Blood by Moonlight Read online

‘Fair, aye: a magistrate’s darling, forsaken when the day died.’

  She turned on them.

  ‘How will I be crossing to the crannog?’

  They stared at her. None of them were answering her at first.

  ‘Moy-rua, none of us will row you there,’ said a man at last. ‘The ferry’s the only way. And it only goes after moonfall; and they’re choosy who they take.’

  That was all the answer she got.

  * * *

  MUDDY SEDGE skirted the lough away from the village. The stranger woman scooped up water and drank from her black-marked palm. It was warm, that water, running in her belly with secret life.

  All that moon, she stayed by Aengus’ grave.

  All her bitterness was burnt out of her now. He was punished and dead, the way she would never be seeing him again. But the memory of him was yet alive. She missed him.

  All that moon, there was one small break in the cloud of mist. A ray of moonlight was falling onto Master Aengus’ grave and the woman kneeling there keening her grief.

  The keening went on long after the moonlight failed. But at last the woman’s voice broke, and she slumped on the dirt.

  * * *

  LATE IN THE DARK of the moon, one of those Swan boats was poled over to land from the crannog. From the boat stepped the lady in the silver cloak. She ignored the grave and the sleeping woman, and walked about the lanes of the village. Her quick, light step passed among the cottages where the grownups of the villagers were lying abed dreaming. As she went, the lady hummed to herself a sprightly tune.

  The children of the villagers, now, hearing the humming, rose and went to her. They crowded round her in their nightshirts, clamoring softly, ‘Take me with you! Take me! Take me!’

  The lady smiled on them, and handed them all little sweets and candies and drops wrapped in silver-paper. And she sent them back into their homes, and they were chewing and sucking on the sweets for the rest of the darkness, until they fell into their beds dreaming. And ever thereafter those children stayed up when the Moon went down, and dreamed when the moonlight flooded their little rooms, and talked back to their parents; and it was a trouble to their parents to be rousing them when the Moon rose.

  The lady passed back into the ferry, and let herself be taken back into the crannog. But from up in the land hoofbeats echoed across the waters, and the great each dubh Porter showed himself on the crest of the hill thorned with the wild low trees. A man in a dark gray cóta mór stepped off the steed, gave him sweets, and sent him back to his master. Meantime the dark man stood on the top of the hill looking down over the lough. He dug his hands into the deep pockets of his coat, and pulled out a bag full of hand-small stones. Those he scattered in a circle in the grass about him, and sat down on his haunches.

  Silently the dark man buried himself in his cóta mór gazing down over the mist on the water, waiting.

  Lights were burning on the lough that darkness, but no more Swan boats crossed. Only, just before moonrise, one was softly poled to shore. The two ferrymen, muffled in great cloaks, climbed the slope. One bore a lantern, its iron panels shut so that only a thin beam licked the ground.

  They put the lantern down by the grave, and set to digging furtively. They took care not to waken the woman curled at their feet.

  On the top of the slope the man in the dark gray cloak watched them, and he touched the peak of his tricorn hat to the grave of Master Aengus; but it seemed the ferrymen didn’t notice the man, hidden as he was behind the circle of his stones. They ended their work, and took back to the abbey that thing they had been sent to fetch. It was only just in time they were: the Moon was already burning at the edges of the mist, when their poles sent back their ripples to the shore.

  The rising Moon woke the mourner, and she went down to drink once more. She sat by the grave in the patch of moonlight. She did not guess what they had done, while she had lain sleeping; she did not guess what things befell in the abbey on the crannog across the water, deep in the whiteness of the mist.

  * * *

  WHEN DARKNESS came again, the ferrymen poled the Swan boat across and back again, as their business bade them. From the encampment people were coming, leaving their tents and wagons and carriages, and themselves going over to the abbey.

  They were an odd blend. Some gentle men and gentle ladies, others marked like tinkers; wenches and rogues, minxes and bandits, jades and rascals; farmers and fishermen; these rushing, and those laughing wickedly; the others fingering the hilts of their scians or the pommels of their pistols.

  And some were stopped along the way by a sad-eyed creature in rags, calling to them from the sedge,

  ‘Take me across with you, Sir!’

  But they were shaking their heads. ‘It’s no place for you, girl. Go back to your village and marry. It’s still being done, you know, for all that it is Night.’

  And the creature went to the mooring-pole, asking the boatmen to carry her across.

  ‘What will you be paying?’ they asked.

  ‘I will pay you after,’ answered the creature.

  ‘If you lack courage, you cannot cross.’

  ‘I am Lady Agatha. Is that courage enough for you?’

  The ferrymen looked each other in the eye. ‘You are the Lady Agatha? It was for you the Irishman sank the sun? Then you will never cross, the way you are the lady’s enemy.’

  And once more the stars wheeled round to touch the Samhain mark, when all souls and dreams are loosed. And for four and twenty hours the Moon did not rise nor shine.

  When the Moon returned, and the lights across the lough faded again, and the creature was left behind. From over the rise the village waked again, and some of the village women were pitying the creature sitting in the sedge, and leaving her baskets of food.

  Now some hours passed, and the Moon was after falling, and a group of girls came sneaking out of the village, nervous as geese, passing the creature on the way to the mooring-pole.

  ‘Where are you bound?’ she asked them.

  ‘Surely we’re for the abbey,’ they answered her, ‘to enter the lady’s service.’

  ‘What will you be doing there?’

  ‘Clean and cook, and serve and sew and all. And we’ll be learning to be like them, and after nine Moons they will be giving us each for a duais a brand-new chest, and bright pretty gowns, plates and cups, and all we need to be winning our loves.’

  ‘Let me be going with you.’

  ‘But she only sent for seven! If you go, one of us must stay behind.’

  Then in her need the creature drew out the last of her belongings. Gold its chain, the emerald bright as her eyes had been in day.

  ‘Now what one of you will be taking this for her dress, and the right to go across with you?’

  The girls were eying one another, but hung back.

  ‘Please,’ she breathed, ‘it’s all I have, and I must cross.’

  ‘Lady, you may have my place,’ said one. ‘I will cross another time. But keep your jewel, the way I wouldn’t know what to do with it.’

  ‘Hold it for surety then, or sell it for a house full of plate and linen, the way it is worth ten times that.’

  Still the girl wavered, shaking her head. But it fell out that an old woman from the village was passing, and she scolded the girl something terrible for being so foolish, and talked her over to taking the jewel.

  Then in the lake water the girls washed the mud from the poor sad creature, and were drying her with their aprons and hiding her from prying eyes while she drew on the homespun dress, even while the boatmen came, and tied up the Swan boat on the mooring-poles.

  The girls went in a flock to the mooring-pole and into the boat. The stranger woman was shivering with damp and fever, bent low in the middle of the girls lest the boatmen notice her.

  The boatmen hardly looked upon one out of yet another group of girls lured by the glamour of the witchlights into running away from their homes and risking themselves in the abbey. Whe
re some would be finding their fortune, and others their ruin, but all alike in this, that they would never be able to go back into their village and take up the life they had known before.

  And the lantern at the ferry’s prow was burning in their eyes, and the lantern at the mooring-pole fading away, and with it the shore, the village, and the land. In darkness they were gliding across the whispering water, and in their ears were growing the sounds of revelry, the closer they were to the crannog in the lough, and the white walls of the abbey emerging from the mist.

  Part III.

  The Full Moon

  The Fifth Year of Night

  In the fifth year of that Night, some Special Ones became known. And they walked apart from all their brother Waking.

  And the others, who were the most part of the Waking, sought the Special Ones to be their teachers.

  And some apprentices learned well at the hand of the Special Ones.

  16. Of the Leag Lorgmhar

  GENTLY, the Swan Boat bumped upon the crannog.

  The ferrymen slung the ropes about the mooring poles, and the seven girls walked up the planks and onto the ground of the crannog. The mist seemed thicker here, and the girls were feeling its chill droplets kissing their cheeks; on the girls’ hair the droplets caught the light like brilliants. Hanging in the mist, moving about, globes of brightness slowly swam over head. Some of the globes were no larger than a man’s head, others a full fathom wide. The globes trailed spiny black tails that were propelling them through the air.

  At the end of the mooring a woman was waiting, and she was Old Meg. Old Meg looked the girls over with her bright, bright eyes while they were curtsying to her; then she swept her arm back behind of herself.

  ‘Welcome,’ said Meg.

  The girls looked about, eating up the wonderful sights of the place. In the moonlight the abbey and the crannog could never be seen from the village, the mist was so blinding white. But in the dark of the moon could be seen, not so much the thing itself, but only the image of its lights in the water. Through the dark of the moon the abbey was ablaze, and the village dark and closed. Only, here and there, a shutter softly opened, and a young lad or pale-eyed lass would be gazing out into the mist, and wondering. They never beheld the true shape of the abbey, they who dared not cross and enter service there, as these girls did.

  ‘Well,’ said Meg, the mistress of the girls, looking them over; ‘this crop seems a bit better than the usual run of what straggles over; all but you, the last one there: why, you’re hardly a girl at all, and have a proud look in your eyes.’

  The creature stared back at Meg. Meg sighed, threw up her hands and said, ‘Well, what ever can the lady expect of me, when I’m getting such as this! Come along then, girls, don’t be gawking, it’s impolite, and likely to win you a whipping hereabouts. Mark me, come along now!’

  Meg took the girls round the buildings to their beds, the better to be showing them the place, and telling them their duties. Quietly they trooped round beneath the high, white stone walls. Through the airs around them swam the witchlights, globular, effulgent fish, trailing snaky tails, breathing out brightness from their gills.

  The abbey was not so much built by the setting of stone upon stone, as spun like a spider’s bridge. Its halls and rooms were never the same, but changeable as the body of a woman. Sometimes this building was the refectory, sometimes it was the brewery; the lady chapel there, now: next darkness, maybe the garden would be in its place. It could be a maze at times, and you never knowing what would be the room beyond the door you were opening. But there was a place for the servants, and a place for the kitchens, and a place for a bell-tower rising over the shell of a basilica, and a place for Arianna’s blood-hounds; that much at least could be said.

  And the grandest building there was the casino. Once of a time it had served as the Abbot’s home and offices; now the Italian pleasure-house, it rose seven stories to the lady’s chamber at the top of its forward tower, called the Lady’s Tower; under which were the bedchambers of the gentle folk, the lady’s wards and robbers, and down below them gaming rooms and showing halls, and a feast hall. At its rearward wall rose the framework for another tower, on which a few men were working; that was called the Bride’s Tower, but its oldest stones were centuries old, and no one would speak of the tale that lay behind it. From the front doors of the casino to the lady’s rooms above, seven stories up, coiled an immense marble staircase, one hundred steps and a step all blackened with muck; but all the other rooms of the casino were properly clean.

  ‘This will be your duty,’ Meg told the proud, proud girl; ‘what is it we’re to be calling you again?’

  ‘Agnes,’ the girl replied, flashing her eyes.

  ‘Agnes, well now, Agnes, then: you needn’t be helping any of the others in their tasks, Agnes, no, you’re much too fine and good for that, old Meg can tell your quality, Agnes, but all you need be doing is the cleaning of the Hundred Steps and a Step. And you needn’t even be working the whole nine months out, but as soon as all the steps are white as a child’s teeth, it’s free you’ll be. But if you fail, you go empty-handed.’

  And Meg laughed when she said it.

  * * *

  THE SERVING-GIRLS slept in a dark, low hall, half-buried in the crannog, and ever wet with lake-water seeping up under their beds. Three times fifty cots there were, for three times fifty girls.

  And some were sobbing for homesickness, and some sighing for love, and some deep in dream, their labors had been so hard. Many were naked in the arms of their lovers in the upper chambers, or filling their mouths with wine and sweet-meats in the casino. They were the girls had been there longest, and would not go back home.

  Again and again the swan-boats poled across the lough, discharging and collecting the wild folk of the abbey, the robbers, the gamblers, the rogues and the jades. No one saw the dark man in the cóta mór squatting on the hill. Until he rose, as though after making up his mind, and stepped out of the circle of his stones. Gently he strode down to the water’s edge, holding his tricorn low and his muffler high over his face, and he joined the others waiting, and was ferried across with no questions into the white buildings grown up on the crannog.

  * * *

  MAID MIELUSINE had been welcomed to the abbey, the way she was the lady’s ward. She was given chambers high in the casino, and told to prepare herself, the way in time she must be welcomed by the waters. But Mielusine kept to her chambers, and did not dress, and did not go down the Hundred Steps and a Step in the processions.

  So she stayed there, lonely and longing, looking out the window into the bright mist. Witchlights swam in and out of the window, glowing in her chambers, some of them pink, others greenly glowing, or golden or amber or gray. It was the virtue of those fish to be dark and drinking in the light while the Moon was rising, and breathing back light when she sank. Some of the serving girls, those who had been there longest, brought her up food and the oddments she was needing; it was themselves told her of the abbey.

  ‘In the abbey,’ said one, ‘all is intrigue and passion. Here is no mourning for the Day. In the abbey Arianna built her playground, and stocked it well with meat and drink, amusements, women, and men.’

  ‘Arianna!’ exclaimed Mielusine. ‘Who is she now, and where did she come from? I was never hearing of her in the day.’

  ‘Och!’ cried one girl. ‘The Lady Arianna was fished up out of the bed of the lough, after a sleep longer than centuries, by a horseman who had come.’

  ‘Nay, why are you filling her head with such nonsense?’ cried another. ‘The truth of it is, Miss, that in the day Arianna was no better than a common adventuress.’

  ‘Yes, and she killed the King’s chief magistrate in a castle in Wales.’

  ‘No, that’s not it at all! Miss, listen to me, I’ll be telling you the truth. I heard it from a certain gentleman, and he in a position to know, that Arianna is a foreigner out of the East.’

  ‘No, not the East:
it’s Italy she hails from, now: Venice, I heard said. She was a noblewoman there, shut up in a convent by her family for the hotness of her blood–’

  ‘Hold your tongue now, don’t be filling her head with lies!’ shouted another, giggling: ‘Truth is, Arianna was a courtesan, who tempted men from the shade of the Coliseum in Rome.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong,’ said the first, and ‘You’re the lying one!’ said another. Every serving girl was telling Mielusine a different tale; and there were too many tales of Arianna.

  So Mielusine kept for many darknesses undressed in her chambers, and was frightened to be going down in the processions, the way even the serving girls there were splendid. She was standing naked in her shift in the high open windows of her bedchamber. She was looking out into the burning silver mist, feeling its droplets on her throat and her breast, tasting its watery perfume, breathing it in. And the mist off the lough was rousing desires in Maid Mielusine for longing, for daring, for recklessness, and for more.

  In her loneliness she was thinking more and more on Master Aengus. She could not get beyond it, that he was dead. Lady Agatha had taught Mielusine dances and all manner of things, with only Master Aengus in mind; now he was no more, what was the good of her?

  His rooms, high in the bell-tower, were still empty. No one was admitted there.

  One moonrise, when the lady and the court lay down to dream, Mielusine dressed herself, uncomfortable in the heavy dress after going so long in only her shift. She touched open the door to her bedchamber, and crept down out onto the crannog. The moonglow was burning her cheek like the blush of a secret sin. She walked across the lawns between the high buildings into the blasted, black shadow of the basilica. She stepped into the ruin and softly climbed the bell-tower stairs to Master Aengus’ door.

  And she turned the latch in the door, and stepped into the darkness beyond.

  * * *

  A GREAT WAYS DOWN below her, in the pleasure-house, Agnes was nearing the Hundred Steps and a Step. It was her first time at her chore. In the abbey, the servants toiled while the gentle ladies dreamed.

  She looked up those steps, at the dirt on them, at the black on them.

  She had a pail of soapy water, a scrub brush and a rag. She was dipping the brush into the water and scrubbing the step; and after a bit she was wiping the step off with the rag, rinsing the rag in the water; and when the water was black, but the step no less so, she was bearing the pail out, emptying it, filling it, and staggering back.