Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (57 page)

"Here's apples in store,” says the witch, and fills their pockets, lest the russets run out and leave them darkling.

At the witch's beckoning, Kit bends to her. She pins his mantle with a clumsy iron brooch, a ring and a raven's head, inimical. The ring runs grating through its single eye; the beak's the pin. Old, old: and perilous. But tangled in it is a snarl of stuff from a workbox: threads and needles. A dangling spider takes his measure. “I'd not game wi’ that,” the witch says. “It's worked another time, but ill."

She turns to the crow lad, who glowers haughtily. “I's Leapfire, lord o't dance. And I's a sword will make awd Winter skip. Nowt else."

"Crawing, crawing,” jeers Imbry. “Thou dies in a bush. Takes Ashes to get thee up."

"Thou scrog o thorn. Thou lop. Thou limpet."

"So thou's to dance soulnaked i’ thy sark?” The old Moon's knuckle lifting up the crow lad's chin.

Hand at hilts. “Sun's what I is."

"I's beard thee.” The Moon takes a winnow fan of barley, tosses it; so when he jumps, he's all a flare of gold. The air about him dazzles blue. He splinters sky.

When Grevil can speak, he says. “And he's Tom o Cloud as well. His coat?"

Bending to the floor, the Moon picks up, shakes out a heap of leaves: an urchin tumbles out, offended. Stalks snuffling away. It's a coat of sorts, a wood with sleeves.

"A cup and a staff—” says Grevil.

The staff is leaning in a corner—no, it's rooted there, and branching. It unleaves; and yet is never bare. He's caught a leaf of it, dry, curling. Beech. Hazel now. Now oak, now ash and thorn. Down fall the pale and yellow leaves, and light; their fellows rise to meet them, they are mirrored in the air ... He drops the leaf. He's in a hovel, in the smoke. The tree's a staff. When Mally gives it to the lad, he leaps it, swinging round. And still it's rooted, though it travel.

Here's a footed little mazer cup. Wormeaten, with a ring of blackened silver round it. Ah, he knows that cup. They drank of it. Not all the dreams were ale.

"—and a hat with a feather,” says Kit.

Drenched and battered, with its broken plume, Grevil's now is fitted for the part. He looks to the Moon; she nods; he gives it to the crow lad with his blessing, lays it lightly on his head.

Now for the silent girl.

"I'd play yon bear,” says Imbry, “and I'd harry ‘em off."

They stare at her.

"Bear?” says Grevil.

"What bear?” says Kit.

"Thou poppyhead,” the crow lad says.

"'Tis not in our book,” says Grevil kindly.

"Craws eat thy book. I'd want some Northern stars. Unleaving.” She points up in the rafters. “So I'll have yon Bear. And t'Comb, and t'Ship. And if we's not got dancers, then we's best take t'Knot o Swords."

"Aye, that's witty,” says Kit, admiring.

"Ship's thysel,” says the Moon. “Mind that.” And she gives the girl an old horn comb, agrin with half its teeth, and a pair of rusted scissors; then she clambers on a basket on a kist to reach the rooftree, hauling down a great black fell of fleece. There's ice on it, still glittering.

"'Twill be brave as Ashes’ coat,” says Imbry. “Will I study my part?"

Kit says, “Black Ashes has no lines. You may do it extempore. When Tom is slain, you grieve his falling, in among the leaves.” He makes a dumbshow of weeping.

"Colder, by and by,” says Grevil sighing. “A gown for green Ashes."

"What's that to be? Awd hay?” says the crow lad scornfully.

And Kit can't help murmuring,
"Aye, bedstraw's what comes o green gowns."

But Mally takes a nutshell in her hand and huffs on it. It sprouts, unfolding little plaited leaves, green leaves. A gown, as crimped and shining as a new leaf is, and sticky from the bud. Then she takes an eggshell full of milk and drops the shale in it. Plock! A coronet of drops splash up, and fall a garland of white buds.

Rough as she is, Imbry skips; she dons them. Turns. On her, they are a wave, as green as any glass, and crinkling white.

"Let's see thee lady it in that,” says Noll, jealous of his part. A girl disguising as a boy disguising as a girl. “Softly now. To music."

Kit takes the fiddle from his pack: a poor crank instrument, and scrannel-voiced. He's nursed it as he could. Bending, he begins to tune. Looks up, as if he's heard a voice. And Grevil sees him see the crowd of bone that's hanging in the roof, unstrung. He looks and longs. And yet he sees in it a greater shadow than mere death. Would he dare speak for it? Or leave it hanging there and live, to marvel and to mourn?

"I'll have yon crowd,” he says.

"Unstrung?” says Malykorne.

He nods.

"'Twill cost thee."

"I have paid."

"And will."

He says, “Its playing is beyond my art. Its silence outdoes me."

"Thy silence for its voice?"

Without a word, he hands his fiddle and his art to her.

He knows what road we're going, Grevil thinks. So do they all. As I have known but as a proposition on a page, mathematically; but he with his soul. If A then O.

"Imbry,” says Kit, “I'll beg that pipe of thee a little while.” He plays green Ashes’ dance, “The Nightgrove, or, The Embers Ashes,” steadily enough. Imbry paces gravely to its measure.

Noll behind the curtain sees the darkness parted on a glare and clamour. It is time now. He cannot. He will.

"Well measured,” says the dancing master.

Imbry nods, all business. “And my part?"

"I'll tell it thee.” Light and shadow on his face. He kneels to face her.

She rehearses as he speaks; but overlapping her, as wave on ebbing wave, Noll Grevil takes it up, goes on:

He stumbles. Forgetfulness? Or feeling? Kit goes on:

Turn and turn; then as one:

"Where got you those lines?” both say.

"Of mine aunt,” says Grevil, “that was lost."

"Of my mother who is dead. She made them."

"Her name?” His voice shakes.

"Annot Lightwood."

"Not Covener? Not Fell?"

"She would not say. She took her mother's mother's name for dread of her great kindred.” He turns his face a little from the fire, shamefast. “I am lightborn. She knew not my father's name."

Grevil's gazing back in mingled joy and grief and perturbation. Found and fallen at a breath: and dead.

"She had an antick ring of her, which too is lost, of silver, with a posy:
Lief wode I fall, an light wode spring."

"That Annot was my mother's sister; thou her son, my cousin that is found."

They embrace. No words, no words.

Then drawing back a little, but to look on him, on Annot in his face, Noll says, “Thou art like."

On a sudden, Kit laughs. “But thou art
Noll,
then. Noll that was Ashes, Noll that took his physic like a soldier—"

"Tales."

"—Noll Hobbinoll that told her histories of the sky.” Then looking at his fool's coat and his ladle sword, “So now we're in one. On the Road to Law."

Noll says, “And I am with you to the end. But why?” And in that word is all the road before them and the grave, whence none return.

"My daughter is there."

Go and catch a falling star,
thinks Ashes.

Gone.

And giddy with the turning, damp and breathless with the chase, she pauses: and at that the light falls silent and the dance is shadows in the mist, is stone. So now and ever now it falls, still so; and yet has long since fallen, and is yet to fall. Time echoes, echoes.

Now is here.

Half naked, but for slashings of her office, Ashes stands amid the Ninestones, at the sill of heaven. She's come where she is most herself: where she can see. She knocks at air.

A girl in a blue gown opens, with a hand curved round her candle. Light spills through her fingers, stills her face: long-lidded, lustrous as a pearl against the cheek of night. Her gown seems made of sky. For all her ornament she wears bright shears. Her hair is twisted in a cloth, a wentletrap of linen, with a streak of dusky hair wound round it, like the bandings on a shell.

Hallows with you,
says the girl. Not Siony this time. Another holds the candle, and another ever: eldest shifts from star to star.

And with you, and all of you,
says Ashes. Is it Talith? Or Tiphan?

Turning to the light within, she calls her sisters from the weaving.
Come. Here's our youngest sister from the clouds below. Here is Eldins.

They gather. All in blue: dusk blue, or deeper, or the liminal bluegreen of twilight. None with fiery hair. They speak in wreaths of words, one twining with the next.

Ah, you braid of her, your mother—

Thea, that is music—

Embers of her Ashes, bone of bone—

A tale of her telling.

They have a smock for her like theirs, ungirded, of the greenest sky.

I am smutched,
says Ashes.
I will sully it.

She thinks of Corbet's hands. But looking down she sees her body—if it is her body—scoured as with spindrift, all her cuts clean as paper, stinging. They are salt, the Ashes, like an ocean of girls. Not water. When she touches, gingerly, the shorn spikes of her hair, her hand is silvery with ashes. Fire-singed. Burnt Eldins.

But the coat's unchanged: still black as earth untainted, hallowing what's laid in it. Bones and the bright gold circling them, or fallen from the ears, like seed from barley. It is Ashes’ lap, who lightward travels, greening. A generation of light.

They dress her with their deft hands. Though the gown is of air, she cannot see herself through it: yet if she walked before the moon, its light would shine through her, the gown and all. She eclipses nothing. Is she bodiless? One brings a bowl of milk, and one a riddle cake, unshared. And thankfully she finds that she is clemmed with hunger, dry as straw; can eat and drink. She sups. They bid her to their workroom.

It is nearly done. Will you see?

And walking in, she stands—
O heavens
—lightstruck. For their web is marvellous, beyond her telling. See, the Lyke Road's on their loom, the green world and that other woven with a mingled skein. Unleaving and the lowering stars that rise and set, the sun and moon, and all the storied sky. The scattered leaves bound up.

It still is weaving
, says a leafgirl.
Still to do.

Ashes tells the warp.

A cloud of Ashes, and a Crowd of Bone—

Herself and all alone, she sings, her one plaint always: of her death—

With her, rough maids on whom the godhead falls—

And that great Ashes under Law who sings the stones from Annis’ crown—

And the warp's of all their heartsblood.

Soulstrings.

Lives.

It shifts as Ashes looks at it, the Bear's a Ladle.

All the constellations change like wind on water, wavespell: but the sky's the sea, eternal. For the Nine have woven in it all the stories of the world at once. There's guising in it; there are cards from Jack Daw's pack, high rimes of ancientry, and tinkers’ rumors, to and fro, like weeds beneath the waves. There are runes and riddles sunken deep within it, like the wrack of ships: she's read them only in drowned books. From Cloud and Lune, and east and west; and north as far as Scarristack beneath unsetting stars, they come: the ritual and unremembered, silly and unseely, courtly mummery and country matters, light and dark. As if her cards, and all the packs of cards now scattered through the world were gathered back, unwintering, like dry leaves to a tree, now green. As if the pages of her Master Grevil's book—how he would marvel if he saw—were glass, and story after story overlaid.

Here's the Fiddler in his variations, but himself's the tune. He's picted in his tattered guising, in his glory that bestrides the sky: the Hanged Lad and the Hallows Tree, the Flaycraw, and the Sheaf.

Here Ashes walks the sea's edge, to the knee in shadow. To her, from her, endlessly the pale of water shifts. The tide's eternity. Her lantern swings and halts. And at her feet she finds a ring half-buried in the sand. She tells it. Ashes rises from the dark, and at her feet spring flowers: so the Road is white with her journeying. And Ashes sprawls in darkness, great with light, no lighter of her child. The Ravens fall on her.

For the constellations of the underworld are here, and the mourning of the stars that journey in the sky below. She sees the Coffer in the Ewe in Lamb, the Reaper's Attercap. And yes: she sees the Nine in their imprisoning, in Annis’ tower under Law, as well as in their exaltation, weaving in their web; and earthwise, as a ring of stones.

Here are bloodnailed Witches from the crow lad's tale; and Sisters from the masque, with their epitome of painted ice; and ballads from the book left open on her bed in Law: “...one king's daughter said to another..."

And here and everywhere are Norni's tales of the Unleaving, from her island in the farthest north. See, here's the windwife's Comb, that's toothed on both sides: so she brings the storm and binds it, rime and rune. The Road's her Hair. But cludderfolk do call her Crowdybone. Here's the Selkie that can daff her coat of skin—
that's Ashes,
Ashes thinks. Here's the Bear our eldermother, she that quarrels with the Sea to have our bones, and thunder is their strife. The Warpstones in her Loom are Nine. They've woven Norni's stars who lost them, and her tales, who died untold. She never saw the sky again when she was taken. Nor the sea her strength and lover, and the eldest of her blood. Nor yet the one child of her body, Imbry Ask. She put her from her breast, and set her in a boat adrift: that Annis might not eat her soul.

The Ship's a cradle on a sea of dark. Her milk's the Road.

And here is Law: a girl sits reading in a story, in a garden made of stone.
What is it lives within a maze, within a wall, within a hedge of thorn? And on an island, not a winter's day in riding round. Yet she's never seen the sea.