The Moonshawl: A Wraeththu Mythos Novel (6 page)

I managed a smile. ‘It’s quite
all right, and best we establish the boundaries before I waste any time, as you
said.’

‘Will you stay for dinner again
this evening?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s kind of
you. Saves me cooking!’ I realised that to refuse might have seemed churlish,
yet I couldn’t dispel the feeling of irritation, of being somehow
thwarted
.
First there was the unspoken assumption I was expected to perform hienama
duties, and now this – being somewhat shackled in what material I was permitted
to use. Still, no job of this kind would ever be straightforward. I must simply
toe the line, respect hara’s feelings, and make my work easier.

Some moments after this – and it felt like a rescue
in the rather taut atmosphere – Rinawne appeared at the library door. ‘I’m all
done,’ he announced. ‘Your tour guide awaits you.’

I bowed my head. ‘Thank you, tiahaar.
I’m ready to be amazed!’

Both Rinawne and Wyva laughed;
the atmosphere became relaxed.

As I’ve already mentioned, Meadow
Mynd wasn’t one of those grand mansions with huge sweeping staircases and airy
halls. The rooms were fairly modest in size, and the staircase of dark oak
unimposing. The house was full of nooks and crannies, odd little window seats
where somehar might curl up to read, narrow corridors leading only to bizarre
tiny rooms, such as the one containing an ornate lavatory covered in baroque
designs. There was a ‘gentleman’s Turkish bath room’, (a true remnant of olden
times), and the ante-room to it was full of riding boots and coats of cracked
leather, which looked as if they hadn’t been moved for hundreds of years. ‘Yes,
relics,’ Rinawne said rather mordantly, as he noticed me inspecting these
articles.

‘It’s like a museum,’ I said.

‘Exactly like a museum. Fusty
and smelly. If it was up to me, I’d throw out all the junk and air the whole
place, but it’s not up to me. I have a couple of rooms I was allowed to
redecorate when I came here, to be more to my taste, but it was made clear that
would be all I was allowed.’

‘Do the Wyvachi...
revere
objects
like these?’ I asked carefully.

 ‘It’s not that. They just won’t
throw anything away. Perhaps one of these pairs of rotting boots belonged to
great great great Uncle Bertie. Who knows, he might come back for them?’
Rinawne grinned.

‘And are there ghosts here?’

‘To be sure – if you’re open to
them. I’m not. I banish them from my thresholds. I prefer to live in the
present moment. You’re always asking about ghosts, aren’t you?’ He gave me rather
an arch look.

Beyond the boot room the
domestic quarters began: kitchens, pantries, laundries and so on. It didn’t
surprise me to find most of the appointments in these rooms to be antiques.

‘I quite approve of
this
old stuff,’ Rinawne said, affectionately touching one of the copper saucepans hanging
from a rail above the cooking range. ‘In kitchens, things can be old, because
they know the food better and how to make it delicious. Just doesn’t feel right
to me elsewhere. I like these rooms.’

In a smaller kitchen beyond the
main one, we came across three of the Mynd staff, who were sitting round a
circular table, plucking feathers from what appeared to be game birds and
gossiping together. They greeted Rinawne warmly, while awarding me wary
glances.

‘Dinner,’ Rinawne explained,
gesturing at the birds. ‘No doubt Wyva wrung their necks only an hour ago.’

‘Fresh,’ agreed one of the
kitchen hara. The tiniest feathers floated in the air and there was a smell of
blood.

Rinawne strolled around the
table, put his hands on the shoulders of the har who’d spoken. ‘This is our
head cook, Dillory, and these
scullions
here with him are Barly and
Fush. Yes, Fush. Ridiculous name.’

The young har in question
grimaced at Rinawne, but was clearly not offended.

‘Anyway, we are off and
onwards,’ Rinawne said to his staff. ‘Keep up your excellent work.’

He sailed out of the room and I
followed.

From there, we meandered back
into the warren of the main house, with its odd little rooms. The library was
the largest of them; the drawing room and dining room were next in size. There was
a hexagonal conservatory tacked on to the east wing of the house like a quartz
growth. There were sitting rooms with clocks where at one time female ancestors
might have sat with their embroidery or to read. Sunlight came dimly through
the mullioned windows, fighting with heavy drapes that lolled around the
frames. As well as the dining room there was a breakfast room facing east to bask
in the morning sun. Here, the round table was already set for the next day’s
breakfast. I wondered if, in fact, anyhar ate in there.

Perhaps Rinawne divined my
thoughts. ‘Wyva always has his breakfast here. Sometimes I join him. Sometimes the
rest of them do.’

I smiled at him. ‘I did wonder.
So much of this house seems like a display of the past, to be looked at, not
touched.’

Rinawne wandered to the window,
looked out upon a lawn that swept away to tall evergreens, including a monkey-puzzle
tree. The other species were unknown to me, obviously brought from far
countries in the distant past. ‘This is perhaps the most haunted room in the
house,’ Rinawne said. His voice was almost wistful.

‘Oh? Will you tell me the
story?’

He turned to me, shook his head.
‘I don’t know its history. All I know is that something haunts this room. I’m
quite sure it doesn’t appear to Wyva, because he comes here every day.’

‘And you think he wouldn’t if
he...
saw things
?’

Rinawne shrugged. ‘Well I
wouldn’t want some sulky ghost gawping at me while I was eating, would you?’

‘Have
you
seen it?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, the thing tried
it on with me at the first, but I wasn’t having any of it. Nothing can haunt
me. I sent it packing from my mind. I learned to do that from an early age.’

‘What did you see?’

He shrugged. ‘Just a vague shape
in the curtains, a hand reaching out. I spat at it and it went.’

‘That must have surprised Wyva.’

‘Nohar said a word. The whole
family was here that day too because I was new.’

‘Perhaps they were testing you.’

Again, Rinawne laughed. ‘Now
your imagination is running away with you. They must be used to what is in this
room, and each of them deals with it in a different way. I just used my way and
that was that.’

Rinawne was a frustrating
creature. He led me on into mysterious avenues and then pulled me out again
before anything could truly manifest.
That
was his way. Intrigue, then
debunk. I thought of a skittish young har brought to this house to forge some
alliance through chesna-bond with the Wyvachi. Unknown, somewhat wild,
unpredictable, he is taken to the haunted room. Clearly, he sees something and
spits at it. And the family say nothing, don’t react? It made no sense to me,
and I had no idea how much of that story was true. Perhaps none of it. Somewhat
annoyed, my feelings shouldered aside my common sense and a remark came out. ‘You
got me into trouble today.’

Rinawne frowned quizzically. ‘I
did? How?’

‘When Wyva came into the library
I mentioned the moonshawl story and that I was considering incorporating parts
of it into the yearly round.’

Rinawne uttered a derisory
sound. ‘Oh dear. I did try to... well,
warn
you. He didn’t welcome the
suggestion, I take it?’

‘I was told in no uncertain
terms to abandon that thread of work. Why is he so sensitive about it? It’s not
a gruesome story, nor does it show the family in a bad light. I’m surprised he
doesn’t want it included.’

‘The Wyvachi are
very
sensitive
about the past,’ Rinawne said. ‘Like a lot of tribes they have cupboards bulging
with skeletons from the early days. I bet your own tribe is no different. It’s
just that most tribes have forgotten such things now, have let them fade, as
they should. You won’t find that round here. The past still lives for hara in
these lands. In my opinion, your job should be to shift them forward from that,
so I agree with Wyva in this case. I’m really sorry. I only told you that story
because I thought you’d like to hear it. I just don’t think sometimes.’

‘But hara already use the legend
in their celebrations,’ I said, unwilling to let the subject drop. ‘You told me
so.’

He frowned. ‘This is part of the
problem. The Whitemanes use that field, not Wyvachi hara. It’s common land, but
Wyva isn’t happy about it.’

‘And you omitted to mention
that?’ I sighed. ‘What
is
it about the Whitemanes? How can I do this job
if information is withheld from me and I go blundering into areas that cause offence?
It would
help
to know.’

Rinawne put his head to one
side, inspected me for some moments. ‘Don’t get angry, Ysobi har Jesith. Was
but a small mistake. Ask Wyva about the Whitemanes. I don’t trust what might
come out of my mouth.’

‘So what you’re telling me is
that the job I’ve been commissioned to do is not for everyhar in Gwyllion, and
what I devise might clash with what other hara are doing?’

‘Speak with Wyva about it,’
Rinawne said. ‘He’s the one who wants this.’

I was beginning to understand
more clearly now why he did.

I didn’t want to stay for dinner and yearned for
time alone, but there was no polite way out of it for today. After the
breakfast room, Rinawne showed me no more of the house – the fascinating top
story with attics, for example – and conducted me back to the library. I sensed
a wall of frost between us, not a serious one, nor an unbreakable one, but
there nevertheless.

The day had so far disappointed
me in several ways. I resolved to concentrate on my work, write up some fairly
soft and hackneyed yearly round for the hara in the village, and be on my way.
But to where? For the first time, the thought struck me: I’d been in Gwyllion
for less than two days but already it felt more like home to me than Jesith.

I asked to return to the library
to work, and Rinawne said he would fetch me at dinnertime. Once seated at the
glossy old table that dominated one half of the room, I got out my notebook and
wrote up the incidents of the day. None of them would be of any use for my
work, but I wanted to remember the details clearly.

I remembered Rinawne telling me
in his story of the breakfast room ghost how he had seen an arm reaching out to
him. This reminded me of the seemingly blind ghost at the Pwll Siôl Lleuad .
Were the two connected? Rinawne had described the ghost as ‘sulky’, yet what
I’d seen at the pool was a terrified har who asked for help, who had uttered
the word ‘Wraeththu’ as if hara were either little known to him or he felt
separate from them, even though I was certain he was har himself. Did that
perhaps indicate some incident in the Wyvachi past where a newly-incepted har
had perished in this house or its estate under traumatic circumstances? The
ghost was not asking help of the Wyvachi, but of me. These ideas swam around my
head. I wondered whether I was jumping to conclusions, or simply fashioning a
fictional tale to my liking. At that stage, it was impossible to tell.

As the light began to fade in
the room and the gardens beyond the windows sank into twilight, I considered
the Whitemanes also. The Wyvachi clearly had no liking for this other family,
who perhaps considered themselves a separate tribe. But that didn’t make the
Whitemanes horrible hara; it merely spoke of a rift or a clash of interests. I
decided I would have to make their acquaintance and see for myself. But
tomorrow, I would start my work properly. I would begin with the season we were
now in – early summer – and work forward from there. While I was familiarising
myself with the landscape, I might as well make use of the season to help me
acclimatise.

The younger hara weren’t present at dinner; there
were only Rinawne and Wyva, Gen and myself. Cawr was out visiting friends with his
chesnari. Gen didn’t have a chesnari – no surprise to me. He was the archetypal
rakehellion brother from an old novel – setting hearts and bodies alight but
never there to watch the last burning embers fade to cold.

There was no more talk of local
stories, or even my work. Wyva spoke of running the estate, rambled fondly
about certain animals he owned, and bickered mildly with Gen who’d forgotten to
complete certain mundane tasks for him. Rinawne caught my eye once and winked.

During dessert, Gen asked me if
I’d like to visit the village with him the following evening. I saw no reason
to decline, although sensed a stiffening in Rinawne’s posture at the foot of
the table.

‘I can take you to some more
sites tomorrow,’ Rinawne said to me.

I was silent for a moment.
Tomorrow’s work was already decided upon. I didn’t want another day with
Rinawne, followed by further difficult to decline invitations to the Mynd. I
smiled at him. ‘Not tomorrow. I
must
write out my ideas for the first
part of my work. Perhaps later in the week?’ I didn’t want to get into the
habit of Rinawne leading me about every day.

Rinawne stared at me with quite
a hard expression. ‘As you wish.’

‘How about Agavesday?’

‘Fine.’

Clearly, it wasn’t fine.

I glanced at Wyva, wondering
what he might think of this exchange and its implications, but he was once
again talking with Gen about trivial matters. He was either rather stupid in
respect of Rinawne or simply didn’t care what his chesnari might get up to.  I
knew without the shade of a doubt that Rinawne intended at some point to pounce
on me. What I was rather confused about was that I didn’t find the idea totally
repellent.

Later, as I lay on my side in the darkness of my
tower bedroom, I thought of my chesnari and son, so far away. Did they miss me,
or had my absence healed over so that I was already a wound forgotten?
Restlessly, I turned onto my back, my left arm behind my head. I realised that
ever since I’d returned from Kyme, Zeph and Jass had been slipping away from
me, bit by bit, drawing away in spirit. I hadn’t really noticed, but now it
seemed obvious. I’d let them keep on drifting, or maybe it was me who’d
drifted. I remembered the day of my departure – Jass hurrying around the house
preparing to leave for work, making a cursory check of my luggage to ensure I’d
packed essentials. Then a brief farewell, his expression tight, but not sad. We
hadn’t even embraced. Zeph had come into the kitchen as I’d finished drinking
my breakfast coffee; long-limbed, lanky Zeph with his bewitching lazy smile –
which, incidentally, he rarely turned on me. ‘I hope it’s good for you in that
place,’ he’d said, but it was as if he was saying it to any har who might need
restoration. ‘Well, got to go. Goodbye.’ And that had been that.