Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (18 page)

See, where I am split, my belly seamed. A curved blade caught me; I was reft. Yet I do bear, I ripen, plum and stone. They hang, my sloes, world-dark as winter nights, abloom with souls. They fall and sunder, worm and root.

I stand among a grove of girls. A garland, woven all of Ashes.

Touch my bark and I am elsewhere, though my lyke is earthfast, here and now. Break wood and I will burn. Do you see me? Now and nowhere, turning nowhere, telling light. But I am not my tongues. I rise with my sisters, woven in our dancing, scarved in light. We are pleached in an endless knot, an alley, in a cloud of stars: a hey as white as hag.

All ways led upward: not a door would let her to the wicket gate, the garden, to the maze that she would solve. She'd brought the clew to measure it; had sopped her manchet in the drowsy wine to brave the dogs withal. A hard frost glittering on snow: she'd hoped to leave small trace. Thin shoes, no mantle. She had only what was hidden left to take: the key, the clew, the ring. Her ravaged cards. Nine burnt.

No door. And higher still. A window? Could she get a wren's-eye view of it? Could draw it then.
Thou mole,
she thought.
'Tis black of night.
Moondark, so my lady and her raven hunted souls, and thought she slept. How long until they came to wake her? Found her gone? Dread struck her like an ice-axe to the shattered heart.
Go on,
she said, in darkness. All among her shards.
Old mole. ‘Tis nowhere here. Get on.
Lightless, breathless with enormity, Margaret wound the stair.

She pushed through a last door, out onto the leads in snow.
O heavens.
Round she wheeled, within the greater wheel of stars.

The wood above.

That she had forfeited. Pasteboard and precious tawdry, turned celestial. All burning, unconsumed.

She'd never seen the stars at once; had learned them from her slit of window, from my lady's iron hoops, her brazen spheres. Her stones that hopped from perch to wire, dish to wire, like a cage of singing birds. But these were glorious: they flamed amazement in her eyes.

Giddy with the sky, she turned, until her breath had blinded her. Then she wiped her glazy spectacles, and stood and stargazed.

Knot by shining knot, she made them out—the Nine, the Hallows Tree, the Ship—yet wondered even in her wonderment.
But why a Ship? Why not a ladle or a swan? Why not bare stars, themselves? And why Nine Weaving? There are stars in clouds of stars, as if I breathed on frost. And which is the lost star of the Nine, amid so many?
She looked for the sisters, jumping edgewise in her slanted sight. Ah, she wished for those spectacles she'd found and left, that made the candle huge. They tangled in and out of focus, in a country dance, a hey. Five, a cloud of silver, three, four. Gone again.

And one bright planet threading through the maze. Like a knife round an apple, all askance. Or like a lantern through a labyrinth.
O yes.
Clasped hands flying to her lips: she bit them, so as not to cry out loud for joy. And ever after, when the Nine were named, she tasted rime on rough wool, and the oil of orange in her nails.
Yes.
The garden was the quickset stars. The key was errant: Perseis, and in her night house, at the wake of Souls. The Crowd of Bone. Those stars ascendant at her mother's birth.

She saw the way.

Down and round she ran, still downward with the falling spindle of the stairs, that twirled the heavens to a clew of light. That other chain, the necklace that she wore, broke loose in running, whirled and scattered on the steps. She left it as it fell. As later, in the time to come, she would outrun the world of her begetting, scatter it behind like leaves: her glass would crack my lady's heavens, would unstring the stars.

Margaret ran on.

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When a star falls, we do say:
the Nine are weaving. Look!
The Road's their skein, that endlong from the old moon's spindle is unreeled. Their swift's the sky.
O look!
says Margaret. The children of the house gaze up or glance. The namesakes.
Look thou, Will. Look, Whin. They stitch your daddy's coat.
The twins, still whirling in the meadow, seem as heedless as the light, as leaves. Now one and now the other one, they tumble down and down the slope, lie breathless in the summer grass.
His mantle's of the burning gold,
says Whin; and Will,
His steed is January. I'm to have his spurs.

Bright-lipped in her bower of meadow, imber-stained, small Annot gazes. She is like bright Annot fled; is like herself.
I've counted seven for the Ship. Like cherrystones. I've wished.

What Nine?
says Tom.

Why, sisters in a tower—see yon smutch of silver, where it rises? Back of Mally's Thorn?

He studies.
Aye. And stars in it. Like kitlins in a basket.

Their house. It is a nursery of worlds.

Is't far?
says Annot.
Can I walk there?

Not by candlelight,
says Margaret.
'Tis outwith all the heavens, sun and moon. I'll show thee in my glass.
But she is elsewhere now, remembering the Road beneath her, and the heavens that her glass undid. Remembering the Nine, the sisters at their loom of night.

And now, as once they ever did, they cast the shuttles, swift as memory, to and fro; they weave the green world and the other with a mingled skein. Leafgreen, light and dark, the lifeblood, and that other thread too quick for seeing. All that's fleeting is their weft: the wind in grass, the wavespell where it meets the rippling sand. Cloud shadow on the corn. They weave the spindrift and the wreathing snow, the whorl uprising in the fallen leaves, the spiring of the flame. Whatever's here and gone. Breath, body, and that
I
that wakes to dream—sleaved out, as light in rainbow ravels into air. What they do undoes.

But Ashes tells the warp. My lady's daughter—aye, herself that walked the longways out of winter—she, and all that wear her coat. Free maids, that weave their thread with bones.

We are storied in their web. Not held: our shadows, not our selves inwarped. We dance above it, like the light on water, like fireflies aslant the summer grass.

Grey-cloaked, the skein of sisters wind the stair. Nine lanterns halo them, now mingling, now distinct; and in and out, like dancers in a dance. Wicksilver. At the sill, the eldest turns and lifts her candle, beckoning. Light spills through her fingers, stills her face. She draws her hood to shadow it. Without a word she turns from earth and swings the sightless door. No stair. And yet they mount on a spiral of sky, as if the faultless air were crystalline, were cracked. One by one, still climbing into air, they—

Sisters?

Rose and faded.

Air.

Earthbound, Margaret stood amid a silent throng, cloaked grey as ashes, emberless. The dancers banished from the dance, the earthfast stars. They look still toward morning and can find no stair.

O sisters.

Cold as stone, as silent.

Margaret woke amid a circle of grey stones and saw the spring stars fading into morning. Last and fairest, rising at the hem of day, she saw bright Perseis amid the Nine, with sleighting Brock, all tangled with a wraith of moon. One glyph: a riddle beyond rede, a rune of light. The stars at her nativity, her second birth. It dazed and dangled, like a cobweb set with dew; like a snarl of stuff from a celestial workbox. Her clew.

She gazed until it drowned in light.

A bird spoke, sleepily. And only then, she saw the wide world tilted at her feet. She was standing at the twelve winds’ nave: the fellies of the wheel were hills. All round her, shade beyond shadow, dusk and blue, lay Cloud. Too great to compass: she had never been unwalled. She laid a hand, a cheek, against rough stone to steady herself.
O,
she thought giddily,
it is the sky below.
She knew the charted heavens as she did her A and O; she had no map for this bewildering earth, but turned about her for a bearing. All unskied. She saw—not one Road but an interlace, an eddering of light. A maze. She saw a wood unrooted, floating in a lake of sky, of blue beyond the rainbow's edge. She saw a spark of fire like a falling star: a harbinger, a brand.
The Sun is in the Thorn at Ninerise.
Sun? In turning, she had lost her north. No stars. But counter to her whorling sprang a pale of fires on the hills, a wheel of suns. Even as she swung about, their light was swallowed in a nothingness, a chill white mist. At once she was lank with it, spangled and amazed.

Behind she heard a clank and rattle, and a horned thing sprang away. Startled, she cried out and reeled from it. And now a stone had shifted, dwindling. Standing in her way, it crooked a knee to her, it spoke.

"My lady?"

Stone still. All about them, fires dying on the hills.

Before her stood a small crookshouldered person in a coat and breeches, all in deadleaf brown. He bowed to her as to the new moon, louting low; then raised his shining, streaming face, his hair in ratstails. He spoke again in the old tongue, haltingly.

"My lady?"

"No,” said Margaret, appalled. “No."

He flinched. He had a waning look, this apparition. “Lady, by this hand, if I offend you..."

Still as a candle, gathering her will to run; then startling. “That?"

A grey ghost blaring in the mist.

"Ah. That. A sheep: no fellow.” Still his bended knee to her. “Have you no company beside, no rade? No others of your folk?"

All about them, fires dying on the hills. A huddle of grey stones behind.

"They leave us,” he said softly. Then, “How came you from this hillside?"

Waking?
All behind her and before was cloud. They stood within a burr of morning, now and here. A bubble. “Oh...” Now she saw his broad hat wreathed in flowers, violets and wood anemones, as fair as any painted book. But real, as blood is real, or feathers.

Gently, warily, he took the garland and held it out to her. She made no move. He crowned her unbent head, so carefully she felt no touch but green. Stepped back and swept another bow. “I bid you good morrow, lady. Hallows with ye."

Caught with flowers,
she thought. Spellbound.

Turning to the quick of day, he spoke as to himself: “...his fury's in the fall of leaf. Then scatt'ring of his wits, poor Tom lies naked in the slough, and shakes against the frost and February of his desolation. Being wood, the spring's his ecstasy, o'erspilling dark. His dreams do prick him and he flowers."

A hill aside of them—O marvellous—a blade of sunlight glinted like a sword unsheathing, raised in accolade. It slashed the silver to a sleave of rainbow. Mantle and scarf. It struck a flowering tree to mist and dazzle. A wonder: a cloud full of thorn. The birds woke shouting with joy.

And it was all too much, too much. The air was full of voices clamoring, hail-sharp; the light, white-fiery, furious: a glare as of unbroken lightning or the blinding of unbodied snow. A dazzlement, a tempest—

Thea? Did you know all this?

And still he touched her not, and still she felt his garland like a crown of hail.

She stirred and shivered.

He did off his coat and held out it to her. “It strikes cold at first,” he said, in Cloudish now.
I thank you, no,
she said, with palm out-turned and bended knee; yet glanced at him, her hand against the doubtful sun, the water running down her face. They were of a kind, she saw—
like sister and like brother—
but his squirrel-red hair was faded. There were tufts of grey in it and squinches round his hazel eyes. “No place for a lass here alone.” He gestured at the circling smudge of fires, at the revels. “They do make green gowns."

They?

"That bring the summer in."

In memory, she turned a card, now lost: the Rainers. Grave but joyful came a band of nymphs, the deer-legged votaries of Annis, who leapt and clashed with long braids flying, dark and fiery and fair. Still children. Cold as April: moon-cold crescent girls. On a pole wound Maywise with ribands, they bore the loveliest of garlands: hoops fixed crosswise in an orb, wound with ivy, crowned with flowers, trailing tendrils like a thyrsus. In it hung a Lady made of grass, a rake of grass blades in her hand. Reaper to herself, the mower mown.

Just then the grass bowed and darkened in a flaw of wind; white petals fell. A cold bright rain drenched down and drifted on. Stunned and shivering, Margaret raised her eyes to watch its ragged skirts retreating, grey and gleam. As if the squall had rubbed away the tarnish of the night, the hills were green. They ran with silver: tumbling becks and falls.

A voice on the hill cried, like an ember falling. “Craw's hanged!"

And voices echoed, hallooing. “Craw's hanged!” The rout was coming now, by twos and threes, running down from the fellsides: toused and tangled, carrying great boughs of green. No silvery maids. Rough lads and rantipoles, a sort of vixens and a sloth of bears. “Hey's down!"

No cover.

"Back way,” said the stranger. Downward, sheer. The path was no more than a sheen on grass, a flaw like bruised velvet. She wondered he could tread so nimbly in this hail of light. Skidding and stumbling, she could manage her water-heavy skirts, no more. Fell, slathered to the knee and scraped, yet shying from his proffered hand; went on. The flaw became a runnel, the runnel a trod, deep-sunken in the hillside, set thwartwise with stones. On either side, a foam of flowers, wild and delicate and rank. Deep hedgerows. Thrawn trees, shock-headed, throwing roots across her path. At a stile, she looked back.
Oh.
It pierced her heart with green, this world. This spring. The stones were out of view, as vanished as the morning stars, the rainbow ravelled into cloud. That door, that bridge were gone.

Sheer morning. Now the drystone walls turned hedges, the trod to churned mud. They came through intakes to an onstead, barn and byres and a cross-winged hall. In the courtyard, at the studded door, she balked. Locks and keys again, another cell? In from all this ruthless beauty, into easeful dark?