Sister Emily's Lightship

by Jane Yolen

  The Uncorking of Uncle Finn

  UNCLE FINN HAD ANGERED the Abbott. It had something to do with blasphemy—the Abbot’s, not Uncle Finn’s. Uncle had been converted several centuries before by the Irish saint, Patrick, and was deeply religious still, given to falling on his knees in the unlikeliest of places: rookeries, backstairs, tidal pools, butter churns. The Abbott, on the other hand, was a pagan and a drunk besides. It was inevitable that the two should clash over matters of faith.

  Now I grant you that it is unnerving for the locals to have a fanatically Christianized elf forever exhorting them to eschew evil and seek the good, popping up unexpectedly in their most secret places of vice. He knew where every still was working, every mistress kept, every bit of falsified paper stored. He had a nose for venialness. But as he had been proselytizing for more than three centuries in his own curious way, one would have thought the humans would have grown used to it. And indeed, those who could stand it the least had long since left, moving to Killarney or Glocamorra or catching a ride with itinerant saints, sailing westward over the treacherous seas in coracles made of glass. There were some just that desperate to escape Uncle Finn’s exhortations.

  The Abbott, however, was newly appointed, being a sinner of great reknown on the Continent. It was thought by the bishop that a year or two in Kilkenny under the watchful eye of Uncle Finn would wear him down. It was the bishop’s own version of a finishing school, and he was prepared to finish the Abbot or kill him in the process.

  The war had begun as soon as the Abbot had set foot in the cellar, that being Uncle Finn’s province. He was partial to dark places; his maternal great-grandmother had once lived with a troll, and Finn took after that side.

  The Abbot’s first trip to the cellar was without warning. He had disconnected the bell that rang over the cellarer’s head, a precaution even his most fervid detractors had applauded. That way, of course, no one could count the number of times he visited belowstairs. Kilkenny Abbey was well known not only for its wines and a surprisingly good claret, but also for its hardier brews: Kümmel made with an imported caraway seed, a plum drink concocted with the help of a recipe lent by the Slovakian saint Slivos, and a wild blackthorn gin that had been said to rock even the toughest of European soldiery.

  To say that Uncle Finn was surprised by the Abbot is an understatement. He was astonished out of three Hail Marys. They bled from his lips and lost him the conversion of three recalcitrant mice and a reprobate rat.

  One must also imagine the Abbot’s astonishment, for no one had warned him about Uncle Finn. He had come tripping down the stairs, ready for further lubrication, and suddenly there was this wee attenuated creature garbed in green on knobby knees before a congregation of reluctant rodents. Is it any wonder the Abbot cried out and held his head? Or that Uncle Finn reciprocated with the bloody Hail Marys and an elvish curse that shattered three bottles of the best claret that the Abbot had hoped to save for after midnight Mass?

  The Abbot fired the second shot of the war, a letter to the pope requesting excommunication for all faerie folk on the grounds that everyone knew they had no souls. But the pope refused the request, for he himself had once held similar views when he was but a seminarian. And then he had pronounced that his walking stick would sooner grow blossoms than a certain nixie of the local pond might enter heaven. He had not known she was a convert, one of the magdalens brought round by a recent crusade. No sooner had the words been out of his mouth, than his staff had sprouted a feathering of ferns and spatulate leaves and begun to bud. So the pope was not about to deny the possibility of souls to any of the Good Folk. In effect, he left the matter entirely in the bishop’s hands.

  This so displeased the Abbot, he turned his displeasure into a monumental drunk using the sacramental wine, a drunk that ended only when he awoke in his cell the Sunday before Lent to see Uncle Finn perched on his bedfoot, hands upraised, the spirit of the Lord and all the Irish saints moving in his mouth.

  “Arise,” cried Uncle Finn, “and go forth.”

  The Abbot arose, and his sandal went forth and smacked Uncle Finn right between the eyes while all the while the Abbot praised the Lord.

  Now a sandal and Uncle Finn are about the same size, so there was more damage than either the Abbot or the Good Lord intended. So the Abbot was, indeed, forced to arise and scoop up Uncle Finn’s body from the stone floor. He brought Uncle Finn, wrapped in a linen handkerchief, to the infirmarer, a certain Brother Elias.

  “What can you do with this thing?” asked the Abbot. However, as he was holding Uncle Finn wrapped in the handkerchief in his left hand and his right was holding his own head (and it still ringing from the three days of steady drinking), it was no wonder Brother Elias’s answer was confusing.

  “If you’d stop bending your elbow, my lord Abbot,” said the old monk, “your head would be marvelously improved. It’s a wonder of anatomy, it is, that head and elbow are so connected.” The infirmarer, being a reformed tippler himself, had plenty more salvos where that one came from. He had given up drink and taken up religion with the same fervor.

  “Not my elbow and not my head, you Kilkenny clodpate! This!” The Abbot held out his left hand, where, in the linen, Uncle Finn was just coming to.

  “Saints in heaven, but it’s Finn,” cried Elias, making the sign of the cross hastily and missing a fourth of it.

  “That’s not fine at all,” said the Abbot, who had no tolerance for any accents save his own.

  “Not fine, Finn,” explained the infirmarer, but since he pronounced them the same, it led to a few more moments of misunderstanding until he reached over and gently removed Uncle Finn from his winding sheet. “You had better be asking his pardon, my lord. He’s a Christian now for sure, which means he will turn the other cheek as often as not. But he’s still quite a hand at elvish curses when he’s riled. Better not to be on his bad side.”

  “He’s already on my bad side,” roared the Abbot, remembering with renewed fury the three bottles of claret. “Fix him up, tidy him up, and shut him up. Then report to me. The minute he can handle a good strong talking-to, I want to know.”

  But Finn was already beginning to sit up, and reaching his wee hands up to his wee head. What was not clear to the two monks was that Finn, while awake, was not aware. The sandal had quite addled him. His magic was turned around and about widdershins. He began to moan and speak in tongues.

  “Oh, for Our Lord’s sake,” cried the Abbot with great feeling, his own head twanging like a tuning fork by the tone of those tongues.

  The supplication to Our Lord brought Uncle Finn’s eyes wide open, and he began to sing hosannas.

  “I wish he’d put a cork in it!” cried the Abbot, his hands to his ears.

  At the word wish, Finn’s eyes got a strange glow in them, and everything not human in the room began to stir about as if caught up in a twisting wind. Faster and faster anything not pinned down began to move: glasses and retorts; bunches of drying patience, pepperwort, and clary; mortars and pestles: long lines of linen bandages; copies of Popular Errors in Physick, Mithradates’ receipt for Venice Treacle, and Drayton’s Hermit. All the while, Uncle Finn kept chanting:

  Pickles and peas, knife and fork,

  Find a bottle, carve a cork,

  Wind it up and in the wine

  A sailor’s life is mighty fine.

  Which, of course, is a terribly mixed-up version of the old bottle spell used mostly by drunken mages to call up spirits.

  Sea winds began to blow, spouts of whales were sighted, dolphin clicks heard, and with one last incredible whoooosh, the whole of the whirling stuff was sucked in through the neck of a nearby bottle of Bordeaux ’79 that Elias used for medicinal purposes only, it being too sour and full of sediment for a tippler of taste. The displaced wine splattered all over the infirmary, and the room smelled like a pothouse for a week.

  Then, with a final thwap, the cork replaced itself. The stirring continued inside the bottle for fully a mi
nute more, and when the wind and mist and moisture had resolved itself, there appeared inside the light green bottle a passable imitation of a sailing ship, with a pestle for a mainmast and linen bandages for sails. Clinging to the mortar steering wheel was Uncle Finn, looking both puzzled and pleased. He gave a weak smile in the direction of the cork, put his hand on his head, and slid down in a faint onto the papier-mache deck on which the ingredients for Venice Treacle could still be discerned.

  “Oh, my Lord,” said the infirmarer, not really sure if he meant the salutation to have a capital L or a small one.

  But the Abbot, taking it was himself addressed, said softly, “And that should do it.”

  For a week he was right, for the abbey was quiet and filled with plain-song laced only with the Abbot’s own version of an old capstan chantey sung fully a half note off-tune.

  But the communications of the Fey, while sometimes slow, are sure. The rodent proselytes told their families, one of whose members were overheard by a wandering and early June bug. The June bug’s connections included a will-o’-the wisp who had married into Uncle Finn’s family. It was scarcely a week later that word of Uncle Finn’s incarceration came to my father’s ears.

  By the time he had sorted through his meager store of magicks and translated himself to the far side of the island, using a map in one of his books that was sadly too many years ahead of its time, twelve boggles, banshees, nuggles, and a ghost (all relatives) had been to visit before him. The abbey had, in that short week’s time, gotten itself a reputation for being haunted—as indeed it was, in a manner of speaking—and the humans had summarily deserted the abbey grounds until the proper exorcists might be found.

  None of this, of course, helped poor Uncle Finn. No one but a human could pull the cork from the Bordeaux bottle, for it had been placed there by a human wish. And as long as the visits continued, no human would venture near the place.

  My father sighed and stared at his brother, whom he remembered fondly as an elf of high promise and a great sense of humor. Uncle Finn looked little like the memory, being sadly faded and a bit green, a property not only of the tinted glass but of his initial handling, seasickness, and a week corked up in a bottle that still reeked of wine.

  Father shouted at him and Finn shouted back, but their voices were strained through the layers of green glass. Conversation was impossible. At last Father came home, whey-faced and desperate-looking. In fact, all the relatives had left, for there was nothing any of them could do except sigh. As the last of them departed, the priestly exorcists arrived. Humans have this marvelous ability to time their exits and entrances, which is why they—and not the Fey—hold theatrical events. They spoke their magic words and threw about a great deal of incense and believed it was their own efforts that rid the abbey of the Fey. But like a plumber who gets paid after a sink has fixed itself, they were praised for nothing. Visiting Fey never overstay their welcome nor hang about when nothing can be done. It is simply not in our nature.

  The Abbot had, of course, sworn Elias to secrecy concerning Uncle Finn and the bottle, and the two of them had replaced the Bordeaux 79 on the wine cellar racks without the cellarer’s knowledge. But Elias, after a week in a room smelling strongly of tipple, returned to his old ways, and after that his vow of secrecy mattered little, for no one would have believed a word he had to say. As for the Abbot, after a year of the most flagrant misrule, he was sent by the pope on a crusade against the infidels from which he did not return, though there were frequent rumors that he had become a sheikh in a distant emirate and had banned all peris and jinn from his borders.

  That left Uncle Finn corked up in his bottle on a back shelf in a cellar of a once-haunted Abbey, marked as a wine so degraded and unpopular that it would never be taken by any knowledgeable person from the shelf. And we were afraid he would remain so forever.

  But one day, as I sat reading in my father’s library, which is well stocked with books of the past, present, and future, I came upon a volume in section A. A for Archaeology, Astronomy, Ancestry, and Aphorisms. It was a splendid piece of serendipity, for the book told about the Americas, where, in some distant year, a man rich in coins but lacking in wisdom would take Kilkenny Abbey stone by stone over the great waters, a feat even a Merlin might envy. And—as one of the Aphorists wrote in another volume in that section, since Americans would have no wine before its time, surely the magical words “Bordeaux 79” will reek of such time. Uncle Finn, oh Uncle Finn, you will have before you an entire continent to convert, and proselytes beyond counting, for a land that saves its saviors in plaster and seeds the heavens with saucers should have no trouble at all accepting a bottle saint.

  Dusty Loves

  THERE IS AN ASH tree in the middle of our forest on which my brother Dusty has carved the runes of his loves. Like the rings of its heartwood, the tree’s age can be told by the number of carvings on its bark. Dusty loves…begins the legend high up under the first branches. Then the litany runs like an old tale down to the tops of the roots. Dusty has had many many loves, for he is the romantic sort. It is only in taste that he is wanting.

  If he had stuck to the fey, his own kind, at least part of the time, Mother and Father would not have been so upset. But he had a passion for princesses and milkmaids, that sort of thing. The worst, though, was the time he fell in love with the ghost of a suicide at Miller’s Cross. That is a story indeed.

  It began quite innocently, of course. All of Dusty’s love affairs do. He was piping in the woods at dawn, practicing his solo for the Solstice. Mother and Father prefer that he does his scales and runs as far from our pavilion as possible, for his notes excite the local wood doves, and the place is stained quite enough as it is. Ever dutiful, Dusty packed his pipes and a cress sandwich and made for a Lonely Place. Our forest has many such: dells silvered with dew, winding streams bedecked with morning mist, paths twisting between blood-red trilliums—all the accoutrements of Faerie. And when they are not cluttered with bad poets, they are really quite nice. But Dusty preferred human highways and byways, saying that such busy places were, somehow, the loneliest places of all. Dusty always had a touch of the poet himself, though his rhymes were, at best, slant.

  He had just reached Miller’s Cross and perched himself atop a standing stone, one leg dangling across the Anglo-Saxon inscription, when he heard the sound of human sobbing. There was no mistaking it. Though we fey are marvelous at banshee wails and the low-throbbing threnodies of ghosts, we have not the ability to give forth that half gulp, half cry that is so peculiar to humankind, along with the heaving bosom and the wetted cheek.

  Straining to see through the early-morning fog, Dusty could just make out an informal procession heading down the road toward him. So he held his breath—which, of course, made him invisible, though it never works for long—and leaned forward to get a better view.

  There were ten men and women in the group, six of them carrying a coffin. In front of the coffin was a priest in his somber robes, an iron cross dangling from a chain. The iron made Dusty sneeze, for he is allergic and he became visible for a moment until he could catch his breath again. But such was the weeping and carryings-on below him, no one even noticed.

  The procession stopped just beneath his perch, and Dusty gathered up his strength and leaped down, landing to the rear of the group. At the moment his feet touched the ground, the priest had—fortuitously—intoned, “Dig!” The men had set the coffin on the ground and begun. They were fast diggers, and the ground around the stone was soft from spring rains. Six men and six spades make even a deep grave easy work, though it was hardly a pretty sight, and far from the proper angles. And all the while they were digging, a plump lady in gray worsted, who looked upholstered rather than dressed, kept trying to fling herself into the hole. Only the brawny arms of her daughters on either side and the rather rigid stays of her undergarments kept her from accomplishing her gruesome task.

  At last the grave was finished, and the six men lowered the coffin in
while the priest sprinkled a few unkind words over the box, words that fell on the ears with the same thudding foreboding as the clods of earth upon the box. Then they closed the grave and dragged the weeping women down the road toward the town.

  Now Dusty, being the curious sort, decided to stay. He let out his breath once the mourners had turned their backs on him, and leaped up onto his perch again. Then he began to practice his scales with renewed vigor, and had even gotten a good hold on the second portion of “Puck’s Sarabande” when the moon rose. Of course, the laws of the incorporeal world being what they are, the ghost of the suicide rose, too. And that was when Dusty fell in love.

  She was unlike her sisters, being petite and dark where they had been large and fair. She had two dimples, one that could be seen when she frowned and one when she smiled. Her hair was plaited with white velvet ribands and tied off with white baby’s breath, which, if she had not been dead and a ghost, would certainly with have been wilted by then. There was a fringe of dark hair almost obscuring the delicate arch of her eyebrows. Her winding sheet became her.

  Dusty jumped down and bowed low. She was so new at being a ghost, she was startled by him. Though he is tall for an elf, he is small compared to most humans and rarely startles anyone. It is the ears, of course, that give him away. That, and the fact that, like most male feys, he is rather well endowed. The fig leaf was invented for human vanity. The solitary broad-leafed ginko was made for the fey. She covered her eyes with her hands, which, of course, did not help, since she could see right through her palms, bones and all.

  “What are you?” she whispered. And then she added plaintively, “What am I?”

  “You are dead,” Dusty said. “And I am in love,” foreplay being a word found only in human dictionaries.

  But the ghost turned from him and began to weep. “Alas,” she cried, “then it was all for naught, for where is my sweet Roman?”