Authors: Elen Sentier
‘I sensed something. Then Embar got it too, bottled up and sprang round to face up the path, staying close to me like he was trying to guard me. At first it just looked like flickering lights then the lights took on form, like the folk Arthur Rackham drew, all pointy faces and ears, thin, spindly, beautiful. Except they felt like predators. Embar backed right up against me, I could feel a sort of growly purr vibrating against my legs, like he didn’t want to threaten them but did want to tell them he’d stand up for me.’ Isoldé stroked the cat who still sat on the table beside her. He purred softly back. ‘Well, I tried to relax. There were a lot of them, all hanging in the trees around us, far too many to fight and, anyway, I didn’t know that fighting was what they wanted either.’ She began to giggle, Mark raised an eyebrow. ‘I came out with the standard line in every old sci-fi-movie, “We come in peace”, well the second standard line I suppose. The first is “Take me to your leader” isn’t it?’
Mark managed a chuckle himself. ‘Yeah, I suppose it is.’ He stroked her fingers across the table.
‘At least they looked beautiful, not like those Roswell things from the X-Files. Nor Richard Dadd’s faer folk, they always seem a bit weird too. Whatever, one of them slid down a branch and landed at our feet. It was so fast we both jumped and Embar hissed but shut himself up again. Some of them now looked more like Fitzgerald’s half beast-creatures, especially the one that
had landed in front of us. I crouched down to get nearer eye-level with him and …do you know …the little thing got all sexy with me, wriggled his hips at me! It’s funny now, looking back, but I couldn’t raise a laugh at the time. I did manage a grin though, it sort of broke the ice. We got talking. I asked what I might be able to do for him.’
Mark broke in. ‘You didn’t promise anything?’
‘No, I do know better than that.’ She smiled at him, squeezed his fingers back. ‘The little creature’s voice was sort of like a soggy firework, hissing and spitting, rolling his “rrs”. He told me he, they, could help me. I asked what that would cost. We had a bit of argy-bargy then, he was sort of testing me, anyway, we got through that and began to talk sense. They want Tristan’s songs, like Gideon said, particularly the Moon Song.’
Isoldé crumbled bread into the last of her soup and ate it.
‘Do you know anything about ley lines, energy lines?’ she asked Mark.
‘A bit. Tristan knew a lot, taught me to dowse. I can find them and I know where there’s lines hereabouts.’
‘Well, the little demon-creature drew me a pattern.’ She dipped her finger in her coffee and drew the pattern in wet lines on the beech table. Mark got the pad and pen from beside the kitchen phone.
‘Thanks.’ She smiled at him, redrew the pattern, the six-armed cross.
‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘I know that. Not exactly ley lines, it’s the pattern of everything or so Tristan always said.’
‘That’s what the demon said too. He said each of the seven songs that I’ve found go with each of the points of the star, with Earth, this world, Middle Earth at the centre. Then the Moon’s Song goes over all, directing the whole.’
Mark thought about that. ‘Yes, that makes sense, I think. Like the moon directs the tides and the water within our bodies and the flow of sap in the plants. And loads more things too
according to Tristan. He was well up in all that. I know a bit but it wasn’t my thing. Has it got to become that now, for both of us?’
‘I don’t know that we need masses of knowledge,’ Isoldé said. ‘Just to know how important the moon is may be enough. What they need, so the demon impressed on me, is the song. That will do the trick without having to have all the academic-style knowledge.’
‘Mmm …I sometimes wonder if we humans aren’t natural head-cases,’ Mark said with a chuckle. ‘We spend lifetimes talking
about
things and very little time actually doing them.’
‘You’ve got a point,’ Isoldé agreed. ‘You and I seem to be more doers than talkers, at least in this field. Darshan was a bit of a head-case, always off on courses, could talk the hind legs of whole beach-fulls of donkeys on spiritual stuff, probably bore for England on the subject. I think that’s why I never got into it while I was with him. Uncle Brian was a doer too. I used to love going out with him, even though my teenage self got a bit rebellious later, wanting boys and “reality” rather than magic.’
‘I expect we all mostly go through that,’ Mark said.
‘Anyway,’ Isoldé got back to the story, ‘the demon impressed on me that they, we, everything, needs this song. He said “We need her to direct the flow. She enchants us. She sings us into life,” meaning the moon. And that I must find the song that enchants. In fact he even said “please” at that point.’
‘Does he know where it is?’ Mark asked.
‘So he says …’
‘But what …?’
‘It’s in Tristan’s mind and I must tap that mind to find it.
‘And just how do we go about doing that?’
‘Precisely what I asked,’ Isoldé said. ‘The demon said he could show me and that brought us back to the price again.’
‘So …what is the price?’ Mark still had hold of her fingers, his own tightened on them.
‘It seems the demon doesn’t know.’
‘Oh shit!’ Mark exploded, letting go of her hand. ‘What’s the use of a bloody demon if he doesn’t have all the answers?’
That made Isoldé laugh. ‘I think, you know, that while they’re different from us, can do things we can’t, it’s like Gideon said, they can’t do everything nor are they omniscient.’
‘Damn it! Yeah! I know you’re right. I’d just rather it was like in the simplistic Victorian stories, where they do know everything and sort it all out for us.’
‘No you don’t, you don’t really want that. You’re not that dumb!’
They sat across the table from each other grinning. She took both his hands and held them. ‘There’s us,’ she said. ‘Us! We’re together. We have each other. They can’t take that away.’
Mark’s face clouded over. ‘Can’t they …?’ he said.
That put a chill up Isoldé’s spine. Was that the price? She wouldn’t pay it. No! She wouldn’t pay that. She got a grip on herself again, shook Mark’s hands, bringing him back to her.
‘They told me they’d show me how to get the song,’ she went on, remembering now what the demon had said when she’d asked about Mark. She was not going to tell Mark that. And she’d renege on the deal if it looked likely they’d lose each other. She sent a mental message to the demon telling him just that. There was a spike of pain in her head, she flinched.
‘What?’ Mark gripped her hands again.
‘Nothing. Just a bit of headache. Not surprising really.’ She blinked, picked up the coffee cup, drank. ‘And they promised to help me. I agreed to look for the song,’ she told him. ‘Then they led me to the grove and there you were, thank the gods. Had you just arrived?’
‘I’d been there a while,’ he said. ‘I tried to come to you but I couldn’t get out of the grove. Every time I tried I seemed to come against some invisible barrier, my foot wouldn’t move, not until I turned back to the truck. I gave up. It felt as though something was happening out there, with you, but I couldn’t get to you.
Something didn’t want me to. Makes sense now. It was scary though, I was sat in the truck trying to work out what to do if you didn’t come soon. I’ve no idea how long that went on for. Time seemed to go weird. It felt like it was only a few moments, and the clock in the truck didn’t move much, but it also felt like ages.’
‘What time did you set out to get me, do you know?’
‘Around eight-thirty, just gone, I think.’
The both looked at the kitchen clock, it said a quarter to eleven.
‘I think it was ages,’ Isoldé said softly.
‘They can freak with time …’ Mark added.
‘Looks like it …’
Isoldé was still very shook up after her meeting with the fairy folk. Telling Mark about it had been both harder and easier than she’d expected. Getting going at all had been difficult but it got better as she got going.
‘I’ve seen them too, just occasionally,’ Mark told her, ‘especially in the grove up there. It’s special, you saw it, there’s a spring there, by the carved stone.’
Isoldé remembered. It was a little grove of ancient, twisted Scots pine trees, all low and bent with the wind that swept across the top of the hill direct from the Atlantic. They coiled and spiralled round to not even ten feet high in most cases, very different from the tall slender stems and wide flat branches she was used to. In the dark, at first, she hadn’t even been certain they were trees, they looked more like Tolkien’s Ents. Perhaps they were, she thought now. After last night, anything was possible. Now, here, in the daylight she wasn’t sure she wanted anything to be possible, had a strong feeling she just wanted to crawl back inside a nice, small box and not know about anything that wasn’t completely mundane. She sighed. Fat chance of that!
The carved stone was strange, a picture of it came into her
mind’s eye, sticking up out of the ground, looking like a flattened head, as she’d followed the faer folk down the path. Last night it had looked almost alive in the crazy half-light that came wherever the faer folk were, it was like they emitted the light themselves. There’d been no moonlight, heavy cloud filled the skies like a thick, black blanket, enclosing her in the world of the faer, claustrophobic almost.
‘Like a bubble in space-time,’ Mark had said when she told him how it had felt on the way back to Caergollo in the truck. Then, when they’d finally looked at the clock in the kitchen, it seemed that was true.
It had frightened her when he’d told her he couldn’t come any further, had had to stay there waiting for her.
‘I couldn’t go any further, I just had to stay there and wait,’ he told her again over breakfast. ‘I tried, tried to get to the cottage, but my feet wouldn’t move, not beyond the edge of the grove. It was like they were paralysed, I couldn’t even feel them. The waiting was terrible, not knowing.’
‘Didn’t you know?’ Isoldé asked him suddenly.
Mark stared at her for a moment, frowned. ‘Yes …’ he said. ‘I suppose I did.’ He thought about it some more. ‘It was like I knew you were there, coming. And, yes, I did, I knew the faer were with you. It made sense of me not being able to get to you. But part of me didn’t want it to be that, didn’t want to know. I wanted it to be ordinary, just a wet night and you not knowing the way home.’
Isoldé took his hand. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘This living in two worlds at once. I’m not used to it either, despite Uncle Brian. I used to go with him, learn the stuff, but it was all still a sort of game to me.’
‘This is no game,’ Mark said.
‘No …it’s not.’
Slowly, Isoldé followed the traffic out of Exeter airport and back round the A38 and A30 to the Moretonhampstead road. Mark would be in the hotel on the Isle St Louis as soon as she would be home to Caergollo, like as not. She wanted to go home over the moors, the way they had gone when she moved to Caergollo. Mark could call her on the mobile and, as long as she was on the tops, there’d be a signal.
‘This is a treat for me,’ he told her as they waited for his flight to be called. ‘Until now I’ve been on my own, driven myself up here, left the car in the car park and sat reading music magazines over a coffee all on my tod.’
They were sat together in the café enjoying coffee and Danish pastries. It felt odd to her, him going away and, at the same time, quite normal. She knew his calendar, the dates of performances, recordings, his life was mapped out for the coming two years. Oh, there was plenty of time at home too, and she wanted to go with him on some of the trips, in fact there was a semi-journalistic idea growing on the back burner of her mind about a series of articles on musicians, their travelling and international performances. She’d tried it out on Mickey over the phone, he’d thought it could be a runner, said he’d try it out on the features editor at the paper. But there was no way, as yet, she could be gone from Caergollo, with all that was happening between worlds there she wanted to get back. It would be the slow way, over the moors, today. Something there was calling to her.
‘I don’t think I’ll stop off at the bookshop,’ she told Mark as they finished their coffee. ‘Doesn’t feel right.’
‘What about Darshan?’
‘I’ll text him, he’ll understand. Say I need to get on, get home.’
‘Do you?’ Mark eyed her, knowing her, he could tell there was something else.
Isoldé rolled her eyes and quirked a smile. ‘You know me too
darned well!’ She squeezed his fingers. ‘I think …I think I need to go back over Dartmoor, not decided yet. I’ll see where the car takes me. You can call me on the mobile when you get there.’
Mark sighed. ‘You’ll love the hotel …when I ever get you there. I think it’s on the site of the building Bacon lived in when he studied in mediaeval Paris.’
Isoldé laughed. ‘You’re an incurable romantic!’ she told him. ‘And you’re throwing out lures!’ He knew Bacon was another of her favourites.
‘I am so,’ he laughed back, mimicking her accent.
‘I’ll come, I will, but not now. There’s too much going on and my head feels full of mush about most anything else except that wretched song.’
‘Yeah, I know. I have to keep focused myself to do my concert and recording work. The song presses down on both of us.’
‘Good job you know what goes down then,’ Isoldé snorted. ‘I’ve got to learn my part.’
‘And everything that goes with it,’ Mark added.
Once through Moretonhampstead she was out on the moor and it opened up around her. She took the left at the top of the hill and went slowly along the narrow road until she saw the lay-by. She drove straight into it, the car jouncing a bit on a pothole, and stopped the car. Up to her left was the path Mark had told her about that led up to Grimspound. She locked the car and set off up the three steps and onto the track beside the brook that chuckled its way downhill.
Coming to the wall she looked up at the remains of the huge Bronze Age village. Mark had said the gate was up on the higher side, she could see it from down here and set off widdershins to go to it.
It was impressive, even after four thousand years. She tapped her foot on the stone, asking permission to enter. It felt like an invisible barrier disappeared. She set out across the wide
expanse. Scattered remains of round houses were to either side but she was heading for the best kept ruin, Mark said it was impressive and well worth sitting in to get a feel. As she got close she saw he was right. The entrance was curved, probably to keep out the wind, again she tapped the stone for permission to enter, felt a welcome and went in to stand looking round. A chill wind whipped up around her, catching her scarf and blowing it tight over her face. She felt herself begin to choke, grabbed at the silk and pulled it away, then she really did have a fright. All around her were a mass of little folk, again just like out of the Victorian fairy painters minds, and similar to the demon’s friends up above Caergollo. These didn’t look overly friendly and stood around her in a circle, grinning, their little sharp-pointed teeth shining white in the dull light under the purple cloud that had suddenly come up. Isoldé froze to the spot.