Emerald Magic Read online

  The next night I was to go to sing and play at a pub in Kentish Town.Waking up, my throat was as sore and hoarse as if she, the old hag, had been strangling me in my sleep. Yet no sooner had I croaked into the phone and canceled my gig, than my throat was well, as if from the strongest antibiotic known to man.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  But she only opened the fridge door again, and spoke to the winter within, of ice and snows and berries and belling stags, and low sun and the lawless winds of the Cailleach Bheare, the winter goddess from the blue hills.

  I must pay her no heed. There was nothing to fear. Ignored, in the end she would leave me alone.

  ALL FRIDAY, all Saturday, there we were, we twain.

  Saturday afternoon I went out to the shops, and she went with me, hooking her loathsome, withered, iron-tough arm in mine. A tourist herself from another time, another country, another dimension, oh such pleasure she had among the market stalls, and in the supermarket. No one else either saw or heard her, but once or twice, when I forgot and spoke to her, as when I told her to leave the cabbages alone, then I got the funny looks the crazed receive.

  Perhaps that was it. Had I gone crazy?

  “Hoosh,” said she, “that is not your fate,my soul.”

  When we were coming back from the shopping, she dragging on my arm like a bundle of whisky-damp laundry, the next thing happened. In fact, it had happened before, and I knew it had and that it must, if not quite yet what it was.

  “Who are they?”

  “Who do you think,my soul?” said she.

  “The Faerie Folk?”

  “Hush, never call the Gentry that, keep a wise tongue in your head, so you must. But no, nor they are.”

  At which I must know, for what and who else was left then that they could be?

  They darted through the crowds, the three of them, silken-lithe and gorgeous. I recollected I had seen them before on the escalator, and today in the market, and taken them, as you would, for three Goth girls of unusual beauty. They were clothed in fringed black down to their ankles and to their little black boots, and on their hands were black gloves and bracelets of gold that might be Indian, and off their milk-pale faces, the black hair poured like three black rivers to black seas, and to the backs of their very knees. Unlike my old woman, these were not truly invisible. Some people did see them, and turn and look admiringly at them, but I doubt in that case anyone noted their sunglassless, kohl-ringed eyes, just as I never did till we were nearly at my door. For if any had—

  “Run—run, old lady—”

  So we ran, and she, bounding along at my side, the eldritch wretch, as if she staggered now on the limber springs of a kangaroo. Up the steps, in the door, away and away into the upper rooms of the flat. Door slammed and locked. From the window I squinted down. There they were still, out on the hot summer pavement of London’s Russell Park. Three beautiful young girls, loitering.

  Irish eyes—I said:Who, that doesn’t have them, can resist. Put in by a smutty finger, they call that smoky ring around the iris. Colum had it, and my mother did, and her father, too, and I. She had it, the Speir-Bhan—And they did, down there, the trio of Goth girls in black, who were not. For inside the smoky rings, the irises of their eyes were sulfur-smoking-red—the fleer-fire optics of foxes in a nightmare I had once as a child, about that fox-fur cape of my grandmother’s.

  Scathing eyes, cruel eyes, heartless, mindless, soulless eyes—no-pity eyes that would tear you up in joints and eat you blood-gravy hot—if they had no teeth to do the service for them instead. But they had teeth. They smiled them up at me from below.

  The Speir-Bhan brought me a cup of tea, strong,with gin in it. I’d never known a poet’s muse could make tea. I suppose they can, if they can haunt you to claim back a family bargain for the Fair Fey Folk, do anything they please.

  “WHAT ARE THEY?” I whispered. “What—what? Do you know?”

  City dusk had come down. The moon was up. It was one night off the full, and never till now had I remembered.

  I was lying down with my head in her lap, the Speir-Bhan. It was as if I had my mother with me again, and my grandmother as well. Though they had not been so exacting.

  She told me the story, and I listened, for outside on the pavement, under the rustling dusty English trees, they still idled, the three fox-vixens, with their rows of glinting teeth.

  The Speir-Bhan told me of two heroes, sons of the gods or the Fey Folk, and of how one sat harping on a hill, and the three devilish women came to hear. They were, by birth, the daughters of some sort of demon in a cave, but in those days, their shapeshifting was to a kind of wolf—a werewolf, no doubt—human, or passing for it all month, but not on the night of the full moon, when they would change their skins and prey on everything they could find that lived. It occurs to me now, that by Colum’s day, no wolves were left in Ireland, only foxes. And maybe the foxkind was angry with mankind, as wolfkind had been, seeing as how foxes were hunted by then instead, and made into coats and capes.

  Whatever it was, one hero harped, and he persuaded the demon-girls to put off their wolf-skins. And then they sat as human to hear him, one beside another, elbow to elbow, the story said.

  “No doubt they were fair to see,” sang my muse to me, “fair as three dark lilies on a stem. But no doubt of it either, between the long teeth of them was the rose-red blood of what they had slaughtered, and matted in their sloughen skins and raven locks, the bones of babies.”

  So while the women were tranced by the music, and songs that were so flattering to them, the second hero, standing below the hill, took his longest, sharpest spear, and slung it, as only heroes can.Up it flew, and passed in at the arm and shoulder of one girl, straight through her heart to the body and heart of the second, and through her into the third, body and heart, and came out at her neck. Then all three were there, spitted on the spear like three beads on a thread.

  Did I ask her why that had needed to be done while they were in human form? Was that the only sorcerously potent method to be sure of them—or had it been easier to kill a woman than a beast? I think I never asked. I have no answer.

  All I have is the story, which she then concluded. “After which, he took off their heads with his sword, he did.” So crooned my Speir-Bhan. She was uncivilized and cruel, too, of course—what could you expect of a muse? Yet not so bad as young girls who rip lambs and children apart with their fangs. The heroes had only done as they’d had to.

  “Then it’s a job for two strong men,” I said.

  “It’s a job for one that’s cunning,” said the Speir-Bhan. “But first there must be the song, or they will never stay.”

  “They’re out there on the street,” I snapped. “They’ve stayed.”

  “Sing to them, and you live. Without a song, they’ll tear you up the first.”

  “Or, I could stay in. Bolt the door.Wait till Monday—the waning moon.What then?”

  “They’ll always be there, patient. Till next full moon,” the old horror murmured, in that honey brogue I can’t speak at all. “And next after that next, and next for ever.” Not whisky on her breath—uisege beatha and flowering heather.

  “Why?”

  “You found Colum’s book.”

  “Hasn’t anyone ever read his bloody book before?”

  “You have,” said she, “eyes in your eyes.You see what others don’t. The curse of your kind it is. And your blessing.”

  We remained as we were, and the fat moon came up. It glided over the window. That was Saturday. Tomorrow the fat moon would be full.

  THAT SATURDAY NIGHT I SLEPT, but had no dreams. I had other experiences. The Speir-Bhan did me the great kindness of sleeping on the couch. Twice I got up. The first time it was about 4 A.M. Outside, down on the pavement, I couldn’t tell if they were there or not, among the tree shadows and the orange bluster of the streetlamp.

  Then, near sunrise, a noise—something—in the garden-yard behind the flats—and I got up again. I we
nt to the back windows now to see, and saw. S hapes . . . shapes in long sombre gowns, circling the single tree that grows there among the rough grass. A glimmer of bangles, spangle of eyes—oh as if their bracelets and their eyes together sprang right at me so I started back. The eyes were red, redder than the lamps over the wall. For a moment as I stood there on the floor, the memory of their red gaze locked with mine—it seemed to me my eyes were just the same, bloodred, like theirs.

  Minutes passed. I made myself creep back and look again. The dancing figures by the tree were merely someone’s washing, hanging on the makeshift line that now and then appears there, and the gleam of gold and red—some trick of my vision in the fugitive dark.

  It was like the dentist’s. You can only put up with it, put it off so long. Something has to be done once the thing’s gone wrong.

  WHEN I WAS A KID, I used to travel on the tube with my mother. She would hold my hand as I climbed laboriously on. I recollect journeys, and her wearing the French perfume she wore then, called Emeraude—Emerald. She told me stories on trains. They’re gone; she told me so many, just wisps and drifts of fantasy and idea left behind, which mold quite often the things that I create. In her teenage years, before there were teenagers, she’d written songs and sung them. She had a wonderful singing voice, I’ve heard, but I never heard it, for by the time I was born, somehow it had left her.

  To my embarrassment, I don’t even know if they have an underground system in Ireland. Surely they must? Lord help them if they do. Because it will pass, won’t it, through all the hollow hills, through all the supernatural caves—in and out of the Many-Colored Land, which is the Hereafter, or Faerie—or both.

  This time, the Speir-Bhan did not hang heavy on my arm. She walked unaided with a steadier and more sprightly middle-aged tread. She had become, too, more assimilated.Her hair was less knotted, and shiny. Like me, she had on jeans and a T-shirt, though she’d kept to her old boots and her long coat. There were earrings in her ears. They looked to me like polished diamonds, or,more likely, stars. Maybe, maybe. Her wardrobe was psychic, of course, and she could put on what she wanted.

  I carried my guitar in its case. I’m used to taking it on the tube. It’s alive, but I never need to buy a ticket for it, because no one else sees it’s alive—and so with the Speir-Bhan. We slipped through the robot barrier on my ticket like melted butter out of a crock. Then down the escalator, she and it and I, into the hollows under London.

  UNDER THE TUBE, around the tube, are Roman remains, ancient banqueting halls, plague-pits. I’ve never heard of fey things there, but naturally there are ghost stories. Like the castle then, Castle Sanvy, where Colum went that night, among the ghosts and Lordly Ones.

  We sat facing forward.

  After four or five stops—I wasn’t counting or looking—the lights flickered. The train halted. I glanced about. The carriage, apart from ourselves, was vacant. Then it was full of something else—clouds, I’d say, clouds on the underground. They tell you, she comes from the sky, a Speir-Bhan, Speir Bhean, Shpervan . . . her name means something like that, to do with beauty and the firmament—she is Heaven Sent.

  We three, she, it, I, were out in the tunnel next, soot-black and echoing with trains. And then the tunnel, too, was no more.

  I have said, I’ve never been in Ireland. I meant, never in the flesh, to visit the actual place.Where now I went, I believe, was the genetic Ireland in my blood and physical soul. There.

  WHETHER AT SUN’S RISE OR EVENING, by land or water, though I know I must die, thank God, I know not when . . .

  It was night.

  I was on a hill. The Speir-Bhan had vanished. She had said she would sit in the brain to inspire, as she must. So perhaps she did.

  This then must be how I imagine Ireland, or so I suppose. That is, the Ireland not only of its own past, but of its own eternity, behind the cities and the accumulating modern ways, the trains and graves and Euro currency.

  Over there, the cliff edge, not even a castle on it now, but the late-summer dash of the sea over and beyond. The sun was sinking to the ocean. The water was like wine. The land was green and everywhere rolled the woods of yew and oak and rowan and thorn. Hawks sailed away down the air inland. Bear moved like brown nuns through the thickets. It was very quiet. I could smell wild garlic, flowers, and apples.

  For myself, my clothes had altered in some incoherent way, but my guitar had not become a harp. I tuned it as I waited for the dark to begin, and the round moon to rise above the woods. As I waited for them to come running,with their barking shadows before them. I was lonely, but no longer afraid. Can I tell you why? No, I don’t know why it was.

  AFTER THE MOON CAME UP, I waited still. Then I began to play, just some chords and showy skitters over the strings. I knew they were coming when the guitar itself barked out in their vixen scream, the sound that puts the hair up on your head. Colum hadn’t known what it was, how the harp had done that. But I had guessed. It was calling them in, that was all. The way you sometimes say to the crowd, what tune will you have?

  I watched them run out of the woods. Not girls now, but three black beasts, too big for foxes, far too big, thick-furred, and neon-eyed.

  My hands played and the guitar played, and up the hill they sped.

  I could smell them. They didn’t smell of animals, even the feral sort, but of summer night, like grass and garlic and blooms, but also they reeked of uncooked meat and blood.

  They circled me, panting a little, their long, black tongues lying out, so the spit sometimes sparkled off them to the ground.

  Part of me thought, They are weighing it up, to see if they like the music well enough to sit down, or if they’ll prefer to kill me and have dinner.

  But the other part of me started my voice. I began to sing to them a melody I had made for them in my head.

  I’m used to awkward audiences. Noisy ones and restless ones, the chime of glasses and raucous laughter, to keeping on, weaving the spell if I can, and making the best of it if I can’t. But these creatures, they, too, in their own perverse way, had the blood of the green land. Presently they gave over their circling. They sat down before me in a row, closed their jaws, and watched, with their ears raised like radar bowls.What I sang them was this:

  Women veiled with hair, shaming the black of the raven’s wing, In your night-deep tresses dwell

  A murder of crows,

  That will madden with delight or envy

  Any, be they woman or man,

  Seeing you go by.

  So long and be-glamoring your streaming crowns,

  That glow like the blue-burning coals,

  And your faces set there like three white flames,

  And your eyes like sparks from the fire.

  This is your finest jewelry,

  These midnight ringlets,

  Which catch the moon herself in their chains,

  So she must serve you, shackled,

  Your slave indeed.

  No wonder then the crow

  Can prophesy to men.

  Since he lives in the starry heaven

  Of your veils of hair.

  It was Colum’s song, of course, or the song he had been given to please the Faerie woman at Sanvy, and which I had adapted for these three daughters of the dark, to flatter and cajole. As it seemed it did.

  When I ended the song, and only went on lightly playing little riffs and wanderings, they were still there on the hillside before me. But they were not elbow to elbow, nor human.

  Then I did what the first hero did. Over the music, I said to them softly, winningly, “Oh, how beautiful you are as foxes,my highnesses. But I know that, as human women, your beauty is beyond the beauty of the moon herself. Never forget, I saw you, even in your female mortal shape.” Then I paused, playing on, and said, musingly, “It occurs to me, as you exist mostly in your human form, you’d hear my songs to you better with your human ears.” Did I speak the Gaelic to them? I shall never know.

  The guitar c
ertainly would do anything I wanted. I could fashion things with it, things of light and air, that I had never been able to call up before, and never would again. My voice, too, which is good enough, was that night on the hill of Other-Ireland, the voice you hear sing only in your own head.

  Presently, as in the legend, they removed their skins.

  I have seen films, movies with computer effects that are miracles, but never did I see anything like that disrobing. Each of them, one by one, rose up on her hind limbs and drew off her fox-body, as a woman pulls off her dress. Off over their heads they drew the fox-skins, and laid them on the ground. Then they shook themselves and sat down once more, in their white complexions and mantles of ebony hair.

  Their eyes, I’ve said, were awful either way, but now I got used to their eyes, as you can, to anything, yes, if you must, and even quite rapidly. And then, once I was used to their eyes, I learned the real atrocity of them. For these three were the most beautiful beings of any sex I have ever seen, yet there they sat, and I could clearly make out the piles of gnawed bones and the gouting blood, not caught in their hair or teeth, but snarled up in those eyes, mired and stuck deep, like poison, in their ruined astral insides. They were like lovely women riddled with some wasting death for which there is no cure. Except, they never could really die, they must, as now, always somehow eventually come back, and besides, who could, even for a century or so, kill them? They would never be done with this.And, just as I’d become accustomed to them, so they had become accustomed to themselves.

  Did that mean they liked it? No, for you do not have to learn to accept that which you love. It is a part of you, from the start.

  All these facts were there in their sulfurous eyes, like rot in apples. And like the apple skin, they mostly hid it, but only from themselves.