FATHER TIMOTHY HAD all his weapons to hand. Bell, book, and candle—and a fire of devotion that burned higher with every day that passed. His flock was as intractable as he had expected. They came to Mass on Sundays as they always had, heard his sermon with their usual blank politeness and the occasional snore, then went straight back home and put out their saucers of cream and put up their charms to placate this spirit or that.
He strode through the village one fine Monday morning, with his bell ringing and his candle burning. At every doorstep he stopped and bowed and prayed, and poured out every bowl of cream.
It was a great waste of good cream, as the widow O’Brien declared in her brass trumpet of a voice. “And is it any less wasted for sitting out in the sun or the rain?” he shot back from the core of his zeal.
That silenced her, which was a miracle in itself, but by evening every doorstep had its bowl back again, and cream in it—even his own.
It took a great mustering of courage to confront Mrs. Murphy, but confront her he did. He led her to the doorstep and the offending object.Words were almost beyond him. “This,” he said. “This thing—this defiance—before God, woman, are you determined to destroy me in this town?”
Her face was as serene as it ever was, but the brogue was just a fraction thicker than usual. “Sure and I did nothing, Father,” she said.
“Nothing but put this bowl out for the pixies,” said Father Timothy.
“I never filled it,” she said. “It was empty when I came in this morning, and full when I came out just now.”
Mrs. Murphy stood there with her stiff spine and her perfect rectitude, and he could not believe she lied. “Then who is it?” he demanded. “Who did it?”
“No human person, Father,” she said, crossing herself devoutly. “Come inside, Father. I’ve a nice chop for your dinner. Where’s the harm in a bowl of cream, after all?”
“Where’s the harm?” Father Timothy sucked in air. “Where is—” He coughed and choked. She thumped his back with a surprisingly strong fist, until he could talk again. “There is all the harm in the world! This is a threat to your immortal soul. You shall have no god before God. You shall worship no heathen spirits. You shall not—”
“Come,” she said, tugging lightly at his arm. “Come and have your dinner.”
“Unhand me, woman!” he thundered. “I will not be treated like a child—fed and put to bed and then forgotten. This village is in mortal danger. The forces of darkness are creeping up on it. I must defend it. It is my duty.”
“Surely, Father,” she said soothingly, “and a warrior of God needs his dinner if he’s to fight the good fight. Come and have your chop before it gets cold.”
Father Timothy groaned in frustration. But she was right. He should eat. Then he would pursue this war in earnest.
THE CREAM WAS THE LEAST OF IT. Every jar of milk that came into the priest’s house went sour, even if it were brought warm and foaming from the cow. The boots that fit him best in all the world sprang their soles and stayed sprung. His cassock would not stay clean for anything he did. There were vermin in his bed and spiders in his parlor, and when he walked on his rounds with his bell and book and candle, invisible fingers pinched and poked him until he bled.
None of it swayed him in the slightest. The worse the persecution, the more determined he was. He toppled the dolmen in the wood with his own hands, and nothing but a pick and a crowbar—and all the price he paid for it was a mass of tiny bruises that he offered as a sacrifice, and a broken toe that was even better in that regard. That Sunday he said Mass with more conviction than he had since he was first ordained, and his sermon was thunder and brimstone.
Better yet, the village began slowly to shift from gaping at him in astonishment or, at most, calling out to him to stop whatever he was doing. None of them made a concerted effort to stop him. After his glorious Sunday sermon, when he went to exorcise the ghosts from the crossroad, a surprising number of people followed him and joined in the responses.
He came home from that in a flush of triumph, having prevailed upon his audience to renew their baptismal vows—in which they renounced Satan and all his works. He found Mrs. Murphy in the kitchen as usual, tending a savory pot of stew while she stirred a cake that made good use of soured milk.
He came perilously close to hugging her, but her dignity was much too formidable for any such liberties. He settled for a broad smile and a delighted greeting. “A fine day to you,Mrs.Murphy, and aren’t we God’s favorite children?”
“You are, I’m sure, Father,” she said with no sign that she noticed his ebullience. “I’ll be leaving early this evening, Father, if you don’t terribly mind.”
“Oh, yes!” he cried. “Yes, you can go. It’s your daughter, isn’t it? I’ll be baptizing another soul for the parish soon, I’m sure, and God bless her and the child, too.”
Her nostrils thinned slightly at the indelicacy of a man referring to a woman’s lying-in, but she thanked him civilly.
“You are very welcome,” he said. “Go on now, I’m sure you’re eager to be by her side. I can watch the cake until it’s done, and feed myself, too.”
It was a measure of her concern for her daughter that she did not bridle at the suggestion. She left him with most particular instructions, which he promised to follow to the letter. By the time he had repeated them once, then again, the cake was done; she set it on the table to cool, hung up her apron with unruffled tidiness, and excused herself.
He went to bed that night a happy man, replete with cake and stew and the sweet savor of victory. In the morning, he thought, he would begin the next phase of his campaign: going from door to door and taking down the charms, and calling the rest of the strays back to the fold. He fell asleep with a smile on his face and a heart full of anticipation. It would be a glorious morning, and an even more glorious week, in which Ballynasloe at last, for the first time in its existence, became truly a Christian village.
IT WAS RAINING that Monday morning, with a raw edge to it that spoke all too clearly of winter. The hermit had been up all night burning the volumes of his sonnets—which served, quite incidentally, to keep him warm in the unexpected chill. Pegeen had brought his daily meal while he snatched a bit of sleep: he found the pail and the jar and the basket of bread and apples by the hearth when he woke. The bread and the stew were as substantial as ever, but the ale had fallen off dreadfully. It was thin and horribly bitter. He gagged on the first unsuspecting swallow, and spat it explosively into the fire. The flames hissed and glowed briefly green.
“William,” said a voice as sweet as honey in the comb. “William Thorne.”
He started at the sound of the name that he had left behind with the rest of his worldly life, and scowled as he spun. “My name is Brother Columbanus!”
“William Thorne,” said the uninvited guest. She was sitting on the bench by the wall. He had not heard her open or shut the door, which even after Pegeen’s ministrations had a noticeable squeak in the hinges. She was simply sitting there, smiling slightly, dressed in something shimmering and white.
He did not, except for the first fraction of a second, mistake her for an angel. Angels, as any hermit should know, had no gender. This was a female beyond any shadow of a doubt. She looked rather like Pegeen, in fact,with her hair as black as black ever was, and her skin as white as snow on the mountain, and her eyes the color of the sapphire that his lost beloved’s husband had given her on their wedding day.
That memory, once so piercingly painful, now barely rippled the surface of his calm. He knew his Plato; he was a Cambridge man. To the blurred and faded shadow that was Pegeen, this was the luminous reality. His memory of the yellow-haired Englishwoman had dwindled away to nothing. Before this vision of glory, he had forgotten even her name.
“William Thorne,” said the vision a third time, as if to seal the spell. “A good morning to you, and a fair meeting on this fine wild day.”
“Good—good morning,” the her
mit stammered. He tried to scrape together the fragments of his dignity, but they were lost beyond recall. “How do you know my name? How did you get in? How—”
“So many questions,” she said, still with that hint of a smile. “Is that ale in the jar beside you? May I trouble you for a sip? For it’s far I’ve come, and a thirsty journey, too.”
“It should be ale,” the hermit said. “It tastes like cat piss.” He caught himself; he flushed as hot as the fire.“Pardon—pardon—I—”
“Is that the very truth?” his visitor inquired. He had not seen her move, but somehow the jar was in her hand. She sipped from it, paused to savor the sip, then nodded as if in satisfaction. Then, to his startlement, she lifted the jar and drank deep.
He leaped to her rescue—for, by God’s bones, she would destroy her stomach with that vile excuse for a tipple. She smiled blissfully at him and surrendered the jar. He raised it to fling the remainder of its contents into the fire, but stopped short as a pair of things intruded on his awareness: one, that the jar was as heavy as if she had not half drained it, and two, that such an aroma wafted from it as must wreathe the casks in Paradise.
In his shock, he could not help himself. He sipped as she had.His eyes went wide. Just as she had, he took a deep and blissful draught. This was the very living archetype of Ale, as she was the archetype of Woman. And when at last he lowered the jar, with his head spinning from the glorious fumes, the brown ale lipped the brim. The jar was as full as it had been when he began.
He was not ready yet to accept what he was seeing. That the priest was right and there was magic in this world, and a being other than an angel could appear to a would-be holy hermit and transform a misbegotten brew into the tipple of the gods.
His uninvited guest arched a brow. “My dear William. You will credit the existence of angels but not of good earthly magic? Is that what it is to be modern—to be all agog over a myth and all blind to the truth?”
“Your accent,” he said. “You sound . . . English.”
She drew herself up. He had not known she was so tall. “Indeed I am not any such thing! I am a daughter of the Daoine Sidhe, of lineage as old as any in Ireland.”
Her indignation was as imposing as her height. It even overwhelmed the fact that she had heard his thought as clearly as if he had spoken it. “I—I’m sorry,” he said rather weakly. “I didn’t intend—I only meant—”
“Of course you never intended to offend,” she said from the height of her dudgeon. “In all your reading of myths and stories, did you never come across the gift of tongues?”
“I came across many things,” he said, and for safety’s sake: “lady. How can angels be a myth? They’re religious doctrine.”
“Have you ever seen an angel?”
“Well,” he said, “no. But faith requires—”
“Ah,” she said.“What you’ve never seen, you believe.What you see before your very eyes and taste with your very tongue, you call a fancy and a fabrication, because in your vision of the world there can be no such thing.”
Her logic was rather deadly. Her eyes were even more so. He could drown in them. “I believe in you,” he said dreamily, “but not necessarily in—”
“I suppose that will have to do,” she said with studied patience. “Believe in me, then, and listen. I come to you for help.”
“For—” He gaped at her. “What can the likes of me do for the likes of you?”
“One would wonder,” she said, but kindly enough that he could not take it poorly. “Still, none of us can escape the truth of it.We have a great difficulty and a spreading grief, and all our castings and omens send us to you.”
“Why? What can I do?”
“That,” she said, “the omens don’t say. Only that you are our best hope.”
“For what? Against what?”
She nodded as if his sudden sharpness pleased her. He never knew what to do with himself around a beautiful woman.With this one, for a miracle, he could speak. Mostly he stood and gobbled, or blushed until he had to turn and bolt.
When she spoke again, her voice had a stronger music. He heard the lilt of the Irish in it then. “I come from the Daoine Sidhe to the hermit of Ballynasloe, to the last of his kind in all of Ireland. I come in the name of the Dagda and the Morrigan and Maeve the queen, with their strength in my hand and their blessing on my head.We beg that you will hear us.
“Our power is not what it was. The moon has waned too often. The sun is setting fast.We are old, old as our green hills, and year by year we dwindle into the grass.
“Time was when we would have raised war in heaven and riven the earth below, and broken the back of any army that came against us.Now we have shrunk into the little people, the faerie folk, dwellers under the hills. We feed on cream that goodwives set on doorsteps, and perform little magics for those who still, in their dim way, remember.
“We were proud once.We were gods, and mortals worshiped us. That is gone. All gods die; time rules us all, even us who saw this isle rise gleaming out of ocean.
“We are dying, but our time is not yet come.Yet we are being hastened to our end. Our shrines are violated, our workings fouled, our own land turned against us. The faith that sustained us is being eaten away. Cruel spells weaken and destroy us.”
“The priest’s crusade,” the hermit said in a flash of understanding. “He’s only one man. How can he—”
“Not one man alone,William Thorne,” she said. “Years, centuries of them. Bell, book, and candle drained away our strength year by year, robbed us of the mortal faith that fed us, and narrowed the sphere of our earthly power to one small ring of hills and a valley with a river in it, and an oak, and a Druid wood.”
“Ballynasloe,” said the hermit.
“Ballynasloe,” she said. “All those things, and an old tower that was ours long ago, set above the last of the hollow hills, with the last hermit living in the tower and the last of us living below.”
The hermit regarded her in a kind of a horror.“Then I’m destroying you, too.My devotions,my prayers—”
She laughed—astonishing, and ravishing, with her white teeth and her tumbled hair, and the sound of it like water bubbling from a pure spring. “Oh, no! You’re not destroying us at all. Such little strength as we have left, you feed, with your innocence and your trust, and your faith in the beauty of women.”
“My faith is in God!”
“And is not every woman an incarnation of Her?”
“God is not—” He stopped short. “You’re as pagan as Pegeen.”
“I’m of the Daoine Sidhe,” she said. “The water of baptism would sear the flesh from my bones.”
“I’m a man of God,” the hermit said. “I am.”
“Mostly certainly you are,” she said. “Will you help us? We harm no one.We’ll fade in time; but it should be our time, not that of the man who has taken such exception to our little tribute of charms and cream.”
“He says that you endanger the villagers’ immortal souls. He’s charged with the care of those souls. He has to defend them.”
“We are no danger to anyone’s soul,” she said.
He should not have believed her. If she had been in any way seductive, if she had slid eyes at him or curved her body toward him, he would have known that she was false. But she never moved. Her face was somber. Her words were simple and her eyes steady. She did nothing that a woman would do to tempt a man.
Her existence was a temptation. He signed himself with the cross, desperately. “Get you behind me! Go!”
To his lasting astonishment, she obeyed him. She winked out like a flame in a wind, vanished as if she had never been.
He should have been triumphant. He sank down by the hearth where the fire was dying, and wished he had never been born. Even with faerie women, he was crashingly inept.
WILLIAM THORNE,” said the voice that had been haunting his dreams. He had hoped and dreaded that he would not hear it again while he was awake. But awake h
e most certainly was. He was digging in his garden in a brief bit of sun between a blustery morning and the promise of rain at evening.
She cast no shadow over him as she stood between the poles on which the last of the beans were hanging rather sadly. Her garment was the color of autumn leaves, and her skin was as white and her hair as black as he remembered. In the plain daylight she seemed more real than anything around her.
“William Thorne,” she said. “Have you reconsidered?”
Get thee behind me! he meant to thunder, but all that came out was a strangled squeak. His dreams had been full of her.What he had been doing in them, and what she had been doing in return, he prayed she could not see. He had been doing penance for it until his back was raw.
God seemed very remote just then and rather mythical. She was there and real and as solid as the black earth of Ireland.
“If you’re dying,” he heard himself say, “then why are you so—so—”
“You give me life,” she said. “It’s a blessing and a miracle.What a rare creature you are,William Thorne!”
“I’m very ordinary,” he said. “I’m a terrible poet. I’m worthless with women. I’m not even very good at being a hermit.”
“You are excellent at being William,” she said, “and at making us stronger. Tell me,William Thorne.What price will you take for your help against us?”
“What—”
“Gold?” she asked. “Jewels? Works of beauty and great worth?”
“Faerie gold turns to dust in the morning,” he said. “Even I know that.”
“This is real gold,” she said, “from old hoards. But if that won’t buy you . . . what of fame? You call yourself a bad poet.Would you gain the gift of the bard? We can make you the greatest maker and singer that ever was in Ireland, give you words of power to shake the courts of kings. You’ll make men laugh and sing for joy, and weep with the beauty of your verses.”
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