Moon Song (27 page)

She stood at the top of the steps waiting for the moon to rise, for the path to appear. Suddenly it was there. The stone of the steps silvered, joined with the light, which became solid. Before she could think further about anything Isoldé set her foot on the moonpath. There was a slight wobble then it steadied. She began to walk forward without looking back.

‘I’m not running away from Mark,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I’m walking towards the Lost Land, the land of song, of dream, of the dead. I go to fetch Tristan, so that he can sing one more
time. And I go to return.’

The way was long, at times it seemed as if she never moved but always she was putting one foot in front of the other, going forward, going nowhere. It was cold, a light wind coming in off the sea, the sky a sharp, crisp indigo, the stars largely occluded by the brilliant light of the full moon, an occasional wisp of cloud blew across the moon’s face like a thin black silk veil. It took all Isoldé’s willpower to concentrate enough to walk the white track. It felt like being in a dream but it was not, this was reality. The sound of the waves below assured her of that.

Tristan could not come unless she fetched him. She knew that now. When Tristan had come at Caergollo, at the cottage, it had been her own sending that had drawn him to her. She was the power that called. He had lost his power to call along with the soul-part he had abandoned when he chose to die without talking with his muses, with the woodfolk, with Gideon, Rhiannon, everyone who would be affected by his choice to die. She knew she had to call that soul part back.

Was suicide wrong? Her catholic past told her it was a sin, a terrible one that got you excommunicated so you could never go to heaven. Was that right? Did the Old Way agree with that? It didn’t feel so, that paternalistic, autocratic way felt all wrong, yet the whole of this trouble had come about because Tristan had, of his own choice, died too soon and without asking for help from any of the magic folk he’d always worked with. Mark had told her how painful it had been to know that he’d never see Tristan again once he’d gone off on the Japanese tour. But Tristan had not talked about it with Gideon or any of the others.

That was the problem.

Isoldé could get a feel of how Tristan must have felt, the effects of the disease closing in on him, restricting his life. Mrs P had described how difficult it was for him to eat, how his eyelids stuck together every morning so it took ages and chemicals to free them up so he could see, how thin he was, how he could
keep very little food down, how even writing music became a difficult chore. No, he wouldn’t want to live when life became that difficult.

But his life was also part of the life of Caergollo, and of the songs. He’d promised the woodfolk he would write this last cycle, and she now knew just how important that was, but he’d given up, gone, died, before he’d finished it.

Tristan and Isoldé …the old story came into her mind.

‘We three are like that, in a way,’ she thought. ‘We’ve got all the right names but we’re not quite like the characters in the story. There, Mark was king and I was his wife but I loved Tristan because we’d drunk the wedding cup by accident on the boat over from Ireland. We then spent the rest of our lives trying to fool Mark and be together, and ended up dead with roses growing on each of our graves and twining with each other.’

Isoldé snorted derisively, she wasn’t that sort of person now, even if she had been in a past life or something. Now she was quite decisive and wanted to be in control of her own life.

‘Which is part of the problem with this caper,’ she muttered. ‘I’m not in control, I’m having to do things I don’t altogether want to do. Things Tristan should have done but gave up on.’

Back to the suicide question again. Could you commit suicide and it not be a sin?

‘It depends how far along the path you are,’ said a voice in her head.

‘Olwen …?’ Isoldé had really hoped she would be there to help but she was still walking the moonpath on her own. There was no more response, she was still alone.

She thought about what the voice had said. So …if you knew a bit about what you were doing, about the unseen worlds, the magic worlds that lived around you, you had a responsibility to them as well as yourself? Damn! That meant she had too.

A chuckle sounded in her head.

‘OK! OK! I’ve got it!’ Isoldé muttered. ‘So …if Tristan had
come to you all, said how bad he was feeling, that he couldn’t cope, would you have helped? Could he have found a way to die and it all been all right, somehow the song getting finished?’

‘That is another world, another lifetime,’ came the reply, ‘not the one we are all now in. But if he had come to us, told us how he felt, we would have helped.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘No-one knows now. That time is gone, not here, not in this space-time continuum. We might have been able to support his body, or his mind, or both. We might have been able to find another, like you or even Mark, who could write the song. We don’t know now as all that is gone. Those threads, those paths, are not available here. They might have been if he had come to us.’

‘But he didn’t …’ Isoldé said.

‘No …he didn’t,’ replied the voice in her head.

‘And that’s it, isn’t it? Once you work with Otherworld, like I am now with you, you can’t neglect them or leave them out of your calculations. Tristan should have involved you all, his companions, co-workers, in his need to die, not just gone off and done it as though it didn’t have any consequences for you all.’

‘That’s right,’ the voice agreed. ‘Once you work consciously with us then everything you do has an effect.’

‘What about if you don’t know?’ Isoldé asked.

‘Then we clean up the mess after you, like one does with babies.’ The voice was quite acerbic now. ‘Most folk don’t know, don’t work consciously. If they truly are at that stage, unknowing, then there is no deep blame attached. There is a little, everyone has the ability to think if they want to use it rather than run away from it, but if they are still emotionally and spiritually children then the problems Tristan created are not going to happen. For a start, they couldn’t be working at such a complex level with us unless they knew what they were doing and did it consciously.’

‘What about the bad guys?’ Isoldé said. ‘Like the black magicians in Dennis Wheatley stories and suchlike?’

‘What do you think?’

Isoldé thought for a moment. ‘They’re conscious,’ she said. ‘They know what they’re doing and they’re also selfish, doing it for themselves, their own gains, to control …’ Her answer tailed off. ‘Oh …ah …umm …well, I’m a control freak, aren’t I?’

Another chuckle sounded in her head.

‘You at least know it,’ the voice said gently. ‘And although you may argue and curse, you know when something needs doing, like now, and you get on with it. Do you think you have the suicide thing more sorted in your head now?’ the voice finished.

She did. It was about consciousness …ha! So what wasn’t? It was about asking your friends and colleagues how your actions would affect them. Just like having good relations with your friends in the everyday world. You didn’t tread on your friends, you tried not to do things that would mess them up, hurt them, so you behaved as well as that with Otherworld too. Tristan had forgotten that, not consulted anyone but just gone off and committed suicide without finding out if there was another way or how it would affect everything. And that had resulted in him losing a part of his soul, the part that could make the Moon Song, and so not actually even being able to die properly. He was in limbo now, nowhere, going nowhere, unable to go forward or back without help. That was why she was walking the moonpath now, to bring him back to earth so things could be put right and the song brought to birth.

As she realised this, Isoldé found herself coming to the end of the moonpath. She smiled to herself, that too was part of the journey she knew, her own understanding of what had happened, what was happening and her own part in it. She understood now that she could only have reached the end of the moonpath when she reached that understanding in her mind.

‘I had to walk until I’d found the answer to my question,’ she
said.

‘Yes, you did,’ replied the voice in her head.

At last, and it felt like lifetimes since she had left Mark and begun the journey, Isoldé found herself at the end of the moonpath, standing on the shore of white and black pebbles. They crunched softly underfoot as she crossed the beach to walk the moonlit path between the high waving grasses. The seedheads shimmered in the light and bright flowers glowed like miniature lanterns. It was the monochrome landscape again of white and silver backed by deep, impenetrable shadow. Suddenly, she began to run, came to an abrupt halt at the edge of the grove. The path opened up into a glade ringed by silver birches. He wasn’t there.

She would have to call him. She’d always known that was how it would be but had kept that knowledge shoved to the back of her mind, hoping it wouldn’t be like that, that everything would go smoothly, Tristan would be there, waiting for her, willing to come, knowing what he was about.

‘Fat chance!’ she muttered now. But how could he be? He was missing bits of himself, didn’t really know what was going on, what he’d done or anything much about it. Isoldé sighed and walked into the grove.

‘How do I call him?’ she asked out loud, hoping someone might reply. No-one did.

‘Tristan …Tristan …?’

At first nothing happened, then a rustle sounded in the undergrowth opposite and a figure wound its way through the trees towards her. It was Tristan. He emerged to stand looking everywhere but at her. His gangly figure was still clad in the same light slacks, jacket, open shirt and bandana in which he’d appeared at the edge of the lawn at Caergollo. This time he looked far less self-assured than he had then. Eventually he looked at her, saw her and, like that time, waved to her.

This time Isoldé did not wave back but walked across the grove to meet him.

He came towards her. Isoldé halted. ‘Which of us is the ghost?’ she wondered.

‘Isoldé?’ Tristan whispered. ‘You’ve come to me?’

‘I’ve come to fetch you home,’ she replied. Her voice was dull, monochrome, like the landscape. Now he was actually here she felt none of the fever that had been there last time she had met him in the grove. Just a dull ache in her heart. This was an ending, not a beginning.

He held out his arms, obviously wanting to hold her, kiss her, but she didn’t want that, indeed she wondered if she ever would again. Something deep within her stirred at being close to him; it was the soul-part; it knew it was near birthing time and that birthing couldn’t happen here or the song would be bound forever in the Land of the Dead.

Tristan’s arms dropped and his face fell. ‘I …’ he began. ‘I’ve wanted you for so very long, since I first met you all those years ago at the master class. I thought …seeing you here …you’d come to be with me.’ He stood before her, arms hanging down at his sides, his tall, gangly body looming over her like a schoolboy.

‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘But we have a job to do. Remember?’

‘I remember only you.’ His voice was husky now, eyes hot, he was remembering their passion.

Abruptly, Isoldé was angry and her frustration got the better of her. How could he be so stupid? The thoughtless suicide, not bothering to ask for help from all of Otherworld, all the folk he’d worked with all his life, had left her …them both, and Mark too …with a difficult job to do. Knowing that though didn’t help lessen the frustration she felt at his gormless expression, hot, husky voice and the sex that oozed from him.

‘Gods damnit!’ she swore to herself, his brain functions had atrophied. Although the passion had been incredible, wonderful, the most stirring thing she had ever experienced, it had
completely lost its power over her now. She had a job to do. So did he, if he’d ever wake up to it. She wanted to slap him. Didn’t he know the passion had been for a purpose, to engender the song, the song he had died before he had finished writing?

He continued to stand there, looking at her like a lovelorn sheep, as though he had no idea beyond his personal needs of why she was here, why she had made that incredible crossing to find him.

She moved a little away from him. His eyes followed her. ‘Tristan, we have to go back. Now. While the moonpath is still there. You have to come with me. We have to birth the song in the everyday world. You have to enchant the moon there, sing her into life. Do you understand at all?’

Tristan stood, staring, his eyes soft and roving all over her.

‘Do you understand?’ Isoldé repeated.

Tristan took her hand. Isoldé half wanted to pull away but didn’t. His touch was electric, it began to turn her on. A pulsing began in the soft flesh between her legs, rippled up through her body, making her want Tristan inside her, pushing, the rhythm of sex ripping through her. She shuddered with it, pulled her hand away as the tide of ecstasy climbed through her body.

‘No! That’s not what I’m here for!’ she cried out, turning away. ‘Don’t you understand? We have a job to do. The song …’

She was almost pleading with him now. His expression was confused, half sulky, that of a frustrated man who’s just been refused. Damn him, Isoldé thought. Why can’t he remember? Isoldé found a log to sit on, another one was nearby but not close enough for Tristan to easily touch her. ‘Come and sit down.’ Isoldé’s voice was calmer now, colder, matter of fact.

Tristan came, sat down. He reacted immediately to her voice, like a well-trained dog.

‘Tristan, we have to go back over the moonpath …’ she waited, watched, did he know what she was saying?

‘We have to go back over the moonpath,’ she repeated. ‘Both
of us. You and me. We have to go back, back to Caergollo.’ That got a response, the name, his home, she could see the connections firing. ‘Will you come with me? Back to Caergollo?’ she said again.

‘I’d go with you to hell and back,’ Tristan told her.

She gave a half-smile. ‘We don’t need to go that far,’ she replied. ‘Caergollo will do fine. Will you come?’