Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (64 page)

Keep nowt,
they'd told her at her making. Here was nothing.

Wordlessly, she asked Imp Jinny, who had taught her; and was answered.
Sain it, grave it, as it were a stillbirth. For it has a soul.
She looked about her for an ashing, anything: a pin, a coin. She wore no ring. She took a pin from her cap and blessed it, and she named the hailstone: “Annis Ashes’ daughter, mother to thyself: I name thee. Light hap thee, at thy crossing over.” And she drew the sill. “Daughter of thy daughter Ashes, sister to thyself: I bid thee, Annis, go in peace. Lyke to the earth's lap, lightly on the Road. Unleaving be thy soul."

And she in she, the goddesses rose up, greysilver, in a cloud of Ashes. For a breath, they lingered, young and sorrowful; then fading into air, were gone.

Now Ashes that was Margaret stirred and murmured in her sleep. Mistress Barbary took her in her lap, as in the guising overturned: a shadow for the sun. She happed her in the stone-warm mantle, chafed her. A brave lass, a brave lass: she could feel the strong slow heart, the warmth returning to her body, even to her hands, her feet. Could feel the kindling of a fever: she'd want nursing yet. A long way from her bed.

Just at daybreak, Barbary took Ashes’ coat, her silence, gave her back her name: “Margaret, wake."

And echoing, she heard a man call, “Margaret?” He was running uphill, breathing hard and raggedly; she heard the rattle of the stones dislodged. If it were Corbet, let him come. Let him look to his ballocks. She'd a knife. But looking up, she knew him for that fiddler with the gallantry who'd spoken for the sun; but long before that as the desperate boy who'd pleaded for his lass. And in her pride of piety, she'd spurned him: for the sake of ritual. For maidenhead. In longing to be Ashes she was Annis in her pride, disdainful of the grieving heart, the errant flesh. No more.

When he saw them, he cried out, crouched eagerly to take his daughter up. She signed to him:
asleep.
He turned and beckoned wildly to a second traveller behind him: Master Noll, much worse for wandering, and hatless. But unscathed. The faerie-hunter, home from the hill.

She could not rise to curtsey; but she nodded. “Morn t'ye, masters. Here's your lass returned from travelling; she'll live to comfort ye. Come up, we'll bring her home."

Waking from that long strange dream of Cloud in Ashes, Margaret's running in the labyrinth, in Law. She wears the heavens as a chain of stones. Her collar and her clew: it leads her down and down the spiral stair. The necklace breaks, the stars unstring. They roll and scatter on the stones; are lost, forever falling. There are cracks in Law, unfathomed. But she cannot stop to pick them up, the moon is hunting her.

And now she's in a boat alone, but for the silent journeyman. Above her is the starry sky, the bloom of galaxy; below—ah strange, the sea is full of stars. The ship is flying now, the sky is water. A single planet, steadfast, clear, shines out: the Boatman. For they call it so in Cloud, she thinks. She must remember now to speak their tongue, for all's translated here. The ship's the moon and shadowed by the moon; it follows, shattered in the water, coming round and round, still closing.

Cup,
she thinks: she thirsts but cannot drink of it. It brims with light.

The pale ship is the moon, cloud-canvassed, and the moon a bed, its ghostly hangings great with air; the clawed rings inch and jangle on the yards. Crows crony on the masthead. Grave as doctors, they confer, they parcel her.

The sea is fretted now with islands; the rocks are thronged with seals: dark, indolent, and sleeky creatures sloping off, incurious. They slide into their element. But some are Norni's people, with her great eyes. How they stare at her, a bare forked thing. Their changeling and their charge. They slip from her her skins of earth, air, fire: fell on fell. Clay-cold, as pale as cloud; then skydark, pricked with light. Her body's moled with stars. They roll them, fine as vellum, for the steersman. Soulskins. Maps.

The sky is paling, streaked with fire; she is made of sky, she burns and shivers. Where she bleeds is morning. Sleepless as the day, she watches as the Crow stars fade. Seven a journey, six for a thief. She has stolen herself. Uncaged, ah, cut away from Law, outlaw, she wreathes, unwreathes the broken chain. Not dreaming, no. It's only that she feels so light, so strange and light.

Will is on black moorland, climbing. It is half light, neither sun nor moon but shadowless. White frost in patches and a mist arising from it, shreds and tatters of a scarf.

No stars. There'd not be Margaret.

But she's standing by the Owlstone, small and cold and straight. A willow wand. A candle, with a flickering of fire about her head. Her hair. Had they bound her to the cart's tail, cried her for a vixen and a whore? Shorn her for a lunatic? She's naked but her smock, as if she's risen from her bed; and barefoot on the whinnymoor. In frost. She'd starve o cold. Dread catches at his throat.
She weren't—?
No. No, he sees her cloud of breath. But wandering in a fever? Mad?

Thou's late abroad,
he says.
Marget.

He cannot read her face.

The wood above's mine own.
She stands on a puzzling of oak leaves and ice that glitters with the moon in it, in shards. No moon, no tree but where she stands.
I come to gaze.
He sees her glass with her, that charms the moon and stars from the sky. And she's tablets of wax to spell them down.

No stars.

She looks him up and down, half smiling.
Here's bravery. Cap and feather and all. The Road has prospered thee.

There's rings on every finger. Gauds. His hand goes to his hilt: and power. He begins to fear, unknowing how this came. He would unbuckle, belt and all. Ungird. He'd lay them at her feet: his sword, his rings, his mantle of the sun. Cannot: for what he's ta'en.

But she mistakes him.
Put up thy sword. Thou hast what thou didst levy of me: silver and a horse.

That's not what
—But he's forfeited. One kiss is all he craves of her: her child's cold mouth, but sweet as water. That he never took, so never tainted. All other memories of her are black with shame. Her sweet small breasts; her low of fire. Her Lunish talk. Her maddening. Herself.

She's not for thy undoing,
says Brock's echo.

And he says,
I'll take no leave of thee.

Not of thy will, but must. We meet but as the night and day, in dreaming, and the river lies between.
She is her cloud of breath, condensed of it, all air; and if he reached for her—
Win up, win up. The wind is bridled, and thy river's yet to cross.
But even as she speaks, she's fading, mist in mist. She seems to hold a cup of frost: that lingers last of all, bloodred, abrim with sun.

He's lying in a lap. Another, darker cloud looms over him. Not mist but firesmoke and fog. Wet ashes. Drops rain down on him, they sidle.
Will you drink?
the ghost says, echoing. He hears a stamp and jingling, of his waiting horse? A whickering dance? But he remembers now, they bring the hobbyhorse. He hears the cockcrow, or the bagpipes mocking it. And O, it breaks his heart with light. It draws him up and up, still struggling, into ritual: a room of smoke and firelight and rumour. Hobbleshow.

Then the drum beats, and he must awake, away. He rises up to dance.

Looking up, tranced Margaret sees a flint of sun, struck glinting from its wheel: another sun. And then, another and another sun, the fellies of its wheel of frost; but still. It is the year's cross, quartered in its turning. Three suns, beside, aside, above the sharp white sun, at hilt and hilt and pommel of a wintry sword. It dazzles in her eyes. The sword is in the starry hill; the witch is sleeping, naked in her bones of frost, blacksided in a coil of cloud. The white sword's pierced her through. And Margaret stretches out her hand to it and sees that it has cut her bonds. The ends unravel from her wrist, a bracelet of bright hair, plaited as the living blood; but cold, as cold as hail, and darkened as iron in an ashy forge. Then she's slipped. She sees herself the bright hawk balanced on the rimy wheel, the wheel about to turn.
I have flown myself,
she thinks. And dazzled, staring at the three, five, shivered suns, she winks. The windgalls vanish in the sky; the hill is stone.

Will is riding on the nightfell, upward from that silent shore. His mantle of the burning gold flares out behind him as he wades the river: bright a moment, dusk and ashes as he mounts the sky. He's clad in sunrise and its setting, and the black of night between them; but his bones are of the earth. New-fallen snow lies next his body, whiter than a weft of linen, finer stitchery of frost; his coat's the mirk black rain. He wears a windgall at his breast, and at his back, a moonbow, arrows of the sleet. Upon his hand, he wears a stone of fire. Hailshod and unbridled, he is horsed upon the wind. His spurs are January.

When it lightens, we do say he rides. There's thunder in his gait.

He rides by the gallows where the sun will hang. All paths lead ever to that crossroads, to his shadow self, his day. That other strode the heavens, bright and ragged, in a belt of stars. But he is silver that was golden once. He scatters brightness.
Ah, like this
, says Ashes,
like a chimneysweeper
. Leaning to her listener, she opens out her hands, she whiffs.
He comes to dust.
Forever he is whirled away, unsilvered, in the windrush of his riding. Still he scatters, he is endless. Slash him: all within is light. The falling stars are called his seed.

On bitter nights, you cannot see him, sky in sky, but for the glinting of an edge of silver, like the turning of a crystal in the moonlight, like the limb of fire on a glass new-blown, still fiery from the blast. Her breath ensouls. And in him, edge on edge refracted, is another sky aslant: the Ship, the Gallows, Ashes at his heart. The Road's within him, and his riding. See, a littler horseman with a ring upon his hand, epitome: and in that stone, another heavens. All the stories of the world are in him, starry in his veins.

Fading from her lips, he clouds a little. Crazes. There is salt of blood in him, his flaw: he cracks with it. His shattering is storm. A white hag rises from him, streaming from his horse of air, subliming. He is silver on the trees.

Look for him riding on the scar of heaven, on a black moor rimed with stars. Night's horseman.

He will take you up behind.

Cold sunlight, clean linen. Comfort: down and fire, and a fall of snow without. An absence—ah, the soft weight and the winding of her braid along her body, coiling and consoling her. Margaret woke remembering.

A presence. There was a stranger at her bedside reading. Or was reading but a moment since: with a finger in his book he looked at her. An anxious pleasant face, but overwatched: as if she were an apparition in the heavens, long-awaited, clouded over and now clear. He'd Master Grevil's slate-blue jacket on, ill-fitting him; a fairish beard and hair, not sorrel. Like and unlike. Grevil's cousin. Thea's Kit.

He smiled. Swift-chasing light and shadow in his face: an April visage, had she known the month.

"Good morrow, daughter."

She blinked in the light.

"Mistress Barbary would have thee shuttered; but I argued thou wouldst wake to sky."

The chamber was not hers: she was in the great bed, in the loft.

"Madam—?"

"Fled."

Shadow chased light. A silence. She turned, half sat, to see what book he read; he held it up. “
Perseis.
‘Twas my mother's—Annot's—book she left here, long ago. She oft did speak of it, regretting: though she had it all by heart. And played it to me as a child in coats, so I did learn it of her, leafmeal. But in game: and so more surely than I got my grammar.” He smiled, reminiscent. “Though chiefly I did beg of her the masque of bears."

Inwardly, she saw the frontispiece, the woodcut: Perseis appearing to the wondering Shepherd in the wood, the wood unleaving. Oddly drawn: the toyish trees scarce higher than the lovers’ heads, the leaves in folio. The lady naked but a scarf of rainbow, black on white, a garland of the stars outblazing in her comet's tail of hair. As if she'd fallen from an almanac. And he long-coated, with a broad hat and a crook. His budget at his belted side. His black dog at his heel. From a window in the heavens, in a curling of cloud, the Eight upheld their hands.

She spoke for him.
"O rare Cosmography—"

He took her up.
"Let fall my lantern. Thou art only light..."

"But thou art mazed, sweet fool. The wood is dark..."

And turn and turn they played the scene, forgetting here and there, uplifting on the wave of measure, carried by the tale. The lovers meet in greenwood, in the fall of leaf. They spring. The play's a winter's tale: it draws towards darkness, to a storm of grief and partings, even to the deep of hell; and yet will end in reconciliation, lightly, with a dance.

"In another Tale she dyed,” wrote Grevil in the autumn after. “For their meeting was by Chance: as when a Starre falls. We doe say,
The Nine are weaving
; but their Weft is gossamour, it drifteth by the Wind. In otherwise, her Shepheard swain had tarried on the hill, or slumbering late had dreamed a lesser Faire than he had lost a-bed: so waking was bereft of her. Or else, new-fallen Perseis had met not Tom o Cloud, that should have hail'd her, but a loitring Man in black, a rabble of his Drabs behind: so she was fallen utterly.” He paused, biting his pen. How the light danced, flickering at the edge of sight. He rubbed his weary eyes. “The Warp is sett; our lives, light as Shuttles, fly and fall. I have seen young Countrie lasses play at Ninestones, casting up and catching pebbles, very featly. As they play they chaunt a Rime, as
Talith, Tiphan to the East, &c.,
two Sisters to a wind: there being Eight by their reckoning. The ninth is Chance."

Leaves whirling down, a crossroads. Long ago. Too late the boy saw the journeyman, saw the swirl of his long coat and hurried by, head down.