Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [29]
I carried my guitar in its case. I’m used to taking it on the tube. It’s alive, but I never need to buy a ticket for it, because no one else sees it’s alive—and so with the Speir-Bhan. We slipped through the robot barrier on my ticket like melted butter out of a crock. Then down the escalator, she and it and I, into the hollows under London.
UNDER THE TUBE, around the tube, are Roman remains, ancient banqueting halls, plague-pits. I’ve never heard of fey things there, but naturally there are ghost stories. Like the castle then, Castle Sanvy, where Colum went that night, among the ghosts and Lordly Ones.
We sat facing forward.
After four or five stops—I wasn’t counting or looking—the lights flickered. The train halted. I glanced about. The carriage, apart from ourselves, was vacant. Then it was full of something else—clouds, I’d say, clouds on the underground. They tell you, she comes from the sky, a Speir-Bhan, Speir Bhean, Shpervan . . . her name means something like that, to do with beauty and the firmament—she is Heaven Sent.
We three, she, it, I, were out in the tunnel next, soot-black and echoing with trains. And then the tunnel, too, was no more.
I have said, I’ve never been in Ireland. I meant, never in the flesh, to visit the actual place.Where now I went, I believe, was the genetic Ireland in my blood and physical soul. There.
WHETHER AT SUN’S RISE OR EVENING, by land or water, though I know I must die, thank God, I know not when . . .
It was night.
I was on a hill. The Speir-Bhan had vanished. She had said she would sit in the brain to inspire, as she must. So perhaps she did.
This then must be how I imagine Ireland, or so I suppose. That is, the Ireland not only of its own past, but of its own eternity, behind the cities and the accumulating modern ways, the trains and graves and Euro currency.
Over there, the cliff edge, not even a castle on it now, but the late-summer dash of the sea over and beyond. The sun was sinking to the ocean. The water was like wine. The land was green and everywhere rolled the woods of yew and oak and rowan and thorn. Hawks sailed away down the air inland. Bear moved like brown nuns through the thickets. It was very quiet. I could smell wild garlic, flowers, and apples.
For myself, my clothes had altered in some incoherent way, but my guitar had not become a harp. I tuned it as I waited for the dark to begin, and the round moon to rise above the woods. As I waited for them to come running,with their barking shadows before them. I was lonely, but no longer afraid. Can I tell you why? No, I don’t know why it was.
AFTER THE MOON CAME UP, I waited still. Then I began to play, just some chords and showy skitters over the strings. I knew they were coming when the guitar itself barked out in their vixen scream, the sound that puts the hair up on your head. Colum hadn’t known what it was, how the harp had done that. But I had guessed. It was calling them in, that was all. The way you sometimes say to the crowd, what tune will you have?
I watched them run out of the woods. Not girls now, but three black beasts, too big for foxes, far too big, thick-furred, and neon-eyed.
My hands played and the guitar played, and up the hill they sped.
I could smell them. They didn’t smell of animals, even the feral sort, but of summer night, like grass and garlic and blooms, but also they reeked of uncooked meat and blood.
They circled me, panting a little, their long, black tongues lying out, so the spit sometimes sparkled off them to the ground.
Part of me thought, They are weighing it up, to see if they like the music well enough to sit down, or if they’ll prefer to kill me and have dinner.
But the other part of me started my voice. I began to sing to them a melody I had made for them in my head.
I’m used to awkward audiences. Noisy ones and restless ones, the chime of glasses and raucous laughter, to keeping on, weaving