Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (66 page)

"I see ‘tis January with thee, Cloud: thy wit is bare."

"And thou art dog days, as thou ever wast, Crowd. Thou wilt loll thy tongue, and rage, and rig it."

Crowd laughed. “Summer liketh me. I do not reap, like sunburnt laboring men, but leap and sing. I am a gressop.” He undid his purse. “But look you, journeymen. See what a pretty fairing I would charm her with.” A comb and glass of jet and ivory, like blackthorn garlanded around a pool.

My Lady turned, elbow on chairback. “I'd not take those aboard, Master Fiddler, on whatever ship. ‘Twould not be wise."

"A gown of green silk, for the new play of Elfin..."

As if in idleness, but merely for the hand of it, Cloud stroked the folds of silk. A mothwing dangled in a web. No scent of Annot lingering, but salt and wormwood, smoke and ale and players’ sweat. “I am for Lune,” he said, “having some brief errand there, but—"

But the Witches now had snatched the gown, and danced it, jeering at the fiddler. “By tit, here's Crowdy's coats."

"Did he not look a vision in that mantle, like a nymph descending to the inn-yard?"

"Like to queen it at a May-game, with a bellows-mender for a consort."

"The very pot-boys were amazed."

Hand on hilt now, the fiddler scowled. “Shog off, you open-arses. Let you sail, go wallow in your leaky tub. There's not a cock among you lot can stanch her. I am for the lady's wedding; you may play her lying-in."

"That is thy will, then?” said my Lady.

"Aye, Mistress. With your leave."

"So be it. Tide's at three, if her master will put out. Here's silver for thy crossing.” She swept her cards aside to count it out. “A fair wind follow thee."

The fiddler found his dignity, and bowed. “And you, my Lady, and you all."

His bundle and his box were packed, his fiddle in a fleece, fell outward. Round the room he went, bright-faced, in a flame of triumph, clipping and clapping, tugging ears. “Jog on, you Cloudish jades. I go before you as harbinger.” He clipped Tom hard and cheerfully. “A wench is
like,
” he said. “And simile thine only picklock."

"If thou needst break in. I have a key.” A gressop's what it is: in winter it goes. “Fare you well,” said Tom o Cloud.

At the threshold, his mistress recalled him. “Oh, and Master Crowd? Remember: there's thy reckoning to pay."

O look!
A star fell burning from the Ship. The children in the meadow wheeled about, entangling in the summer grass.
There.
Nowhere.

Ah, that's one,
said Margaret.
The first.

Is't fortune?

Turning all, their faces to the heavens.
In a sort. The Nine weave—O it sunders! Two and three.

O brave. Two riders on a horse.

'Tis not like counting magpies, One for sorrow—Four—They weave what will have been that it might be.

A paradox, said Kit. Five, six! Ah, but Noll should see. Has he forgot?

Is writing. Weaving in his way.

Swifter now, as if inspired, the lightstorm scrawled the sky. A moving palimpsest.

Behind his love, his late-found Siony, Kit walked. Small Annot on his shoulder slept. The others waded through the summer grass, they dreamed: bright Phoebe, chirring like a drowsy gressop; wondering Tom; and Will and Whin. His daughter Margaret still would gaze.

In memory, a child was playing on a fiddle, scrawling notes. Beginning it again. Kit knew that tune, green Ashes’ entrance to the stage. He was remembering a low room high upstairs in Lune, all eaves; his mother writing by the window, crowded close to spare the candles. He can see her breath. Can see her fingers, pricked and stained. She copies music for the players, or their words on long rolls; she mends their tirings. Sometimes she will hold her head and sigh; count pennies; weep and rage. Or laughing, she will mock the words she copies. Sing. They dance to keep them warm.

It's a cold room or it's stifling; and it slants. If he lets it go, his wooden horse will travel of itself, roll down away. And on the hundredth trip, she'll turn and rant at him, and cuff; but sometimes she'll get up behind. They'll journey. They are in a winter wood, or on the Road to Law. In Cloud in April. Anywhere. Their cold and crooked room.

Not bare: above them in the rafters hangs a crowd of goddesses and kings. There's Hulver's godcloak, slashed with violet and gold; Slae's stockings, black as ink but shining, and his hempen wig; bright Journeyman's black bag and Morag's beak. A mask for owling in. A robe for to go invisible: they wear it both in turn, and call like echoes, mocking, as the other hunts and blunders.
Here, mam. In the air.
Here's Perseis her rainbow scarf, his mother says. And laughing she puts on the starry gown, and rustling turns to him. She speaks.

No more. The others had gone in; and last of all now, Margaret walked homeward to the hall. Her skirts were heavy with the dew, unsilvering where they swept the grass. To bed now, and to sleep. The stars were fading even as she looked.
But lo, night-braving Perseis embarks, At morrow-tide ascending heaven ...
Ever and again, yet otherwise each night. Her study. At the crook in the green road down from Law, she saw the chimneys of the house; she saw the light in Grevil's window. Still his candle burned: and she would weep. She knew not why. For mortals and their burning brief desires. For herself. One last time turning, Margaret saw the day-star where she lay in Thorn, the branches of it withering with sun; and Brock amid the Witches, etched on ice. And there: great Hulver lay in Ashes, ember into coal.
A flawless night,
she thought:
a fair nativity. Illusion. Where we stand is why.
The wheeling planets do not swerve and wend, now here, now anywhere, like children in a game. There are no striding deities, no figures in the sky: we set them there. For ecstasy and dread, for lanterns as we late. For tales. The sky's unstrung. Yet we make patterns: out of light, of love.

In Cloud, in winter, full a year since the fiddler's ship was lost, the journeyman walked on. He wandered. By his heart was Annot's letter, folded and refolded, grimed with many hands. Much-travelled: but had come to him at last in Uthwind.

At the Knot of Swords, by Mris. Aislaby, in Lyke Street, Lune:

To Mr. Thos. Cloud with my Lady's journeymen:

I lodge now with a fiddler's Boye, call'd Kit. Thy play is done.

And then a line of
Perseis:

"...he's cradled in the old Moon's lappe..."

Thy loving prentise,

Not Lightwood

ix August

In Lune; and he in Uthwind, then in Cloud.

She could scarce have written more; old Corbet had his spies. And indeed all his company had read it over ere it came to him, the seal of it long broken. They had jeering bid him jump for it; still plagued him mightily about his Lunish ingle.

His boy. Or not: ‘twas equivocal. A Kit, a crowd of bone. And Crowd the luthier of flesh—or not, and yet had played on her—was drowned. Ill tidings travel swiftly. Strangely, his rival's death had ghosted him: as if the child's two fathers needs must mirror. He drew himself in breath upon the other's glass.

And yet when first he'd read the letter, he had laughed for joy. As if he'd juggled with the sun, had made it rise. The first of all mornings.

Ah, but how could he sustain them? Would he ever see the boy, if he did braid of him? See Annot? Lying as they did in Lune, over sea and spell.

At dawn he'd left those hobbyhorses in the Bag at Aikenmoor, to snort away their ale and boying in three beds. He'd walk to clear his wits.

A sunless dawn. A silver-frost. It purfled all the brown leaves, edge and vein. How still it was, the endless fall of leaves—He scuffled on a pace or two and halted, looking up. Leaves fell like snow, as if their source was endless: tatters of the sun. It was winter. Elsewhere, anywhere in Cloud, the trees were bare.

By hallows,
said the player softly, and he laughed for wonderment. Uncovering, he lifted up his face, he turned about. Still falling and would fall. He'd played the mystery an hundred hundred times, had danced the light of leaves as Cloud his master and my lady taught him, as their master-mistresses taught them, and backward to the spring of fall. He was prenticed to it as a child, no older than Not's Noll; the first of his alphabet was birch. By his conjury, his art, he called the wood about him out of air: waked wood, and so it was. Nine years he'd worn the coat of tatters, played the fool, waked wood; and now the wood waked him. Now he was shadow that the light did conjure. It did but play him for a scene; would set him by. It took from him his mortal heart—its bruising and its care—put in two eyes of tree. He walked, admiring.

A little and a little further in, he saw a spring. It welled up through the leaves, lapped ice on ice, the knarl of living silver spilling secretly away. Cloud ale. Tom's wassail cup. He knelt and cracked the ice and filled his hands. So cold, as cold as time; and when he drank of it, he tasted earth and leaves. He tasted memory. He drank to the fiddler's boy; drank down the Sun.

In Cloud. Late summer, lingering. A year since Grevil named a green girl out of Law his ward. Once more, the pears were ripe for plucking, and his endless book undone. Paling with the night, at last his candle spired and went out. Grevil set aside his pen; came slowly from his text, as from another world. It was.

Dusk here. He could see the white leaves on the table, scattered, and the window edged with grey. He rose and raxed his stiffness, rubbing at his inky fingers, yawning like a gulf. There was something he ... Now what was it he was to wake for? Ah.
There will be starfall,
Margaret had said.
Toward morning
. Past then, unremarked. She'd tell him what he'd missed.

To bed now: but his wits were thronged with images, as bright and silent as a snowfall. Other worlds. He'd never sleep. Not if he drank a gallipot of honeyed stuff. He'd take a turn about the orchard, then, to settle him. The night air would be fled.

Down he crept, and softly through the wainscot room—Kit's now—to the orchard door. Unlocked: so Margaret also waked and worked. He stepped out among the trees. Will-haunted still. A year since they had lain together, drowning; since he'd named what he would lose.

Unsilvering now: the moon had set. A ghost of green beginning. Here and there, he saw the glimmering of arain webs, like rafts of silver on the grass.
Tom's clouts,
his nurse had called them. Ah, the sweetness of the apples slept, unwedded to the day, when loving sun would waken fire: the scent was all of green and shadow, earth and air. The laden boughs bent downward to the grass; they brooded shadow. Further on, an apple fell. Another. And a wintering bird awoke.

But he was orchard now, in green dissolving. Green. The leaves rained down their silver on him, rivers of the moon. If he but reached his hand, infallibly, he'd pluck the ripening sun.

A something mewed and rustled in the grass. He startled, in that instant all unspelled. Went still. The cat? Had she, the wicked creature, got a bird? He clapped and cried out, “Scat!” No swift cadenza in the grass. No streak of marmalade.

Then softly, lest he tread on wounded game, he swept about him.
There.

A naked child, newborn: a windfall in the grass. A starfall. See, its down of silvery hair still danced like fire round its head. Still travelling though it fell. “Thou will o wisp,” he breathed. “Thou lateworm. Catched thee.” As he bent to take it up, he saw the other: golder, sleepy as a pear, pricked out. By heaven, twins: a manchild and a maid. Willfallen, ah, he had no doubt, and embers of the stars.

How Barbary would scold.

One by one, he raised them to the heavens, laughing.
O you gods!
They woke and starred their little bodies, furious with life. They damsoned and they squalled. Stripping to his shirtsleeves now, he wrapped them in his study gown. He bore them like a garland, branches of the wood above, its fruit and flower, to his doorsill: to his house, to bring it down.

In, summer!

Ashes now, the world my mothers got. All burnt to ashes in my glass.

I, Margaret called Lightwood, leave what may not journey with my soul to Imbry Ask, descendent of that Imbry who was seawrack, and is starry, and of Will, the Sun in Ashes; and of Annot Lightwood, daughter to my father, Kit. Her study is the world I ended: what I knew. She riddles earth, tells ashes. Scries Cloud, its monuments and midden-heaps, as once I delved the air. She raised young Hulver's ship.

I leave to her my glass, wherein Nine Weaving was unravelled. They were sisters once. Didst know? I saw not sisters but a scattering of stars: the knot's within the braiding mind. I told them with my glass. And so resolved, I drew them, scattered, in my book. A swarm. Like bees, like fireflies. Like corn amid a cloud of chaff, still flying from the fan: the seed of worlds. They were, and are now
like
. The sky was storied once, didst know? That galaxy of stars wherein we travel, turning, was a road, a river of my lady's milk. Was cloud and now is law.

Colder, by and by,
the Nine said. Cold now in Cloud, in January. Even by the hearth. Beyond the sill, the stars that I unstrung. Unhallowed, of my will: I would know
why
. A clear night, dark of moon. Bright Perseis at riding, Luneward, on that endless sea. I wait the tide with her. I dip the pen; I pause. My shadow on the page my company. No owl nor raven such as witches keep, but silence and the quilly frost. Its talons in my bones. My bird is time, that gripes my shoulder, perches on my hand. Old bones. Old scrabbling mole. I keep my burrow, in my shabby jacket. Soft as ash. No tiring for my lady's grandchild.

I will tell this in my hand.

Go on.

I leave to Imbry Ask a fiddle and a ring.

I leave to her my pack of cards, that was my mother's legacy, that was a witch's hoard. All painted with the stars at Cloud's nativity. The wood above. A rarity, but spoilt for game: nine cards are lost. My lady took and burned them; these I kept. I turn them over now: the fortunes of a world that is no more.