Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [21]
He thought anyway, none of them would turn to see him. They were the Royal Folk, some band of them, and what they were doing out he didn’t know, for they had no business to be.He was not afraid. As he told me, if he had danced and drunk less, he might have been—but that was to come.
So he followed them up the road, and soon enough it turned in at a wood. There was no similar wood in the area that he recalled. The trees were great in girth, and thick and rich with leaves, and moon-washed. The road was now a track. They and he ambled along, and presently the track curved, as the road never had, and then they were climbing up and up, and where the tree line broke, Colum saw the fish-silver ocean fluting down below. They must all have covered seven miles by then, and done it in record time, for next up ahead he beheld the castle called Sanvy. But it was not a ruin that night, it was whole and huge, and pierced with golden lights like spears.
It was haunted, naturally, this castle. Every castle, crag, cot, and byre is haunted, it seems, along the Ghost Coast of Ireland. So Colum thought it was the ghosts who had tidied up and lit all the lamps, and he waited for some coach with headless horses, or running fellow with hell’s fire all over him, to come pelting down the track. But instead there came a walking woman, with a burning taper held high in her hand.
Ah, she was lovely. Slim and white, but colored in, not like the others, for her hair, which was yards long, was like combed barley, with stars in it and her eyes, he said, like the gas flame, blue and saffron together.
She let the Host pass her, bowing to some, and some in turn nodded to her. Then, when they had gone by and on toward the castle gate, her gas-flame eyes alighted on Colum.
Colum, well he bowed to the ground. He was limber enough and drunk enough to manage it.
She watched him. Then she spoke.
“Do you know me, Colum?”
“No, fair miss. But I see you know me.”
“I’ve known you, Colum, since you were in your cradle, kicking up your feet and sicking up your milk.”
Colum frowned. You did not like a pretty girl to remind you of that sort of thing.
But at his frowning, she laughed.
She came down the track and touched him on the neck. When she did so, it was the coldest—or hottest—as ice will burn and fire seem icy—touch he had ever felt. He paused, wondering if she’d killed him, but after a moment, he felt a strange sensation in his neck.
“It was as if an eye opened up there—as if something looked out of me, out of my throat.”
After that, he found he could speak to the woman on the track in another language, that he had never known, though perhaps he might dimly have heard it sometimes, among the tangle of the hills and valleys.
“What night is this, fair miss,” he said, “when the Folk are on the road?”
“Your night, Colum,” she said.
Then she turned and moved back toward the castle of Seanaibh Sanvy. And he realized, in that instant, what and who she was. She was a Speir-Bhan, his muse. So he ran after her as fast as he could. But, just before he raced in at the gate, he threw a coin away down the rocks into the sea, for luck, and since no others were left now save that water, and the moon, to watch his back.
Then he was in the gate, across a wide yard, and up among the lights.
WELL, HE WROTE this in his book—wrote it in years later, obviously, in another ink. It says: “I have seen a motion picture in color. An American gentleman showed me. It was like that, when I went in there.”
He said, coming in from the yard to the castle’s hall, it was as if a rainbow had exploded, and the sun come up out of the night without warning.
If there were a hundred candles burning, there were a thousand, nor did they resemble any candles he had ever seen before, but were stout, and tall like a child of three years. In color they were like lemon curd. And behind, torches blazed on the walls, and showed tapestries hanging down, scarlet,