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By Root 692 0

the spell if I can, and making the best of it if I can’t. But these creatures, they, too, in their own perverse way, had the blood of the green land. Presently they gave over their circling. They sat down before me in a row, closed their jaws, and watched, with their ears raised like radar bowls.What I sang them was this:

Women veiled with hair, shaming the black of the raven’s wing, In your night-deep tresses dwell

A murder of crows,

That will madden with delight or envy

Any, be they woman or man,

Seeing you go by.

So long and be-glamoring your streaming crowns,

That glow like the blue-burning coals,

And your faces set there like three white flames,

And your eyes like sparks from the fire.

This is your finest jewelry,

These midnight ringlets,

Which catch the moon herself in their chains,

So she must serve you, shackled,

Your slave indeed.

No wonder then the crow

Can prophesy to men.

Since he lives in the starry heaven

Of your veils of hair.

It was Colum’s song, of course, or the song he had been given to please the Faerie woman at Sanvy, and which I had adapted for these three daughters of the dark, to flatter and cajole. As it seemed it did.

When I ended the song, and only went on lightly playing little riffs and wanderings, they were still there on the hillside before me. But they were not elbow to elbow, nor human.

Then I did what the first hero did. Over the music, I said to them softly, winningly, “Oh, how beautiful you are as foxes,my highnesses. But I know that, as human women, your beauty is beyond the beauty of the moon herself. Never forget, I saw you, even in your female mortal shape.” Then I paused, playing on, and said, musingly, “It occurs to me, as you exist mostly in your human form, you’d hear my songs to you better with your human ears.” Did I speak the Gaelic to them? I shall never know.

The guitar certainly would do anything I wanted. I could fashion things with it, things of light and air, that I had never been able to call up before, and never would again. My voice, too, which is good enough, was that night on the hill of Other-Ireland, the voice you hear sing only in your own head.

Presently, as in the legend, they removed their skins.

I have seen films, movies with computer effects that are miracles, but never did I see anything like that disrobing. Each of them, one by one, rose up on her hind limbs and drew off her fox-body, as a woman pulls off her dress. Off over their heads they drew the fox-skins, and laid them on the ground. Then they shook themselves and sat down once more, in their white complexions and mantles of ebony hair.

Their eyes, I’ve said, were awful either way, but now I got used to their eyes, as you can, to anything, yes, if you must, and even quite rapidly. And then, once I was used to their eyes, I learned the real atrocity of them. For these three were the most beautiful beings of any sex I have ever seen, yet there they sat, and I could clearly make out the piles of gnawed bones and the gouting blood, not caught in their hair or teeth, but snarled up in those eyes, mired and stuck deep, like poison, in their ruined astral insides. They were like lovely women riddled with some wasting death for which there is no cure. Except, they never could really die, they must, as now, always somehow eventually come back, and besides, who could, even for a century or so, kill them? They would never be done with this.And, just as I’d become accustomed to them, so they had become accustomed to themselves.

Did that mean they liked it? No, for you do not have to learn to accept that which you love. It is a part of you, from the start.

All these facts were there in their sulfurous eyes, like rot in apples. And like the apple skin, they mostly hid it, but only from themselves.

I’d sung to flatter them, aiding and abetting their self-deceiving. To flatter them stupid, for perhaps that way, I’d thought, I might be able to strike some new bargain. I hoped some inspiration would come to me, trusting the music, and the muse in my head.

But