Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [37]
And then I forgot everything in the whirlwind that lifted me higher and higher through the roof, as the bar collapsed in fire as if an explosion had rocked the place.
The Irish would be blamed of course. Both sides. As they always are. As they always will be. I screamed with laughter as the whirlwind bore me home. If we did not have the Irish, we Fey would have to invent them.
The Hermit and the Sidhe
BY JUDITH TARR
Bloody hell,” said the hermit.
“Language,” Pegeen reproved him, slapping a dot of wool over the stinging wound and stropping the razor until it sent off sparks.
Pegeen was a wild Irish rose, with skin like milk and hair as black as an Englishman’s heart. Her round white arm was as strong as a blacksmith’s, and her will was forged steel.
She had arrived at the hermit’s tower that morning with his pail of stew and his loaf of bread and his jar of brown ale from her father’s cask, and informed him in no uncertain terms that she was making him fit for a mortal to look at. She had turned a deaf ear to his protests that a hermit should be wild and uncouth and unshorn, just as on previous visits she had scoured the old tower from top to bottom, and never mind the requirement that he live in sacred squalor.
“Squalor is the Devil’s province,” she had said.
Now she had determined to make him as presentable as his tower, and even his brief fall into the lower vernacular could not give her pause. She shaved him and clipped him and dressed him in a robe that mortified the memory of the old saints with its absolute cleanliness. It might have begun life as a woman’s Sunday gown, but judicious stitching, tucking, and patching had lent it a rather convincingly monastic air—except, of course, for its disastrous freedom from dirt, lice, and vermin.
The hermit’s own carefully constructed colony thereof, wrapped in threadbare wool and hanging limply from the end of a broomstick, was not even to die a noble death on the tower’s hearth. Pegeen burned it in the open air downwind of the tower, so that the wind carried the stench of it away. Then came the rain of heaven to scour the ashes. “And is that not living proof,” said Pegeen, “that the Lord has as keen a nose as any woman in Ballynasloe?”
“The Lord is pure spirit,” the hermit said as stoutly as he could manage, “and as such, He can have no—”
“If the Lord is a He,” said Pegeen,“then there is one part of a body that it seems He does have, and why not a nose, too, after all?”
With that snippet of appalling theology and an air of solid satisfaction, she put on her cloak and hood and gathered up her empty basket and forayed out into the rain. It was a soft day in Ireland, and a little soaking never hurt a body, as she had told him often before.
Long after the squelch and clatter of her brogues on mud and stone had died away, the hermit sat limply by the hearth. Pegeen’s presence was a great tax on his spirit. “And why,” he asked the air, “could I not have been sent a true and authentic angel to bring me my bread, and not that spawn of a publican and a harpy?”
Once that sentiment had escaped him, he crossed himself quickly and promised the Lord a dozen lashes on his bare back for thoughts unbecoming a man of God. Nor was pique his only sin; for there could be no denying that Pegeen was a glorious specimen of Irish womanhood.
He had come to this place, taking the white martyrdom, to escape just such a temptation. He had almost forgotten the beautiful Emme-line, with her plump white throat and her golden curls. Odes had been written to those curls, and sonnets to that throat—not a few of them his own, and in the humility of his new state, he could admit that some of them had been of less than sterling quality.
“But I had a little talent,” he said. “I did. And twelve hundred a year. But she had a cashbox for a heart. She married six thousand a year.”
He crossed himself again. Bitterness was a sin. So was memory.
He was