Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (61 page)

Yet Daw sees nothing; nothing hears.

Kit laughs.

Dismayed Jack Daw falls back a step: as if his scythe hit rock. Then he opens out his hands, aglow with rings, and in his honeyed voice, he coaxes. “Come, I'll trade with thee: which of these for thy broken kit?"

When an armed man bargains with a traveller, there is something that he fears. Kit shakes his head. “Too gaudy for the road: I would be set upon."

The old god turns to Grevil, wheedling, holding out a great ring with a tawny stone. “See, thine ingle's soul: and thine, to hang about thy neck and dandle; but for thy marrow's wilfulness. He would deny thee. Cheat thee of thy consolation and thy power. And for what? A toy."

Coal and jugglery,
says the witch's glance.
What
he?
Here is Silvry and Rianty.

They go on with the play

"Is the sorceress not here?"

The old god glances sidelong; barely, but they see him twitching.
Ah,
thinks Kit:
so that's the way of it. He fears the cat. We mice do call her in.

"And happen at her book. I would not for the moon disturb her."

Brisk now, officious, the old god chivvies them. “Enough. Here's silver and thy door.” He stamps and the circle's broken.

"You must let us in,” says Grevil, setting by his part. He wries his signet on his finger; but he lifts his face: speaks truly. “It is law; and under Law most binding: your dominion as our realm of day is founded on it, dark and light. Forbid us and your night is forfeit: death will be no more."

We are come to her undoing.

Kit gapes in admiration. Daw parries easily.

"As guisers: but you masque. As journeymen you must be bid. Or hang as gallantry."

Grevil's caught off balance; but Kit stands. He remembers a hillside long ago in Lune, a moonish boy, half drunk: a fiddler coming from a dance. “Did not my lady's servingman come bid me play? And give me handfast of a silver coin? And seal it with his kiss? That holds."

And Grevil, lawyerly: “But played you to this household?"

"Not a note. For my gear was taken."

"So by the rule of riddlery, ‘twas binding, yet is unfulfilled. He must pay his reckoning and hear you out."

They speak assuredly, but quail: a slender chance.

It holds.

"I bid thee—"

"Here's his word,” says Grevil.

"—to no Lightfeast."

"Aye,” says Kit. “A wedding, you did say—"

"But I hear the bride is fled,” says Grevil.

"—and an ashing of the bairn."

"Then take your gold and be gone,” says Daw.

"An if please you, that is not his suit: there was a play contracted, and as yet unplayed. By the huntsman's summoning, that bond is still between you. Signed and sealed."

"Then let you play to the kitchen; you are not for the hall."

The wasp likes not my lady's web,
thinks Kit.
Nor yet does Madam Flyblow.

And the fiddle sings:
My lady will have him, for the smutching of her glass.

Grevil still is dry. “As my lady's seneschal, you spoke for her: let her sleep or wake, her audience is bid. And if the play displease her, yet the choice of it was yours."

Here is Law. I would be elsewhere, were it on a sinking ship, atwixt a bear and honey.

"And if I should refuse?"

"To wake the sun, having bidden it? The law is exact: you owe a sacrifice. A black cock's blood."

There are rings now on Daw's hand: a high king's ransom, were they not of snow. “Then give your piece: a masque or what you will, so not this farrago. It is unfitting for this court."

"Why, then a comedy,” says Grevil, bowing, white as paper and inexorable “If a wedding you want, then a wedding you shall get."

"And an ashing,” says Kit. “For here's a bonny sun a-borning, and a midwife to hand."

"What think you?
Slae and Perseis
?” And Grevil turns to Daw. “'Tis an old play, very choice in rhetoric, in old high Cloudish verse: it tells how Slae did carry off green Ashes for his bride in darkness; but the harper had her first to bed. He sang her out of Law."

But Kit is watching Morag watch the body. The stone-eyed servant's wordsick, circling the carrion and looking for an opening to stoop. Her argument is talons. For the huntsman's promised her her fee. Cock and eyes.

"And afterward,” says Kit, “an antimasque, a most lamentable comedy of the wedding of Jack Daw and Widow Maggot Pie. They sing it all about the norlands—it was made a ballad to the tune of ‘Babylon.’ No doubt you've sold the sheet?” He's babbling; but he wards the body from her scavenging.

"
He put his hand all in his coat, and he pulled out a gay gold ring ...
” sings the Kit witch, and unpins old Mally's raven brooch. He holds it outward, beak between his knuckles; but he need not strike. She gazes, this way, that, admiring, adoring. The ring is Morag's mirror, and it holds her; as the witch holds onto it, but barely in his hand, for it wakes to her: outquilling, living, leashed. He holds it like a falconer: a raven, goddess-eyed; a great-winged woman, cold and perfect to the fork. She changes to its mirror, ravenwise; and wing to wing with it wheels round. Twa corbies. How she courts herself! Each gazes at another Morag, all of night and silver.

"Ah, see how she preens herself, the pretty lass,” he cries to Grevil. “How she flirts, the bonny bird."

"Alas, but she is handfast to a lord of land. All graves are his demesne, all dead his retinue. His train is numberless; they dance the Lyke Road, longways, to his tune: a crowd of bone."

"She will be married this night: to one who loves her least.” Kit turns to Daw. “And we promise you: you will not like your sheets."

"Now,” says Grevil.

And the First and Second Witch stand forth. Turn and turn, the witches speak:

"By the elding of the moon..."

"By the weird of night and noon..."

They conjure Annis: call her to the dance.

Lief, lief,
a shadow calls, re-echoing.
Lief mother, let me in.
The air is full of voices, leaves before a coming storm: fled prophecies. And pale and yellow mingling, dark and red, they fly, unleaving under Law.
By rime and rune, I conjure you.
The colder blows the wind. Wood rises: not as timber but a web of cracks.
I call. I call.
It flaws eternity.

At the heart of it, a bonfire dies.

The wind beats down the leaves, it quells the fire. It is death.

The witches are no more, nor men: but mere astonishment, the circles where a stone has fallen in a pool of dusk, outspreading, o and wider O. The waves will touch her edges; they will be no more.

The raven and her glass fly up into the branches.

Jack Daw stands. He has no power but his voice, to turn the self against itself, despairing. And a cord is at his throat, of tales: the hemp is memory, is fire.

Imbry hurls herself against the air, which now is stone.

Whin gazes at the boy, as bloody now as at his birth. But crying then and flailing, drowning in the air his enemy. Not now. A bonny boy. As she did then she learns him now again by heart: forever now.

The wave astonies them.

The blood in them is silver, running perilously bright and heavy in their veins. Imperative. All memory and all that's mortal vanishes: a smoke, an emptiness. Lost wax. Death casts them and will crack.

Who calls me to the dance?

The ripples die like echoes to the sill. An Ashes there, who speaks.

A journeyman.

Annis and her daughter's daughter, child and death. They come at once, they call each other into being, glass to glass.

Time stills. The air is tranced. Dark-dazzled, like a world enstoned in crystal: dark within, but lightedged, and refracting light. Green Ashes travels slowly, slowly in the timefrost, in the trance of light. A mote in Annis’ gaze. They see her as a crescent, heavy, like a raindrop streaming; but of fire. Ablaze but coldly now: a silver negative. She labors in eclipse.

Too late,
thinks Ashes.
I will be too late.
Her atomies are all but still. The heart, breath, soul in her will cease to tell her threefold story: descant, burden, drone. Already Ashes that was Margaret is effaced, is palimpsest. What Annis sees, she is: a hole to fill. A tuft of red hair flickering about a cleft. A limbeck spilling smoke, a ruined alchemy, a phial of swarted glass: she sees it, canted over in the ashes of a smithy, crackling with the crow god's fire, infumed.

And in that glass, another glass inclosed: my lady's vessel is with stone.

Who let her rune of blood to run?

That howl is felt with other senses: as a shattering of blood, a boneshake. And the ghostly wood is felled, as if a scythe had struck.

My lady turns on the usurping huntsman in a bluewhite firestorm, annihilating with a word, a hand. But in her glassy dark, his doom creeps onward at a stone's pace, crack on crack of fire flaring out: a wickerwork of knives. Her lightnings inch, slow-scissoring. Anathema itself congeals. As slowly as it comes, he cannot flee his death. He watches it, agape, a shriek slow-tarnishing his face.

The greater fury now will fall upon her child's abhorred brat: the hole with legs, the whore, the anarch. Crow's meat, excrement begotten of a ruttish fool. His cockspawn. Her flawless glass made carrion. The goddess scrabbles at her wrist. She will unbind the fiery braid of hair, her daughter's whoredom, as a whip to flay this upstart Ashes, flesh from bone: each stroke eternity.

Not there. Not Thea's but another coil enwreathes her, this of night: wyrm-wound about her, endlessly engulfing self, as if the Road turned serpent. Frenzied now, she claws at it, as if she could unburn its blackness. It will not undo. The dragon eats herself.

The god cries out. Of that great howl of rage and loss, in Cloud a mountain cracks, an isle in Scarristack is drowned. Her cry eclipses light; it is an O that swallows up the sun. Eats Ashes.

Out of Ashes, in that utterness of dark, there shines a coronal of light. An ashing: silver like her father's mother's ring. Ashes tells herself.

"I am Ashes that was Thea's daughter. She is dead of me. I tell the stars."

And she upholds her lens, the last, and gathers up the sky in it. Draws Annis, night and Law, and all the heavens in one glass. A world incrystalled. She has thought to shatter it: a sacrifice, as dear to her as eyes. The breaking of the sky would serve. That last apocalypse of witches held, from shattering to now, nine thousand years. It set the world a-turning, moonwise; but it scarred. She puzzles.
Ah, but if
—And Ashes lifts her face, as to a snow of stars.
I do it, so it is. Unbound the sky.
Delighting now but solemnly, she holds the sky in little on her hand; she breathes on it, the pattern of the moveless stars dissolving like a frost, unfolding endlessly. She makes Law infinite, uncoils the serpent; she unstrings the stars.

Crows light upon the gallows tree, the Old Sun dances on the air.

Kit sees a playing card, a woodcut in a woman's hand, alight. The fire glitters in her rings, reglows. She wears the Hanged Man's gold on every finger, and his tawny stones. His card consumes. She casts it down in embers, and the scraps of ash fly up: as ravens, coal-eyed, calling in their cynic voices. They are bodied like women, naked to the catch: white-bellied, welling blood. They're avid.

Imbry sees a straw man burning on the moor. The witches dance through him, and through and through. They rant and whirl and caper to the goatbagged pipe; they kick him, scattering sparks. Their shawm's of his legbone, their drum's of his fell. She leaps the fire and laughs.

Still gazing at the world between her hands, green Ashes heeds no play. She sees the light still travelling: a winnowing of worlds, their stories all untold. She sees the pattern of the Guisers whirled and scattered in the endless heavens like a broken chain of stones. She sees the Fiddler's belt unstrung. His sword is buried in a barrow-mound of night.

Noll Grevil sees a knot of swords of lightning at the monstrous throat. O strange and terrible: for he himself is dancing with the silent men, the weavers of the wyrd. They slash. The body topples, headless. Then it rises like a roke, if mist could bleed. The little music threads. They dance it, over and again.

Whin sees the Old Sun burning burning on a masthead: many-winged, black, manifold. His mane is glorious. His gallows is the Ship. He falls, still burning from the mast, will fall and burn forever, quenchless in the sea of night.

All stand in awe, in exultation, dread.

Then a great sea whelms them, not of water but of time.

Guisers and journeymen lie tumbled on a darkling shore, amid the wrack of stars. No castle, not a stone nor shallow where it might have stood. No witch, no gallows, and no crow. By one and one they rise and stare about them at the timbers of the Ship, and at the wreckage of their world's mythology: a sickle, buried to the haft in sand; a sieve; a shuttle wound with bloodred yarn; a bunch of keys, rust gouted; ruined hay, a dazed goat browsing it; the rootstock of a thorn, salt-bare. The tideline is a zodiac. They wake and wonder.

All but Leapfire lying slain: the Sun's in Ashes, and the Scythe in flinders at his feet. He's threefold dead: pierced through and drowned and broken on the rocks of Law. There's an orange lying by his hand: his tawny ring. His soul.

Whin crouches by his body; touches with her work-rough hand his cold entangled hair. The coin she's paid for crossing is of gold, and of her make: her winter's son.

Kit holds the frantic Imbry, crackling like a cat. “Let them be,” he whispers. “That's his mam."

Her son,
he thinks.
O goddesses, she's found my daughter. I have failed her son.
Too much, it's all too much, between his joy, apology for joy, his guilt and grief. He scarce dares look at Thea's daughter, nor away. He is in awe of her: a sorceress. In love. Distressed at her ill use: the hacked hair and the bruises. And pierced, in the very finding, with his loss. So much like Thea—ah, that line of cheek and chin, those eyes. Her brow, her lips are like his mother's. Annot's. Like his own. But she's a child no more. Past fathering. Past wanting him. He fears she'll vanish like a trick of light. A lending.