Moon Song (21 page)

‘Tis
‘er,’
the oldest and ugliest of the little gnomes told his compatriots.

‘So tis …so tis,’ several agreed.

‘And she don’t know what she be doing.’

There were chuckles all round at this.

‘Is we be goin’ to tell ‘er then, maister?’ said one of the others.

‘Do y’ think we should then, folk?’ the old one asked generally.

‘I thinks we should,’ one old dame with very long teeth said as she reached out to touch the cloth of Isoldé’s trousers.

That unfroze Isoldé, she let out a scream and jumped back, only to find herself amongst even more of the gnomish creatures. They hung onto her trousers, her coat, a couple of the little ones swung from her sleeves, one climbed to her shoulders and sat pulling her hair.

Trying to get control of her breath, Isoldé managed, ‘What? What is it? What do you want?’

Suddenly there was silence. The little folk dropped off her to stand again in a circle round her. She turned to find Gideon
standing right behind her.

‘Oh! Thank the gods! It’s you,’ she exclaimed, collapsing in a heap on his shoulder and sobbing dryly into the male-scented leather of his jerkin. He stroked her hair, mumbled comforting noises into it.

‘That’s very sweet of you, I am of course delighted to have you in my arms again, but whatever would Mark say?’ he said, chuckling but still holding her close as the shaking gradually stopped and she pulled away. He led her to a stone seat at the side of the roundhouse and sat down beside her, holding her hand.

The circle of gnomes stood motionless around them.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Just what do you think you’re doing up here?’

‘I thought they were going to eat me!’ she muttered. ‘Like in the stories. All those sharp, pointy little teeth …’ His teasing was beginning to effect a feeling of security that had gone right out the window when she’d been alone with the gnomes.

‘No, they won’t do that,’ Gideon assured her. ‘They know who you are, what you’re needed for. But they are wicked teasers and they know the stories about them, play up to them. And you’ve met their relatives before.’

‘I have? When?’

‘When you’ve done the stirrings with Nial.’

‘What? Biodynamics? You’re joking! He never described them like that. He said we were doing it to get the soil going for the spring plantings.’

‘So you are but the energy you’re working with is still the gnomes, the earth elementals. That’s what this lot are too but these are wilder, they live on the moor, not in your garden, and they don’t have the same contact with people. These are used to daft tourists, or even dafter new-agers prancing about in the circles pretending to be pagans.’

Isoldé frowned at Gideon then. ‘They make you cross, the new-agers?’

Gideon sighed. ‘Yes, the idiot ones do. They get a load of stuff from some fancy foreign shaman out to make his name, and, or, a buck, and try to plant it here. They never bother to listen to the land herself. They don’t understand the culture of this land, my land, your land. They don’t feel they have a tradition so they must import someone else’s. It doesn’t fit and it upsets the land.’

Isoldé looked at him, put a hand on his. ‘It really does make you cross, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ He sighed again.

‘I can understand …I think,’ she told him. ‘And …I think that’s part of why you need the Moon Song, isn’t it? To try to reenliven the traditions of here, of Britain?’

Gideon’s face broke into a smile. ‘Yes, it is. It’s about the energy lines, the threads that connect everything. Moonpaths, if you like, as the moon does activate them.’

‘Are they not always active? I’ve read Watkins now, and Paul Devereaux. It seemed to me that the lines, once they’re …there? Seen? Known about, like people recognise the alignments of the hills and things …?’ She hunted for words, Gideon nodded. ‘Once they’re there, they’re always there.’

‘Yes they are. But they work differently at different times of the month, partly because of the seasonal energies but very much because of the moon. What have you learned from Nial?’

‘What? Gardening you mean?’

Gideon nodded.

‘Well …’ Isoldé frowned. ‘I’ve done a couple of stirrings with him and Mark. On root days he said, for the soil and the roots. That’s when he told me about Steiner calling the earth elementals gnomes.’

Gideon nodded again.

‘He said, Nial said, it would help the michoriza get going with the roots, help them get the nourishment out of the soil and improve the soil, get the worms going and all the beneficial bugs and stuff.’

Gideon chuckled. ‘Nial’s a good teacher,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t fart about with a load of cosmic crap, just gets you going with the basics in the physical. But what did he say about the moon?’

‘Oh …well …’ Isoldé tried to remember. ‘It’s about the moon being a lens,’ she said, her brow clearing as it came back to her. ‘The moon’s a lens for the energy of each of the constellations as she passes in front of them during the month.’ She found she’d got it, was in the element again. ‘The moon spends two or three days in front of each of the twelve constellations each month, so she goes through them all, through the astrology, every month. Each time she’s in front of a constellation she sort of magnifies and focuses its energy onto the Earth and that helps the relevant bit of the plant.’

‘Mmmm! Not bad.’ Gideon encouraged her. ‘Tell me about how it helps each bit of the plant.’

Isoldé thought for a moment. ‘The constellations are in four types, earth, water, air and fire,’ she said. ‘Like Scorpio’s water, Leo’s fire, Gemini’s air, Taurus is earth. And there’s a part of the plant for each of them.’

Gideon helped her out. ‘Earth is roots, water is leaves, air is flowers and fire is fruit.’

Isoldé nodded. ‘Yes. So …so if you want to help spuds you work on an earth day, like when the moon’s in front of Taurus or Virgo or Capricorn. Cabbages are leaves so you wait til the moon’s in front of Pisces, Cancer or Scorpio. For cauliflowers, and all garden flowers, you work when she’s focusing Aquarius, Gemini or Libra and for fruits you do it when she’s in front of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius.’

‘Pretty good.’ Gideon had his arm round her still and gave her a squeeze. ‘Now …how do you think all that works with the energy lines?’

Isoldé frowned again, sat up straighter. ‘Oooo …! It must work the same way, but …’ She turned to him, ‘I don’t know what the effect would be.’

‘Why would it work the same way?’

‘Well the moon’s shining onto all the Earth, isn’t she? All the time. Well all the time while the Earth’s not between her and the sun.’

‘Hmm! Good! You do know a bit about how things work.’

‘Of course I do! The moon reflects the sun, of course. That’s how she gives us light. As she goes round the Earth there’s a few days, a week, where the Earth is between her and the sun so no sunlight can fall on her. That’s the dark of the moon.’

Gideon was nodding, grinning. Isoldé frowned, he was pushing her to take the idea further. She sat back thinking.

‘This is getting complicated, I think I need to go home and draw and write and make patterns for myself, so I can get a handle on it. Is that OK? Do I need to be here for anything else? And why did I get the urge to come this way anyway,’ she added.

‘Gnomes calling to you,’ Gideon said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll forget this encounter.’

‘I certainly won’t! It was very scary.’

She looked around. The gnomes were still there, sat down now against the stone walls, teeth neatly folded inside their jaws, looking like little bundles of rags or leaves. If she’d not known, had not seen them earlier, she would have thought they were just bits and pieces blown in from the moor. That made her think again, how often was it truly the woodfolk when people thought it was just rubbish and dead plants lying about? And what happened to the woodfolk if they got swept up and put in the rubbish cart? She thought about the compactors the local council used and shuddered. ‘O! Ye gods …!’ she muttered.

One of the gnomes, the old dame, unfolded herself and waddled across to Isoldé, took her hand. ‘Thank y’, lady,’ she said, the huge brown eyes regarded Isoldé. ‘Thank y’ for thinking of us.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Isoldé said, squeezing the small claw-like hand in hers very gently. ‘Can you not get out of the way?’

‘Mostly we does,’ the dame told her. ‘But the old folk may be sleepin’, hard to waken when we’s old and off in the dreamworld. And the youngsters don’t always know the dangers, though we tries to tell ’em. They gets scooped up and put in the crusher. Tis an evil death.’

Isoldé shuddered. ‘I’m so sorry. We’re an ignorant species, we humans, and think we know best all too often. I’m sorry we kill your folk, and not even know we do it. That feels terrible.’

‘So it is, lady, so it is. Maybe, if you can bring the Moon Song home, things can begin to change. Humans may begin to see there’s so much more in the world than they’ve known for many a long year now.’

‘We used to know,’ Isoldé said.

‘Yes, humans used to know. Tis time you knew again, well time.’

‘So it is,’ Isoldé agreed. ‘I promise you I’ll do all I can to get the song, begin the change.’

‘We thanks you, lady.’

Gideon escorted her back down the track to the car. The gnomes came with them, the old dame holding Isoldé’s hand. As they arrived at the layby the little dame let go her hand and waddled off. Unlocking the car she saw they had hidden themselves as rags and leaves again.

A breeze came up suddenly, whipping round the lay-by, gathering up the leaves and twigs and other bits and pieces, sweeping them off back up the hill towards the Bronze Age ruins. In moments the place was new-swept and clear. Isoldé stared.

‘The winds help,’ Gideon said softly. ‘And the little ones live under the hills.’

‘I’m glad,’ Isoldé said. ‘It’s well time I got myself off home, I’ve got a lot of work to do.’

Embar purred steadily as Isoldé’s pen scribed drawings and diagrams and scrawled words all over the A3 sheet of paper on her desk. This was more complicated than she’d thought when sitting with Gideon in Grimspound. One idea led to another, led to another, there seemed no end to it. Were all these moon paths? She knew they were, even if she didn’t know how or why or much else about them. Mark had reminded her how many, many rhythms the moon was involved in. Although she’d known, taken it in at a mental level, this doing, drawing, scribing, working one thing from another was making a different, deeper, sort of sense to her.

If the moon affected everything, and she was certain it did, then she was beginning to see why the song was so important. And she was also wondering what had possessed Tristan to bugger off out of his life before he’d finished. What the hell had got into the man? He knew all this, must have done, or most of it. Nial had been his gardener, been working at Caergollo for over twenty years. He’d brought biodynamics to Tristan and, in return, Tristan had given him the pagan outlook. Nial thought it a very fair exchange, said it had broadened his outlook no end from how he’d been when he arrived, fresh from college in Sussex.

‘I was all took up with it then, when I first came here,’ Nial had told Isoldé as they sat in the old shed and he showed her the preparations. ‘Thought I knew it all, thought Steiner had known it all. Then I got to working here, with Tristan, and found how much more there was, all hidden deep within the land and the
people.’

‘Didn’t Steiner know that?’ Isoldé asked him.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Steiner knew his own land, I dare say. And there’s those lovely stories of him on the train, meeting this …this person. I think that was one of the wyzards he met, one of the old wise ones. They say he got a lot of the old lore from him but you don’t hear about that too much at Emerson College. They tend to stick to telling you it all came from Steiner.’

‘Didn’t it?’

‘Well …I think it’s more complex than that,’ Nial had said thoughtfully. ‘I think Steiner put it all together, got an “aha!” moment probably, but I don’t think it was all suddenly invented then. Probably the putting together of the preps, like cow shit in cow horns and such, came about then, maybe. But once you start to get into the old shamanic practices you see how alike all that stuff is to many of them. That’s what Tristan showed me. It certainly changed my outlook on paganism. Before then I’d been rather heavily Christian. Many Steiner folks are really, down inside. It’s because Steiner’s supposed to have had some revelation or other of the Christian variety. And, anyway, the Christian box is small enough not to scare most folk.’

‘I know that one!’ Isoldé had laughed back. ‘Confession before you go to mass on Sunday every week, get absolved from all your wickedness, and then you can be wicked again for the whole week, knowing the slate’ll be wiped clean again at your next confession. Makes killing and kneecapping and hating people who are different from you real easy.’ Her voice had been bitter by the end.

‘Aye, I guess it does. I was forgetting again where you come from. You always seem to be so much a part of us down here, even though you’re a real newcomer.’

‘An emmet?’ Isoldé queried.

‘Aye, that’s so, that’s the word for foreigners down here, below the Tamar. And I was one myself for many a year. But somehow
you’re not.’

‘I don’t want to be. I want to be part of this place. I’ve never felt so at home anywhere in all my life. Caergollo fits me like a glove.’

Now, sat here at her desk, Embar beside her, looking out over the grass to the woods, Isoldé knew it was true. She was part of this land.

She pulled herself back to the work in hand.

‘The Moon reflects the sun,’ she repeated to herself as she’d told Gideon up on Dartmoor. ‘It’s how she gives light. And as she goes round the Earth there’s the week where the Earth is between her and the sun so no sunlight can fall on her …the dark of the moon.’ She paused, chewing the end of her pen. ‘So there’s the usual quarters of the moon to think about as well, even if they don’t seem to mean so much in biodynamics.’