Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (67 page)

The Hanged Lad, this. The Crowd of Bone. They strung it with my mother's hair; it sang her death. Here's Ashes, walking on the white road out of death. The Rattlebag. The Tower and the Ship. All stories once. No more: the sky's unpainted and untuned, the wood unleaved.

No Hare, and never was: my lady burnt it.

I was Ashes.

Their drum's the moon. They come in silence on the white road, rising from the hill. They are as they are painted in the cards: the Vixen Dancing and the Bear; old Ashes and her daughter, kindled of her; or the Windwife and her Comb. They are Persephone who must descend—look there, the pomegranate in her hand—and there, her mother who will seek her, even into hell. Whatever you do know them as, they are. The Sisters. See, the Fiddler goes before them: you will follow in the dance. Or as old Jinny tells it, by the fire when the wind is cold, he is the Horseman. He will take you up behind. And when it thunders, she will say:
he rides.
Or he is Dis in his great chariot, night-wheeled; the World Ash or the Hanged Man, or the Huntsman in his crown of horn. He is as you remember him: Orion, Odin, Oberon, the Erl-king, Icarus. Whatever you have dreamed.

They are night's quality: the moon's own company of players and her starry masque. They are the winter's tales.

Brock's journeymen, they bring the sun; and at its forge, they make or mend the fortunes of the world. They hammer out your dreams; their anvil is the night. They are myth's artificers and the thieves of sleep. They take your wits, your memories, your soul. No threshold that they cannot cross; no heart they cannot break.

And then they play the one true story, of the world's creation or its end. They play the turning of the year, the tempest, and the resurrection. They play the tumbling of the drums.

At dawn, they will vanish.

In the heavens now, wheeling and tumbling, the guisers faded into mist.
Exeunt omnes.
In her tower, Margaret looked up, laid by her crowquill pen. Her candles one by one had guttered; and the last of them burned pale. Near morning. Time now to descend. Not lightly now. In dreams—and over and again of late—she still ran down and downward on a winding stair; her chain of stars whirled outward and away, it broke and scattered. Ah, she flew. As light as starfall. Then she woke still in this body, thrawn with time. Too old to weep now for a dream; but mourning for the self that wept.

There was a story Barbary had told: of a girl who walked to the world's end for a wonder, for a scrying glass in Ih to read the mysteries of the world: and saw in it herself, grown old. So she had bought with her journeying old age.

So it was.

Coming down through her chambers, tower and bower, Margaret saw them as a stranger would: wheels and shadows of great wheels, epitomes of light in brass and glass and boxwood. Instruments of unheard music. Engines of time. The rooms themselves looked small and shabby now, wormeaten, paperchoked; the hangings that were brave once, threadbare, ravelled almost into cobwebs. And at their center still, herself the artificer and the arain: Mistress Lightwood in her web of night.

She shook her head. These mazes were but fantasy. The rooms were still her own; they fit her as a snail its shell. Beside her, she had kept, most dear to her, the relics of her centuries: the play of
Perseis
; an inlaid box, a half-embroidered smock in it; a book of scraps of paper, gathered leaves, with childish notes on stars; her cousin Grevil's work,
Reliquiae Nebulosae; or, Remains of Cloud.
Leaves pressed in it, and flowers. Here, the music Kit had written for a crowd of other hands to play; here, laid on it, a spindle-whorl: the owl of bone his dark-eyed Siony had brought from Scarristack, her bridegift. There, the toys of long-dead children: Grevil's twins, starfallen; Siony's fierce Til, in mourning for her own, her sea-drowned father; Margaret's brother and her sisters, lateborn, much beloved. Phoebe's whirligig; Whin's babyhouse, Will's drum; and Tom and Annot's ashing cups. Inch-deep in dust. And on a heap of manuscripts, a shell. Age-clouded now, as light and brown and brinded as her hand.
What's all this Mallywrack?
old Barbary would say.
My life
. But there was none such now as Barbary to scold and set to rights. Who now remembered her? Who knew of Malykorne, of Annis, in this other Cloud?

The old astronomer set down the shell.

She had outlived the world of her begetting. When she broke the sky, dissolved it—and herself in it—the gods departed, that were half her kindred. Not at once, but slowly, slowly, as a tree might backward grow, unrooting from this earth. And history, that had gone through endless involutions in their hands, cat's-cradled, braiding, now was linear. Was so much string. No more she'd meet her shadow on the road; no more would Ashes wake the Sun. The world was otherwise.

Cosmography began. Now
here
and
elsewhere
had been fixed, surveyed, the round earth's corners unimagined. Cloud that once had lain
beyond,
or
farther in,
or
north-north-westward of the moon,
was mapped. No will o wisp about it now: no
there and back again,
no
long and light.
Of old the Cloudish coast was spellbound, and its sea the sky. Its ships had journeyed by the art of windwives, calling on the Witches: they who came from elsewhere. Time went all one way now, and the great ships to and fro. They took the wind's chance.

Now the sky itself had slid askew; or rather, Cloud was on a toppling earth. They saw the seasons falling slowly backward under stranger signs: the spring arising in the Reaper's hook, the Ship star out of true of North, Unleaving sliding like an eiderdown, shrugged off in sleep. Unfast, the laggard Sun slipped backward out of Ashes’ lap. It waked now in the Scythe.

What I do undoes.

With age, the world had cracked, all ills crept in. War, dearth, new plagues and tyrannies. And yet not all was evil that did come of change. Not even law. She had descended once to town, the old mad she-philosopher, the legend and the mock of men, to speak in Sillycourt against judicial hanging. Not that first time nor the fifth or sixth: and yet the law had passed. Daw's wooden horse no more would gallop; and his tree bore no more fruit.

Jack Daw himself was dwindled to a chimney shadow, to a winter's tale: a figure of vague comic menace. They did burn him, hallows night each year, for stealing of the old moon's daughter. He was made a man of straw. The elding lads did bear him door to door in effigy, to beg his firing and ale: black tatters and a mask, slouch hat and broken swagger, with a sausage at his fork. Awd Strawhead.
Penny for the guise!

A bugbear to affright the children. Ah, but so was she, with her great eye fixed on heaven. They did shun her as a witch: Mag Moonwise. She will lure thee in with gingernuts and
tell
thee.

At the window on the landing, she looked out. How straggling now the orchard grew, half wilderness, and hoar with mistletoe. A haunted place. Small wonder they did call her witch.

Not all the bairns had run from her: Is Hawtrey stayed. Ah, long ago: the last of all the maids that Barbary had sworn. A wispy child, like Sukey that had been her aunt; but dark like Hob. All cap and eyes, she was, and smothered in a great rough apron. Clumping boots. She'd come to lay the fires, but had stayed to learn the glass, observe, record. It was Is who'd first discovered the great comet; both had written papers on it for the new Society. Herself alone had seen it twice return; would not again, she thought. They'd named it Arkenbold, for Hob's lost boy, the pretty child who'd chased the sun out on the ice.

No, not all she'd done was ill.

She thought of her new starglass that her cousin Noll bespoke for her, that was a copy of the old remade, with lenses brought from Lune; and then the newer and the newer still, of Cloudish make, refined and reinvented. Then the tower and the domes; the letters and the papers and the learned books; at last the colleges. Noll's joy. Though barred to her by ancient privilege, barred to Is and Annot and their shining daughters. Still, she could rejoice for him, the boy called back from paradise to study muck and wool. He'd walked amid his budding grove—had given it—in hope of nightingales; had sat until the dawn in conversation with his other selves, his burning boys. Who'd Ired into doddery old men nid-nodding in their gowns—alas, she'd argued with them at a century or three of tables—rousing only at a pretty dish: old wine, a syllabub, a pheasant.
I'll the pluck of it, and thou the quill.
But she had time; she had her gossip Mally's knack for meddling; and at length, she had her school: her College of the Nine.

Coming down through the music room, she looked about with pleasure. Here was once the wainscot parlor where old Covener and Corbet sat, like crows dividing her. Here she was made handfast; here she sained the child who would be Master Grevil. She had made of it a reinvention of a memory, of a bright dark closet full of wonders and of dust. A cabinet of curiosities: of wood and ivory inlaid, of woven silk and wool. Here stood a cabinet compact of boxes; here a gathering of china, blue and white, a congeries of summer mornings. At her table, over tea, had come new poets and mathematics; chocolate from Ind; the art of fugue. When Noll and Kit discovered coffee, joy was unconfined. There had been much music here, a changing consort, played by children of the house, their children and their children's children. Still it murmured like a shell about her, echoes of the salt immerging deep of family, the sea of generation. Ah, not mute: like instruments untouched, and long unplayed. Like strings the memories would wake. Their voices lingered.

Slowly now, she crossed the old hall: where the guisers and the gallantry had played. Where she was Ashes. Where the crow lad long ago was tried and sentenced. Still as cold in here as ever, with the timbers of the roof not underdrawn. She would not have it ceiled. Up there about the rooftree that is green with winter leaves, the Sun still seems to hang forever, ever falling into Tom o Cloud's arms. No groundlings now but she; though some who watched him then still did, stared out from portraits. Smutched as colliers.

Oh the chimneys: I regret.
Wheels not of light celestial, but of iron, strap and cog: still turning, ceaseless as the sky, but purposeful, entrapped. The trees that fell, the fires that devoured them. The shuttles multiplying, myriads of nines. The children in the dark. The choking sky. Not Cloud but smoke. All risen from her burning glass, her brave new world. The Scythe's Age, as they called it now. And yet that clattering of looms had raised the towers of her Weavers’ College: light and learning, founded on the engines of the night.

I would know why,
thought Margaret.
It's what I am.

Much like her mother, Kit did say; yet more like those she mirrored, left hand to their right: cold Annis who did think the stars in darkness, so they were; old Mally who did keep the wood.
I am both hands clasped,
she thought,
the light and dark of moon.
But even that was flawed now, but a wizened orange of an earth.

Colder, by and by, the Nine did say. And yet I mourn for what has been. I see the leaves; they light about me, gold and dying, and I weep.

Since the fading of the spellbounds, and the shifting of the balance; since the coming of the Outlune ships, there had been wars. Men had fallen to the scythe in swathes, and beardless boys, unbarleyed yet: no harvest, for no end.
I would know why.
Her nephew, Kit's Tom's restless Will; the boy Is Hawtrey loved, untold by her. The Arkets fatherless; the Shanklins childless, that had three tall sons. All gone: like chimneysweepers, that are gold and come to dust. Yet ever windborn, lighting never on the fertile earth. Unsown. She wondered: had her countryfolk once killed an Ashes child and spilt his blood, in innocence, to feed the earth, to slake its hungering for dead? A sacrifice of one for many? All in vain. They all were crow lads now, all Ashes. Still she raged against the dying.

At the threshold, she swung back the heavy door to let the dawn come in, white mantled. Winter-crowned she came, and walking printless in the snow. Her smock was of the pleated snow. It ruffled at her heels. But where she walked sprang flowers; where her shadow fell was light. They'd spread no rushes for the coming lass to rest, nor brimmed a bowl of milk for her. The maid that slipped the lock did wear no gown of green; she sang no carol to the greenfoot girl. But grey and bending on her blackshod stick, Margaret stood, no slip in flower but a stock of thorn: the last of all her world to keep that rite of innocence. There were none now who remembered.

Winter and summer, you must let the guisers in: they bear the sun. But as for spring, you must call out to her: she rises from the winter dark. You meet as in a glass. She pulls you from the deep of time; you drown in her undying.

Now, here, at her doorsill, in a curving drift of snow, there lay a bunch of frail white flowers. Snowdrops. Yet as far as Margaret could see, the snow lay printless and unmarred. Were they frost in flower? Of a garland for a bride of snow? But bending for them, yes, she saw and felt green stems, the nodding of the buds, a-tremble; even in the cold, they kept their pure green scent of hope, expectancy.

Old Margaret bent her face to them; and softly she spoke:

Then looking to the dayspring and the dawn, she called to Ashes, Ashes to arise.

All in black she rises, walking from the earth. In winter she is naked branches; she is darkfast, drinking snow. The wood, the winter grove, is all of Ashes. Islanded in mist, ah, see the nightblack girls: in spring they wake and whisper, with their leafless hands unbraiding for the dance. They shake their silver tresses, that were bound. They wait. Alone the green girl rises, breaking from her bark of night. She flowers, starry from the wood, whitenaked. Light of darkness, spring of winter: over and again reborn as Ashes of herself, of Annis. Greenfoot in the snow she passes, white in whiter mist. At every step a green blade springs. Her wake is light.