Moon Song

Tristan left Caergollo at dead of night. He parked the car by the bridge at the bottom of the village and continued on foot to the harbour. The way was slippery. Jagged rocks and old ropes caught at his feet but, somehow, all his old strength had returned to him. He felt young again, as before the disease. Rounding the final corner into the harbour itself, the wind caught him, hurling him backwards. He got up, laughing, and pushed his way forward to the edge of the stone quay behind which the calmer waters of the harbour hid from the wild sea.

There was a hint of brightness ahead of him now, lighting the edge of the sea with silver. He stopped a moment, watching the powerful swell running into the bay. Moonlight grew, showing the half-hidden path. Cut away by wind and water, it led him upwards, towering two hundred feet above the waves. In crevices, he caught the scent of tufts of sea-pink, flourishing on the barest smidgeon of soil. The ocean beat deafeningly against the sheer, black walls and the sea-cave howled below, laughing at him as he followed the slippery path around the edges of the chasm.

He laboured up the long, narrow spur, while the west wind beat him back, disputing his passage.

‘I am coming,’ he told it.

Wind and waves laughed. He felt the excitement thrill across his skin. Tonight would be the last and the first day of his life.

Reaching the top, the headland stretched out into the water. The moon had risen further behind his back and would soon bring the foot of the pathway to the cliff edge before him. He
waited, watching the light slither over the sea to stop right at his feet where he stood poised at the top of the three rough stone steps that led out into nowhere. Now, as the moonlight joined with the stone, he stood at the end of the silver pathway. Looking up he watched the horizon unfold. The lost land lay straight ahead of him at the end of the moonpath, floating on the horizon at the edge of vision. Beyond it only a bright darkness and the end of the world.

Below, the sea boiled. Waves thundered, shaking the rocks. The way was clear now out to the Isle of the Dead. Tristan stood a moment, balanced against the wind then stepped out onto the shining moonpath.

Coffee mug in hand, Isoldé went to the door of the flat to collect the newspaper. She took it to the balcony and stood looking out over the gardens that stretched between her and the east side of the British Museum. The sun shone, the fresh smell of wet earth was interestingly mixed with last night’s curry leavings. It reached her, along with the racket of ubiquitous dust carts, rumbling along four stories down on the other side of the building, collecting the hotel and restaurant garbage. Life in the twenty-first century; she put the coffee down on the little iron table and curled up in the basket chair to read. Furtling through the magazines, the headline in the Arts section stopped her.

The paper slid off her lap as pictures formed in her mind’s eye. There was the sound of singing inside her head.

The song, True Thomas, was one Tristan had made very much his own early on in his career, he was always asked for it as an encore after a performance. The lines were from the fairy queen as she tells Thomas where she is taking him.

Fragments of last night’s dream returned; she saw Tristan walk out across the sea on a bridge of moonshine to that impossible shadow-land on the horizon. Isoldé’s breath caught in her throat, walking on water?

Tristan had been her hero and musical inspiration since Uncle Brian first took her to hear him in the smoky Belfast club when she was all of fourteen years old. That gig had begun Tristan’s recording career, the right people happening to be in the audience, one of those luck-moments. Isoldé had lost her heart then, twenty-plus years ago, as she heard him for the first time. Groupie, she told herself, shaking her head.

A massive honking combined with an explosive shouting match from the street brought her back to the present. She went to the kitchen window just in time to see one of the dustmen trip and tip a mass of garbage over a silver BMW whose soft top was fortuitously down. The car driver, silk-suited, had his back to the disaster and was yelling at two other dustmen to get out of the way and stop blocking the road. He turned just in time to see a multi-coloured mess from the curry house opposite land all over
the inside of his car. The shrieks he made would have done justice to a steam train. Isoldé had to grin as she took herself into the shower.

She got herself out of the flat only ten minutes past her usual time and headed for The Guardian’s offices in Farringdon Street. She turned into the usual sandwich shop for her BLT and coffee and stood in the queue watching policemen in flak jackets patrolling Theobalds Road, truncheons in hand.

‘Stupid Yanks! Why do we get involved in their messes?’ Isoldé thought to herself. Coming from Belfast, after growing up in The Troubles, she had no patience with what she called American hysteria. ‘No guns, yet,’ she thought. Not quite Belfast, but far closer than she ever wanted to be again.

Arriving at the Guardian building she climbed three floors and pushed open the door to the main office. As usual, she remembered too late to turn her hearing down.

‘Zoldé! Zoldé!’ a voice called over the noise. ‘They want us in Whitehall.’

‘What is it this time?’ Isoldé collapsed opposite her partner. ‘Osama visiting Number 10?’

‘No such luck,’ Jeremy rolled his eyes. ‘Another bomb scare, but stuff your face first,’ he pointed to her sandwich and coffee which were rapidly cooling. ‘Mickey’s already there.’ He thrust the mobile into her hand. Isoldé rolled her eyes at pictures of workmen, police and military shutting off Whitehall and the side streets around Downing Street.

‘The terrorists have got us all running round like headless chickens,’ she said. ‘They don’t need to actually do anything, we do it all for them.’

‘Ha!’ Jeremy snorted agreement.

Later, in the Cock Tavern by Smithfield, Isoldé cradled her beer morosely. Mickey squeezed in beside her.

‘What’s up?’

Isoldé’s face, screwed up, she shut her eyes, took a deep
breath.

‘I can’t hack it,’ she said baldly.

Mickey peered at her over the top of his specs, raised an eyebrow. ‘Tis too much like home, so it is,’ he said, perceptively.

Isoldé put down her glass and buried her face in his shoulder.

‘Didn’t think I’d ever see this over here,’ Mickey said as he stroked her hair, his own Belfast twang getting more pronounced.

Isoldé sat back, fumbled in a pocket for an over-used tissue and wiped her nose.

‘Sorry, Mick. I think I’d better go.’

‘Email me the story,’ he called after her.

Isoldé was dreaming. The hare sat in the path. Moonlight bleached the grass to silver so the last of the raindrops hung on the stems like glittering diamonds.

Hare and Moon regarded each other, staring up, staring down. A soft wisp of cloud veiled the moon for an instant casting a lacy shadow over the hare. When it passed, a girl sat in the path where the hare had been. Her lower limbs still ended in the long, leaping legs of the creature, her hands too were more paw than fingers and long ears stood up out of her soft silver-brown hair, but she was more girl than hare now. Unthinking, she scratched under her armpit with a hind leg.

Her ears flicked, she sat up straighter, long whiskers twitching around the human lips and then she stood and stretched. Something was here, something not herself, she sat back down, very still, waiting.

Over by the rock outcrop the earth moved, quivered, seemed to split open. Something like a new plant began to emerge, growing out of the crack in the ground. Its form was rounded, dumpy, folds of leaves surrounding it. The leaves looked like arms, opening out, showing the head rising out of them. The face was all folds like an old fashioned rose.

‘Mother?’ the hare-girl whispered.

‘Aye, child. What d’ye do here?’

‘The light is good,’ the girl said after a moment of thinking. It was always hard to use words, they didn’t come easily.

‘Aye child and so it is.’ The rose-faced woman-creature stood now and came rolling slowly forward on her short legs to sit beside the hare-girl. Long-fingered hands, like spidery roots, reached out to stroke the ears and hair. ‘You can shift some now?’

Shift? The hare-girl told the word over in her mouth and then in her mind. It meant something. She looked down at her hands …paws. That was wrong. She looked at the root-hand that
caressed her. Taking hold of threads in her mind she tried to twist and twine them, watching as the paws became hands. The shapeshift steadied, held, the girl began to smile, then the fingers slipped again, the nails becoming claws and the hands paw-like once again. The girl sighed. It wasn’t working, not properly. She didn’t know what to do.

The rose-faced root-woman patted her shoulder, stroked the paws.

‘Tis all right, my lover, tis all right. Tha’s not got the full measure of it yet. When the song comes so tha’ll have it all. Thee’ll lead us all in the dance then, my darlin’ girl.’

The hare-girl tried, every day she tried to shift and hold the form but it would never stay. She should know more of the moon too but always they just stared at each other and she never could understand the words the moon would tell her. But she could feel the pathways, the tingling lines that threaded through the land. Her paws knew the ways, her feet did too, even if she couldn’t shift them. The ways were important but she knew not why. Root-mother told her it would come. She wished it could be soon.