Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (59 page)

Kit looks at Grevil, Imbry at Ashes’ son. No pipe nor fiddle plays, but the blood's still beating fast between those two, like the tumbling of drums.

Irrevocable.

I will,
says the Fiddler.
Thou didst last. Turn and turn.

Two may ride on one horse,
says the Fool.
Do thou knock and I'll call.

Both at one,
the Fiddler says.

The staff seems to branch for them, a ride of thicket of one root; it woods them in a little O, a fetch of fall. Cloud walking. It is rooted, though it moves with them like lantern light, it dips and sways. The leaves forever fall.

My lady calls Morag.

Madam?

My glass.

For the eighth witch is telling: spin it finely as she can, Whin's thread is near done. She will play it out; but they will find her jugglery, her sleight. For naught.

The old surveilling crow unlocks the casket. Long since they've had sport.

A thunderclap.

All pause: as if the turning of the key has drawn it, or the tale has conjured.

Twice, before the echoes of the first have died.

Three times the herald beats his staff. Three times three times it echoes in the timeless dark and wakes the shadows.
Sun's in Ashes! Let us in.

In the abyss and labyrinth of Annis’ dreams, Whin lifts her head and laughs.
Guisers! By stithy, is they mad?

And all the souls screak and gibber, like a treeful of birds at a hawk.

Morag? Go. Harry this impudence.

She nills it, avid for the glass, the game. But at the hammering and cry, a something catches at her throat, it hooks her like a silver pin and pulls her thrashing to the door: no daemon now nor fury, but a monstrous little fish, blind, spiny, benthic; a fingerling of needle teeth, crushed small by self abyss. That pin is law: it hales her.

If they come as guisers, you must let them in.

Was there not a sea?
thinks Ashes.
Round my tower?
She remembers rummaging through chest on broken chest of sea-wrack, heaped and spilling; she remembers mourning for a congeries of books, sea-ruined. In her childhood was the sound and tale of storms.
I was islanded. I know that.
Here is dry. She's standing in a wilderness of air, unsouled. The voice has gone.

And there is nothingness beneath her feet. She reels.

Thou flittermouse, thou worm. ‘Tis nowhere here. Get on.

She feels the roundel of glass in her pocket, makeless now. It recollects her in its O.
I
do
it, so it is. I walk the sky.
She cannot sing her road, but she can riddle.
So: a sea but not of water? What, of time? Of tales?
She claps her hands once, softly; stamps.
Of travellers, of course.
As atomies of spirit, apprehension, will: thought travels where it will, through earth, air, fire, or imagined seas. It arrows on.

The warp is set; the shuttle flies, light swift, beyond the web.

They cross no threshold, but the dark is altered: not vertiginous but prisoning, the cellars of the sky. Out beyond on the nightfell, on the steep of heaven, blackness awes. This inner dark intimidates, it crushes: yet is but an anteroom, a lobby to annihilating dark, the womb of night within.

The crow lad sees a great stone hall where Corbet sits in judgment. At his side, as pale as ashes, crowned with bone, sits Marget, naked as a needle. Flaunting her, he coys her breast, he paddles in her plash with soulringed hands: his winter bride, his thrall.

Kit sees a crossroads on a darkling moor; he sees the gallows tree, sees Jack Daw swaggering with his gang of whores. There's one—O gods—there's one with shorn red hair. A clawed fist seizes on his heart; it drags it through his ribs. She turns, the witch-child in her tawdry finery, the fireship; she kills him at a glance, contemptuous. It mocks the pain it gives. Not Thea, no: her child and his. Their daughter.

Grevil sees his mother in her grave. He looks down on her, her bruised face and the flowers withering. She's empty, open like a coat for Ashes to put on.

But Imbry sees work to do. Her prentice piece. She slips away, as Brock has told her.
Steal it so.

Imbry eels her way through the maze of passages, all interwreathing, spur and spiral, like a cage of thorns. A net. She slips it, minnowing: that seine was spread for greater souls, for gods and heroes and high witches.

Keep ae hand ay to't wall,
said Brock: but Imbry knows where the godhead is, same as like fire, only cold. The awe is like a loathing, like an ecstasy: the wound and its cautery, the venom and its trance, as if unwillingly her soul is frenzied at a rape.

Nobbut Ashes,
she tells herself:
awd coat's what she is.
She's led blind Ashes. Washed her when she's pissed herself; dilled her when she's waked with ranting, rocking of herself and crying out,
There's one falls burning frae a mast. And which is thine?

No.
She mun keep her wits about her, like a needle, eye and end, and all follows. Mind her way:
in's ae thing, but out away's another.
Her blood sings in her heart to drown the terror, in a wordless lalling. No cradle song: but in the drub and driving of the tune, it's for the waulkers at the wool, the threshers in the barn. It sings the tumbling of the drums. Mouth music.

The way turns inward to the eye of Law. She feels the seawind of my lady's melancholy, and a few small drops—ah, not of rain. A sliding shiver and a knowingness. A spatter of souls. And she's in a mist of them, a firefog, a throng of ghosts that mingle through and through her, beading in her started hair, and sliding down her spine. Black spirits and white, red spirits and grey. Her milk-eyed mistress. Thrimni who was drowned; his sons. The windwife who had sold the charm. Life-starved, they mouth at her, athirst for what they cannot feel, that cannot warm them. They are thronging at her eyes, mouth, sex, to drink the tumbling of the blood. Cannot.

Crazy with fear, she flails the air and shouts,
Shog off, yer malleyshags. Ash black yer, will yer leave me go?

Desperately she fumbles for the comb to scatter them like lice; but feels it sleeking through her heartstrings, sleaving out her fear. It lulls her, lulls her, though the hand is bodiless, as no hand ever has or will.

Mam?

Illusory.

The child, the bride, the mother: shadows all, all air and malice.

Crying out, Kit catches at his nameless child to sain her, and she changes to a slithering snake, unfleshed.
Hold fast,
he thinks, bewildered: but it's gone in a shrug of silver, writhing burning through the rock like molten silver in a snowbank, lightning through a cloud. Quicksilver in its moving; in its venom, sublimate. His hand's unburnt. Daw and his drabs are punkfire, scattering like a kicked clump of puckfists, in a smoke of spores.

Thou's dead, thou crawsmeat. Draw.
The crow lad grips his sword and glowers. But the daemon and his thrall are mist: not of water but a fume that catches at the throat, that stops the breath. A bitterness.

The earth has closed about its hoard of bones.
Still dead,
thinks Grevil.
And will be and be forever. That is no illusion.

Gone.

All but the maker of the interludes: she slipped the lock; now bars the way. A daemon, bloody to the shoulder, soberclad: white apron and black cap. A crow-faced malignancy. Morag: Kit remembers her. But sees her now unswaddled of illusion; sees her nakedly. She is atrocity. Had love so muddled him, that fool he was, so mittened up his wits, that he could see this harpy as a servingwoman, this hell as a castle? He drinks lye to look on her. He sees again her kitchen, heaped with game; sees her squatting with a hare to gut, that never was a hare. The clawed hands forage in the blue meagre flesh.

...in a vixen's belly, in a babby—and they's woe to snatch, worse than honey...?

Here is Law.

Noll touches Kit's sleeve, questioning.

"Her servant. She that held the knife,” says Kit; then looking round, appalled, “Imbry?"

"Stalkin brats,” says the lad and hunches doubtfully. “She'd not be held."

Grevil gapes.
Children? Here? In this—?
Then he sees Kit's face. His child. He takes his cousin's shaking arm, and it is wrenched from him.

The old crow says, “Your suit?"

The Fiddler bows. That mask at least can move and speak: though in it, Kit is curled and howling. “Tell your mistress that we bring the Sun.” The guising looks at her. “And take what belongs to it. The living are not hers."

"Thy whore is dead,” says Morag. “Eaten and shat."

All his soul and body rises to a shriek; but his will wears the mask: “I know. I would have my daughter."

"As she is?” The pebble eyes evade him.

The crow lad has half drawn; Grevil's hand restrains him.

"Even as she is."

"As you have bidden, so you must play it out. So Law is kept."

"And your mistress?"

"Will attend no gallantry; but after she will see you paid.” Hands folded in her apron. “You will wish for that easy death you slipped: merely to be eaten, soul and flesh."

By now the hall is full of spirits, crowding in, still crowding: lap on overlap like water, fall on fall. If leaves then ill-intended, scrabbling at their faces, avid of their senses, hating them. If water then a blood-dimmed tide.

The Fiddler turns to his fellows. “Now, my brave boys. Once through and away.” He takes the staff and it sinews him: he's furled of sunlight, rooted in unsullied earth; he's lapped with bright water, leaving into air. A breath. Another. “Now."

Overturning the staff for a besom, now the Fiddler's the Moon. Light from her imagined lenses glances all about, it dances in death's rafters like a cloud of fireflies. Like Cloud. And she dances too, slow-sweeping round her fellows, driving back the drift of souls, the shadows. Where she sweeps is hallows. Where her sister's not, she is.

The Fool bustles on, like a scarecrow to the stake. But in the players’ space, Noll halts. He's overwhelmed. His terror shakes him, even to sickness, and his tongue is dry. Like a shamed child, he's pissed himself. Confusion: what his legs know is a bow. So much: and nothing more. Not his name, his sex, his kind. If he speaks, he will whimper.

The Old Moon brisks round him officiously, brushing at his legs as if she would sweep him up and out. And at the touch of twigs, he feels Tom o Cloud like sunlight on his face, like leaves and light through leaves. And every leaf a word, a page, a story of the world: no tongue he cannot read.
Speak, lady. ‘Tis your cue.

The play begins.

The one is left: my lady's daughter that were Ashes. Kit's lass, that went with child afore she'd bled, and could not bear it for her mother's spell. Old story, that is, but turns out mostly otherwise. If they still lived, the guisers out beyond—poor gaudy fools, cold hail they'd get from Morag and her huntsman—would be telling it.
O Mistress, she will die of her bellyful.
In the guising, the Old Moon saw to that. Undid, and let her lighten of her bairn. A Sun, and every year a Sun in Cloud: but under Law, a lass. And she'll not rise again to dance. Fordone and no undoing her. And yet, thinks Whin, her death's still fiercely brooded, like a living thing. But why?

Or cam'st thou for my daughter's braid?
My lady's told her what she fears, forbidding her, and fear's both lock and key: as Brock's own journeyman Whin knows. So the braid's what binds her to herself, the virgin to the rock? There are laws to the godgame.
Stone breaks scissors, scissors cut braid
... No knife. They took that first of all: as if mere smithy craft could scathe their woundless immortality. She did wonder at that. Small chance of thievery without a blade.

Unbraid it? She's tried. This will not sleave with singing. Even but a thought of it runs fire through her nerves; a touch would burn her hand to bone and cinders. Wake the dragon: who would blast, annihilating.

And yet while Annis slept, Whin's wound a coil of hair about my lady's wrist, herself in self involving. Night and fire mingled, bone and blood.

Can't tell her daughter from herself.

Time's past. And having glutted on the guisers, Morag will return, and there's an end on it. While then, Whin tells. Her voice is giving out, a husk and gravelling; her thread is done. Nothing for it but go on.

What is your nine O? Green goes the Ashes O...?

She plays as the guisers do, for the sun returning: for time.

He is Leapfire, lord of summer.

Up and down his golden shadow strides the field and rants.

The place is anywhere. The mind, avoiding nullity, will have it
here
: a field, an empty ring of stones, scant snow. It will have illusion; or it mads. All here is emptiness; all but the scythe blade rusting in the fallows, rootbound: that is real. The Road's end. Otherwise is blackness bleeding through imagined frost, a cat ice on abyss. They walk on rime.

But Leapfire—ah, he's glorious, the Fool thinks: like a fire, where he is, is center, and he curves a world about him. As he strides, bright flaws of fire seem to break from him, stream upward like a comet's hair. He flames amazement.

The Sun cries out his challenge in the Fiddler's silence:

And the Fool flings wide—no door. There is no outwardness, no hearth, no hallows in this world. Though even nought is bounded, this is limenless. Winter's where they stand, their everywhere: nought else.

Yet he summons it.
Walk in, awd Lightfast.