Moon Song (28 page)

‘I’ll come with you …’ Tristan held out his hand.

Isoldé got up, took his hand to lead him to the meadow path down to the beach. He put an arm around her, swept her into his arms and pressed his lips on hers, his tongue in her mouth.

She pushed at him, turning her face trying to get away from him, the sexual feelings she’d had before were completely gone. ‘Let me go!’ she said as soon as her mouth was free. ‘Leave me alone. This is not the time for any of this.’

He let her go, stood, arms dangling, frowning.

‘Tristan! We have to go back to Caergollo. Now! Come with me.’

She took his hand again and led him towards the beach. This time he followed her meekly and there was no electricity in their touch. They crunched across the pebble beach to the water’s edge. The moonpath spun its way out across the sea before them.

‘Come along.’ Isoldé pulled at Tristan’s hand but he stood still. ‘Come on …’ She tried again, with the same response.

‘If I go over there, over the bridge, I may never see you again if I come back,’ he whispered.

‘And you may yet,’ she told him, not knowing if it was true. ‘But we have to go. You promised the woodfolk, you promised Rhiannon, you promised the Moon her song. And then you left …before you’d done it, before you’d written the song. You have to come back. You have to record it.’

She turned to look at him. His eyes were confused but less than before. He frowned then nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Come on,’ she said, pulling at his hand. ‘Walk!’ she admonished him. ‘Just walk.’

Tristan followed her onto the moonpath. They walked together along the shining road. She found herself counting each step as she put one foot in front of the other and gently pulled Tristan along behind her.

It was like being in a tunnel of bright darkness but there was light at the end of it.

Mark drove the truck up the steep, narrow lane that twisted its way from the road just up the hill from Caergollo’s gate to the top where the spring and the kieve were. And Tristan’s cottage. It was their back door, or so Tristan had called it. The spring was on a public footpath through the grove of stunted Scots pine that led out onto the moor above, a wild scrub-land where local farmers grazed hardy sheep. The moor was full of birds, especially skylarks. Foxes hunted there, an ancient badger family had made their den at the edge of the woods, probably since the last ice age. Mark had played up there as a boy, pretending to be a great hunter and magic man, remembering the old Rider Haggard tales Tristan had told him as bedtime stories when he’d first come to live at the house. Nightmare tales, many people might think of them, but he loved them, they were the basis for his solitary games.

‘Walking between worlds,’ he smiled to himself now at the memory.

Isoldé seemed to have caught something of his mood, she put her hand softly on his as he drove. There was a rapport between them, more even than had been before. It was strange how hearing about her tumultuous love-making with Tristan had changed their relationship and for the better. It was far deeper since she had told him, last night. And the fact that she had felt she could, had dared to, had done things he wouldn’t have dreamed of. They knew each other in ways most people never seemed to reach, the trust between them was complete.

Having Tristan in the back of what had been his own truck made Mark feel a bit strange. The whole enterprise was strange though. Tristan was dead. The body in the back might feel and seem alive but it wasn’t like his own body, nor Isoldé’s, Mark knew that. This was a ghost they were carrying, if a very physical seeming one. He wondered what would happen to the body Tristan was wearing once they’d done the soul retrieval. Assuming they could and it worked, he thought wryly. Neither of them had ever done such a thing before and there weren’t any worthwhile manuals that he knew of. How the devil would you write such a thing anyway, he asked himself. It wasn’t like mending the central heating. Perhaps Isoldé’s friend, Darshan, might know but Mark didn’t think Darshan had actually been faced with a situation like this, nor did he think the man had really done any soul retrieval himself either.

The hill levelled out and the truck stopped straining and struggling. Mark pulled into the widened turning circle not taking the truck to the grove this time. He could almost see the force-field-like aura at the edge of the sacred space. He parked, climbed out and went to help Tristan but he had already got the back door open and climbed out. He seemed perfectly fit. That was another oddity to Mark, he had expected Tristan still to be sick. He wasn’t, of course. The body he now wore was well and healthy, no signs of disease at all, it was like having the young Tristan that Mark had first known back again. No, what was sick now was the mind and the soul, not the body.

Mark helped Isoldé unload the couple of bags they’d brought with them from the back of the truck; she took Tristan’s old carpet bag with his magical stuff while he took the blankets, thermos and food. He led the way to the grove, Tristan trailed in the rear. Mark felt his friend was uncertain about this process although he had agreed to it. Whatever, Tristan did come. Mark put a rug down by the head-stone and Tristan went to sit on it. Mark sat on a log to one side, watching Isoldé work.

His mind drifted as he watched her sort through the magic stuff to find the knife and begin to invoke the circle. Tristan’s return had been very strange from his perspective. He’d been loath to let Isoldé cross the moonpath on her own to fetch the man back but she’d insisted and it was true he’d never done it himself.

‘I’ll have my hands full bringing Tristan over,’ she’d told him acerbically, ‘I don’t want you as a problem too.’

Mark hadn’t been able to argue with that although his macho self had wanted to. He hadn’t ever walked it and, as he saw the moonpath touch the stone step, his stomach fluttered. He might indeed make a fool of himself and be a nuisance to her, she was right. Rather gruffly, he had agreed to stay and watch his end of the path, wait for them, be there when she brought Tristan to middle earth again.

The waiting had been hard and he’d been forever panicking in case a front came up and occluded the moon so the path would disappear. Then, as time seemed to stretch out into forever, and his watch had apparently stuck at ten minutes past midnight, he’d panicked about how long she might have been gone, how long before she returned, whether they were somehow stuck in a time-warp. In fact, he’d panicked about just about everything.

She was right, he’d probably have been a completely useless wreck if he’d gone with her.

When he’d reached a point of complete despair, deciding he would never see her again, he had made out a speck of movement far out along the silver path. The movement had continued, come closer and gradually shown itself to be two figures, Isoldé and Tristan. They had seemed to float rather than be walking along the path, coming closer at an increasing rate until suddenly they were there. Isoldé came first, stepping down the steps, then turning to give Tristan her hand and lead him down onto the earth again. Mark had stood there dumbfounded. What greeting did you give to a ghost?

Tristan, too, was unsure of himself, recognising where he was but moving his feet as though he wasn’t certain how solid the ground beneath them was. And staring at Mark. After several moments Isoldé had put their hands together. The immediate sensation had been electric, then it had calmed down and Mark had put his arms around Tristan.

‘Welcome, brother,’ he’d said.

Tears had coursed down Tristan’s face, no words, just silent sobbing and tears. They had walked him back to where they’d left the truck, by the church. That had been a hassle too, Tristan had wanted to go in, see his organ again, in fact he’d been like a child revisiting a loved place all the way across the Stitches and was, still, all the way home in the truck. Once at Caergollo, Embar had rescued them. At sight of the cat Tristan had fallen on his knees and scooped him up, burying his face in the black fur. Embar had led Tristan outside to the summer house, there they’d lain down together and Tristan had slept out the day with Embar purring on guard beside him. That had been a relief, Mark and Isoldé had got something to eat for themselves then some sleep and then made plans of what to do. The previous day Mark had told Mrs P to take the day off, with no explanations other than that he wanted time alone with Isoldé. She had given them a cheeky look and gone, saying she would see them come Friday and hoped the place wouldn’t be in too much of a state by then and they did know how to work the dishwasher, didn’t they?

The head-stone grove by the cottage was such a familiar place for Tristan, that’s why they were bringing him there of course, he realised that. The Otherworld version of the grove was where Isoldé had first met him …his mind lingered there, in that past. Maybe the Otherworld version was the real place and this just a shadow of it, like Roger Zelazny’s lands were shadows of the real Amber, his central core world. Tristan realised his mind was wandering all over the shop, he brought it back to Mark and Isoldé. He’d seen how they were together, no real hope for him there, those two loved each other. Mark was collaborating with Isoldé on this soul retrieval they were going to do on him, helping her, not worrying about anything that had happened between her and himself.

‘I told him everything,’ she had said, watching Tristan’s face.

Tristan watched hers, he knew what she said was true. How could Mark not mind? That staggered him. His own memory of the lovemaking between himself and his brother’s wife – Tristan’s mouth curled sourly at the biblical phrase he’d used – was quite fresh and potent. If Isoldé had gone into details, and she had from the look on her face, then Mark’s current non-affectedness was beyond him.

‘If our situations were reversed, I would kill you,’ Tristan thought as he watched Mark unload stuff from the back of the truck.

His mind flitted again. Still the same truck, still going strong. ‘KBO!’ he muttered, the sour smile still on his mouth. ‘Keep buggering on.’ It was Churchill’s old phrase from the war years, WWII. When Tristan first heard it years back he’d been taken with it, used it himself, told it to Mark.

‘The truck keeps buggering on, and so do I. Buggering on to nowhere is what it feels like,’ Tristan told himself in his head. The past time, the few hours since he’d crossed the moonpath,
seemed like a limbo, a nothing-place, no time, nothing happening, in-between.

‘I suppose that’s why they want to try the soul-retrieval,’ he mused. ‘To take me somewhere, get me going somewhere, not just buggering on here between heaven and hell.’

‘I got that right,’ he thought. ‘I’m going nowhere to Christmas …’ Spike Milligan’s old song from the Goons swam through his brain. ‘Perhaps I’m as nuts as he was,’ Tristan muttered softly.

Tears came to his eyes. Love, human love, was something he could never share, never have for himself, had never had in his last lifetime, not the sort of love and sharing with another human being that Mark and Isoldé obviously had with each other. He’d felt the sense of oneness with the gods he’d worked with, with Rhiannon in particular. He’d recognised it in Mark years back when he’d first told of the organ god, the Pan-like figure he knew, whose back Mark said he rode upon when he was playing the organ really well. He remembered how Mark had first discovered this god while playing the Exeter cathedral organ. That was something Tristan could understand from his own knowing. But this power spinning and weaving between Isoldé and Mark was different and right outside Tristan’s ken. It frightened him.

He came back out of his musings. It had been like that all day since she’d brought him back, like riding a great swell, a wave that rose up under him and took him to the shore only to sink away from underneath him and slither back into the mass of the sea, dragging him back with it. So, at times, he was propelled into the world where Isoldé and Mark were, only to be pulled back out of it again, back into the ocean of dreams …where he lived in what was left of his mind.

‘Damn it all!’ Isoldé swore under her breath. Then she stopped. ‘I’m getting to swear an awful lot,’ she thought, ‘what’s going on? I know I swear but this is getting to be every second sentence.’

It was the out-of-control sensation that really got to her. Belfast and her Virgo moon, she decided, were both very strong in her. Belfast had been out of control all her childhood, you learned how to behave, how to look, how to not look, how to respond to each sort of person, all so that you stayed alive one more day. Especially when your mother had been killed because the IRA suspected her of collaboration and your father had run off to New York ostensibly to pull money for guns out of gullible Americans through NorAid. Coming to London, getting her degree there, her good job, her good life, had given her back her control, her power as she saw it. Now, it felt as though she was losing it to a bunch of fairies who had incredible powers over life and death.

She stood still, the sacred knife in her hand. She’d been about to invoke the circle but, looking down, she saw her hands were shaking. This was no way to go on. She’d not invoked a circle since she’d been with Uncle Brian but she could feel all the old knowing welling up again inside her, including the knowing that the mood you were in coloured it and all your workings. Bugger! She must get a grip, stop this fear and get to a sense of herself again.

She went to stand at the centre of the circle. The head-stone was there, Tristan sat beside it, but she took no notice of him. She could feel the glass-coffin-like aura around him that was keeping
him separate from her, from the grove, from the whole of Middleworld perhaps. There was a sense of “yes” in her head, the voice that spoke to her more and more often now.