-blooming rose.
When the dawn broke, the Sun’s rays, marching green across the rimy lawns, discovered not Master Aengus sitting, but only a few moldy bones fallen beside the marker.
And the Sun rose, cruel and all-seeing as it ever is.
A young woman in a dark dress came out on the lawn. Her eyes were light as sea-waves, and her face fair, and in her reddish dark hair was a streak of white. She was the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of those two, and her name was Siona Mac Ulcin.
‘Bury the bones with my great-grandmother,’ she said to the servants. ‘She told me he would come.’
Come October, 1858, on her way to Italy, Siona Mac Ulcin took the stage round Ireland with one of her young men friends. She stopped at old Connor’s stage on the way, and she told the master there her story. Himself now was Connor’s great-great grandson; his great granddad had been Shawn Ruadh, Siobhan’s son; and he made Siona tell the tale out three times, until he had it right.
In his turn he told it to his guests, the ones he most liked, the way it was his best-loved tale. They stayed over to hear it out: it took all the night to tell, and who wouldn’t have tarried, to hear the truth of why the Sun had ceased to shine, and to recall the feats of daring in the Night of Seven Years? Traveler told it out to companion, and the latter told it out in turn. So it has come in a long, long line; and now in my turn I pass it on to you.
THE END
OF THE TALE
OF MASTER AENGUS AND LADY AGATHA,
AND THE LADY OF THE LOUGH.
filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share