Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [27]
“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