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Blood by Moonlight

  A Romance

  by asotir

  Eartherea Books

  Here and Beyond

  Copyright 2009 by asotir.

  Blood by Moonlight is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. This means you’re free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, or to adapt the work into any form or media, so long as you give asotir credit for what we did (though not in any way that suggests that we endorse you or your use of this work), and so long as you ‘share alike’ – if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, then you distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license as this one.

  Table of Contents

  HE HEARS THE WIND IN THE SEDGE

  The Last Days of the Sun

  1. Of Master Aengus & His Love

  2. Of the Thing That He Did

  Part I. The Rising of the Moon

  The First Year of Night

  3. How They Lived After

  The Second Year of Night

  4. Of the Three Gifts He Made Her

  The Third Year of Night

  5. Of Agatha by Moonlight

  6. Of Aengus on the Watchtower

  The Fourth Year of Night

  7. Of the Maid in the Wood

  8. How Agatha Taught the Maid of Beauty

  9. Of the Bitterness of Beauty

  Part II. The Waxing of the Moon

  10. Of What Lay Buried Beneath the Sea

  11. Of the Irish Witch

  12. How She Learned of Him

  13. How the Trees Were Stilled

  14. Of the Each Dubh

  15. How She Lingered by the Lough

  Part III. The Full Moon

  The Fifth Year of Night

  16. Of the Leag Lorgmhar

  17. Of the Lady of the Lough

  18. How the Maid Entered the Court

  19. How Arianna Hunted

  20. Of the Dancer

  21. Of the Bell-tower

  22. Of the Masquerade

  The Sixth Year of Night

  23. How He Met the White Hind

  24. Of the Dwellers in the Night

  Part IV. The Waning of the Moon

  25. How They Fled

  26. Of Their Quarreling

  27. Of the Dark Wood

  The Seventh Year of Night

  28. How She Sang to Him

  29. Of the Grianan

  30. Of Aengus in the Sea

  The End of the Seventh Year of Night

  31. Of the Lady’s Share

  The First New Year of Sun

  Afterword

  HE HEARS THE WIND IN THE SEDGE

  I wander by the edge

  Of this desolate lake

  Where wind cries in the sedge:

  Until the axle break

  That keeps the stars in their round,

  And hands hurl in the deep

  The banners of East and West,

  And the girdle of light is unbound,

  Your breast will not lie by the breast

  Of your beloved in sleep.

  —William Butler Yeats

  ‘It seemed I slept –

  I must have slept, the way I did not dream.’

  The Last Days of the Sun

  1. Of Master Aengus & His Love

  THERE IS A LAND that is nearest the moon; and there in that land was once a fine young lady, bargained her way into a great manor house, and was the envy of the county by the banks of the Bride. The lady lived with the old lord of the manor, and some called her the old lord’s ward, and some called her his wife.

  The lady passed her time in reading, though mostly only novels, and one most of all, and the spine of it all worn smooth, the way it was her best-beloved. She took down and opened this old book one time, and started reading in the middle. And all at once she pushed the book away and said, ‘Ah, and the like of that will never be happening to me.’

  And there was a poor, proud farmer, loved the fine young lady. But his love was so cursed that even the wind in the sedge by the desolate lake would be crying out to him, Never, never…

  ‘Let her come back to this place, then!’ Master Aengus would shout.

  But the wind in the sedge cried, Never, never…

  So Master Aengus left the lake behind. His fields, his farmhouse and his milch-cow went untended, and his dog cried from the post in vain.

  He was a strange one, Master Aengus: not the everyday run of a farmer at all. His hands were long, with knuckles round as quail’s eggs, and sparse black hairs growing upon the backs, like reeds bent by the wind. And he had a gap in his right eyebrow, where a pale scar ran. And there was a lock of white hair grown out in his dark locks above his left ear.

  On the road he passed a stream, and stopped to watch the millwheel turn. Round and round went the quern, grain before it, meal behind it. The rain feeding the stream, the stream raising the millwheel, the millwheel turning the quern, the brown grains grinding, and all the world against him. Master Aengus left the mill and miller, and went up on the hill.

  Where he sat on an old, broken millstone at the cross-roads, and waited in the rain. Until the damned day fled, and the golden green rain dissolved in black mist.

  The lady then was dining, and laughing with her friends.

  In the night Master Aengus slipped around the village, climbed the high stone wall, and tracked up the path he knew so well.

  Where he found the rut of seventeen paces, where like a dog he padded up and down. Until a candle gleamed in the window above, and a small pale hand unlatched the casement.

  She looked out of the casement into the deep night. Then she looked down and saw him. He was standing in the worn place in her garden, there where he always stood, with his blushes and rude ragged hair.

  She stood quite still when she saw him. She was afraid of him. She was afraid most of all of his eyes.

  Then Master Aengus said to her:

  ‘Agatha beloved, make the wind a liar, come down to me here and delight my heart!’

  ‘No, Master Aengus, I’ll not do that tonight.’ Lady Agatha said, and turned behind her fan into her chamber, and closed the casement. She felt her heart beat very fast.

  From her shoulders she let fall her India muslin wrapper, and she slid with a whisper into pallid golden sheets, and gave herself to dreams.

  In her garden a great slashing stroke cut down a lady’s-rose in the night. And he stole away, did Master Aengus, across hay meadows to the wood in the park, the lord’s preserve. Where he lay against a hazel log, and held the flower on his breast.

  ‘Oh, Agony,’ Master Aengus sighed. Her given name was Agatha, but in his heart he called her Agony, for she was that to him.

  Come first light Master Aengus woke. There was six days’ beard on his cheek, but the lady’s-rose was still wrapped up tight in itself. And he heard a winding horn, the lord’s horn calling up the green and golden dawn.

  That morning she rose out of bed and bathed and dressed herself, just as she always did. But that morning it seemed to her she saw something different about the light, and the shadows in the corners of her room, and the worn book lurking on the nightstand by her bed.

  She went down to breakfast, and found the others there before her: ‘Have I been sleeping overlong?’ she asked.

  Lady Felicia, her closest friend, laughed and answered, ‘Scarcely that! But it’s a wonder you could have slept, my dear, through the clatter that went on.’

  ‘A bit harsh, my dear,’ muttered dear old Sir James.

  ‘Sir James awoke early, still in the night, really, and insisted on breakfast straightaway,’ said Dame Letitia.

  ‘Oh, I was hungry, and fancied a bit of bacon,�
� muttered Sir James. And at that Lady Agatha, Miss Cecily, and even Mr Humphreys laughed. And even the laughter of her friends struck Lady Agatha as odd and precious on that morning.

  The old lord walked in, came up to Lady Agatha and put his arm about her waist. He kissed her cheek nicely, taking his rights of her, and turned to his friends and guests to say, ‘I’ve been up for hours already, while you’ve been laying abed.’

  ‘Oh, but when weren’t you the first to be rising?’ asked Lady Felicia. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you sleep at all.’

  ‘Tonight,’ he answered, ‘was special – and today is too. Drink and eat heartily, my friends,’ he said, ‘the way it’s a day for celebrating. Today is Agatha’s birthday, and she is twenty-one today, and tonight,’ he added, drawing her closer to him in his long, thin arm, ‘tonight she shall come into her estate, and her dream will be realized.’ At this all the gentlemen tapped their glasses and chorused, ‘Bravo!’ and the ladies stepped forward to offer Lady Agatha heartfelt felicitations, to which she could only reply, blushing happily, ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’

  The old lord loosed his grip of her, strode to the doors and threw them open. ‘Mac Bride! Mac Bride!’ shouted he. The old countryman appeared in the gravel of the drive, tall, dark, and waiting.

  ‘Do you now,’ commanded the old lord, ‘Mac Bride, wake up the master of the hunt, let the horses be saddled, and unleash the hounds! By God, we’ll hunt on this fine morning of the Lady Agatha’s birthday!’

  The old countryman bowed and answered, ‘Aye, my lord,’ and vanished to do his master’s bidding.

  So the old lord whistled up a hunt, and they went riding in his park. First went the portly master of the hunt, and followed the old lord’s guests and friends, the wealthy men and their well-fed ladies, and the old lord himself on his stallion.

  Behind them rode Lady Agatha in a green riding habit, looking about her and delighting in the fineness of the day. And then she saw the farmer standing in her way.

  She drew up rather than ride him down, and he caught her reins in his brutal hands with the great round knuckles and the sparse black hairs.

  ‘Agatha, now make the wind a liar, come down to me here, hide me from the world behind the curtain of your hair!’

  She laughed: that was nerves and breathlessness. ‘No, Master Aengus, I’ll not do that today!’

  He let go her reins, and she left him standing there. Lady Agatha spurred her milk-white mare on, flashing through the trees, faster, faster.

  Master Aengus stood watching her. The golden dawn lit up the half of his face, its bristles and hard lines, and his glittery cold wise eyes.

  He held up his sword, that his father had won at Boyne, where he had lost all else. ‘If I could only hate you, Lady, and be free! But it’s the world I hold condemned, for it’s put you up on a milk-white mare, and left me only a rusted blade.’

  Cursing he put back his father’s sword, and left the lord’s preserve.

  In the blue west a fiery moon was falling: Beltane Moon she was, and it May Day Eve. Beltane is a favoring fire, the way at one time the Druids made fires with spells, driving cattle between them against evil. Master Aengus kissed to the moon a golden guinea on a chain at his throat. Then he went away.

  And it was a day and more than a day, and no man heard tell of him.

  And that night, while the others lay sleeping, Lady Agatha could not sleep. There was a burning in her breast, and her thoughts and hopes racing round and round, at all the promises the lord had made her, and all those he had already fulfilled. She took a lamp down the hallway, past all the doors of the bedchambers of their friends and guests, sleeping soundly. At the sound of Sir James’ trumpetous snore, she smiled.

  But in her mind’s eye there flashed the sight of the brutal hands with the great round knuckles and the sparse black hairs.

  She went into her own room and quietly closed the door. Upon her pallid golden bed she sat, and picked up her book, and stroked its smooth spine before she let it fall open on the counterpane: there on that page she let her finger fall, and there on that word she began to read: ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘and let you return to me on the morrow, at this very hour, Master Aengus. And then – may be! – I’ll go down to you.’

  So she slept, but months went by, and he never came.

  2. Of the Thing That He Did

  ON SUMMER’S EVE Lady Agatha went riding, through the long dusk sparkling with bonfires from every hill, and by chance it was Master Aengus’ farm she was riding past. His house was fallen in, dwelt in by deer and foxes; his fields were fallow, his milch-cow gone away, his dog tracked and slain for taking sheep. But no man, not even a King’s man, would take over that farm, for the curse that lingered there.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ said a man, ‘for the land to be barren and wasting away. Won’t his people come to claim the place?’

  ‘You know he hasn’t any people at all,’ said another. ‘Even old Tadgh and Maille May, they only took him in, the way they weren’t blessed with any children of their own, so they say. He was a foundling child.’

  ‘Where,’ she wondered, ‘has he gone to, then?’ She felt gentleness toward him, now he was gone away forever. For she felt safe at last from his eyes and from the feelings she felt underneath the fear, like the feeling the hind must feel when the hunter tracks her. But the sight of his farm was as if a cold hand put its fingers down the neck of her. Glad she was to put that ruin at her back!

  * * *

  AND MASTER AENGUS stood upon a spine of hills, between Earth and Heaven in the burning, burning night. The rush of the sea swarmed round him like the wildest blessing, and the gentle air was thick with it.

  And Master Aengus pushed into the air onto the far side of the hill over the strand. That was how he won through at last, into the back of beyond, where no mortal men may ever pass. And the fire in the air swarmed and buzzed around him like a hundred thousand bees. But Master Aengus pressed on still.

  A track of stones led down to a little stone hut. He bent and beat on the door with his staff.

  ‘Who’s there?’ was asked.

  ‘Open to me, now!’ shouted Aengus.

  The latch stirred, and the door opened three fingers wide. An old, old crone peeped out. She was so old her feet might well have walked the earth before the first grass grew.

  Master Aengus smiled a wild smile into that lovely face. ‘Give me the heart of my Lady Agatha and let her yield to me, or else the peace of death I’ll never see.’

  But those words broke the crone’s face into a grin. She banged the door shut, and her old voice said, ‘Fool Aengus! D’you think I don’t mind what wind cries in the sedge?’

  ‘Come out!’ cried Aengus. But his staff and his voice broke on the stones.

  Leaving, he broke a yellow pin-wheel in the garden path. It was a thing done out of spite. But far away a wave came crashing on the shore, curling all around the Irish land.

  * * *

  AND LADY AGATHA prospered, to hear the world tell of it, and gave herself to reading. Still and all, to some she seemed unsatisfied with all the gold she’d won. Her lord was kind enough to her, but he loved his hounds and horses every bit as much; and he was old, with an old man’s ways.

  There was never a harvest for promise like that year’s harvest. It promised fair to be as rich as Lady Agatha, as folk said, and make truth of the saying that on Bron Trogain, the start of the harvest, the Earth lay in labor under the grain, the way bron trogain is the trouble of the Earth.

  On the day after Bron Trogain the old lord had a word with the magistrate, and Master Aengus was outlawed, and the King’s men rode out on his trail with their white hounds.

  And Lady Agatha went to the desolate lake.

  She had never gone there, never since the day Master Aengus had espied her, and she had spoken a thing – no, he couldn’t have heard her murmur, not clear across the lake.

  Lady Agatha let trail the reins and wandered in the sedge. The
red sun of Lammas Eve shone off the waters into her eyes and it was sad she was, the way the cold was gathering in the upper airs, and it was nearly summer’s end.

  * * *

  BUT MASTER AENGUS was caged in a hollow tree at the edge of a wood under a spine of hills, and he with a bit of meat on the end of his sword to roast over his fire, when one of the King’s hounds found him. Big it was, sow-white, its ears red as rowan berries. The baying of the other hounds sounded from out the mist, and the King’s men close behind.

  Master Aengus dipped the bit of meat into the fire, bringing out the juices, and offered it to the hound. For a moment the hound was wavering between man and meat; then it set its jaws about the meat. Master Aengus spitted the dog on his sword, and ran it through.

  The baying of hounds rang off the hills. Master Aengus left his father’s sword in the hound. Far away in the wood something glimmered white in the mist. It was a pooka or a hind a-fleeing into a thicket. Master Aengus followed it.

  * * *

  THAT SAME EVENING Lady Agatha went riding in the wind and rain, and it was black night before she ventured back into the manor house, river-wet through cloak and dress and stockings, pale of face, her hands like knots in the leather reins. She let her maid undress her, and she warmed herself in the fire in her chamber, and slipped into her bed to sleep.

  * * *

  INTO A HOLLOW LAND the white thing led Master Aengus, where the bogs quaked round his feet. The soft rain feeding his fever, splashing on his brow, shuddering to steam, until bright laughter stopped him.

  A lady with a silver cloak and crown of hair was sitting on a stone. Her brow was a lily, her eyes were twinkling and her lips red as bleeding blackberries.

  ‘Why are you laughing, then?’ asked Master Aengus.

  ‘Are you not a farmer from the Bride?’ asked the beauty in her turn. ‘I’ve heard tell of you.’

  ‘What thing have you heard?’

  ‘Ah, this and that! That your looks were such, folk took to calling you Aengus for a jest; that your manner was such, they called you Master, poor as you were. And that you know many a difficult and dangerous thing: in short, that you are a free thinker, and a philosopher.

  ‘And what has that won you, Master Aengus? Lady Agatha still blushes when you gape at her. Not all the potions ever blent will win you what you want!’

  ‘What then but die?’ asked Aengus.

  ‘Have you courage? Would you dare all?’

  ‘I would dare nothing, for nothing’s all to me.’

  ‘Then you might do something after all. And then the curse against your love will be ended, and your lady will consent to love you – or rather, she will conceive for you the strongest amorous desire. But if you do it, Aengus! Then her longing for you will be short-lived, and meanwhile all her world will be ruined and waste!’