Moon Song (18 page)

‘How’s that?’

‘It comes from a sacred spring. All sorts of wisdom hides in sacred springs, you know. This one even has a salmon in it, or so they say. Tristan certainly thought so, he wrote one of the songs to the salmon of wisdom. There’s a bell hides in the fall too, or is
it the kieve itself, the cauldron pool?’ Gideon mused, pretending to look puzzled.

Isoldé wasn’t fooled, she could see the twinkle in his owleyes. ‘He wrote you a song,’ she said, on a sudden hunch.

Gideon sat up, faking startled. ‘Now why ever would you think that?’ he asked.

‘Just a hunch.’ Isoldé grinned at him. ‘Call it intuition.’

‘Mmm! I think I will at that,’ he said, leaning forward to sniff at her. ‘You and Mark are getting along well by the smell of it,’ he said, grinning back.

That brought a real flush to Isoldé’s face. She didn’t know whether to be angry or just to let it go. Sexual innuendo was always difficult for her and here, with him, even worse, considering how he affected her. She got a slight rush of desire every time she thought of him.

‘You always find a way of avoiding answering questions that are important to me,’ she told him, trying to turn the subject back the way she wanted it to go.

‘Yes, I do, don’t I?’ he replied.

Her face fell, she sighed resignedly.

‘OK, yes, he did.’ Gideon relented. ‘It’s the Trickster Song, you knew that already from our first meeting, when I quoted it to you. The original will be about here somewhere and it’s rather good. Tristan had a fairly good grasp of me, understood a lot about me. That’s unusual, for humans, but I’ve a feeling you may be that way too.’

He reached out and touched her hand. As she looked down it shifted into twigs, then into a wolf’s paw. Before she could withdraw it was just a hand again. She gasped.

‘It’s just flesh,’ he said softly. ‘It can be any shape you choose. Like your genius, Einstein, said, matter is just compressed energy. And energy is always in constant movement. One can get stuck in thinking it always has to be only one shape. That’s a very human illusion.’

Isoldé blinked. What? The philosophy of physics now? ‘I thought we were talking about Tristan’s songs,’ she managed.

‘So we are. Did you think they had nothing to do with physics or shapeshifting?’

That stopped Isoldé in her tracks. ‘I think I need to go at this very slowly, one step at a time,’ she said. ‘And there’s so much I want to ask you. This place. Tristan’s songs. What you want of me. After last night …’

Gideon chuckled again. ‘You’re right there,’ he replied. ‘I certainly had a hand in getting you to be the Spring Maid. It gave you a feel of what we are, your relationship with us.’

‘Can we talk about that? What does it all mean? What am I to do? How does it help?’

Gideon blinked, again feigning startlement at the barrage of questions from her. She wasn’t taken in.

‘You will be the Lady’s representative in the land, Mark is your guardian. That means you learn to hear the land, listen to it, ask it what it needs. That’s what the shaman does, walks between worlds and brings back goodies to share with her people. Mark’s got to do more of that too, as a musician. Like Tristan, he gives out the goods through his playing. Yours will likely be more practical work.’

Gideon got up and went over to the window. Isoldé’s eyes followed him; she saw that the sun was drawing down the sky, twilight coming on. Where had the day gone? It felt to her as though it was just after breakfast still.

‘You’d better head off for home now, the path is dangerous in the dark until it knows you well.’ He paused, turned to look at her. ‘Dangerous in all sorts of ways. Go on now. I’ll come with you as far as the bridge. You’ll be all right after that.’

A chill settled round Isoldé’s shoulders as he spoke. She put the sheet music down just where she had found it and went to the door. Gideon closed it behind them and led her back through the gate, down through the tunnel and down the steep path. At the
bridge he stepped out onto the planks and stamped his foot three times.

‘Let her pass!’ It was a command. ‘I say this. Let her pass. Let none try to trip or trick her on pain of my displeasure. Let her pass.’

There was a grumbling, rumbling noise and a little vortex of water slithered noisily under the bridge as though someone had just emptied a bath into the stream.

Gideon reached back a hand and drew her up onto the bridge. He kissed each of her cheeks and between her eyes.

‘Go now,’ he said softly. ‘Tell Mark. He will be pleased. But don’t let him go up to the cottage, not yet. You need to be there alone for now, unless I’m there too. Come back to the cottage as soon as you can. Hurry home now, Isoldé, run!’

He gave her a little push and she found herself running, leaping, agile as a hare, going down the path at speed. In moments, so it seemed, she was running across the lawn and into Mark’s arms. He swept her up and took her inside.

Isoldé brought lunch with her this time. And Embar. The black cat was very much at home in the cottage. He sniffed around at first and bottled once or twice – Isoldé thought it was where Gideon had been – then found himself what was obviously a catniche on one of Tristan’s old cardigans on the chaise longue and curled up to watch her over his tail. The cardigan was covered in a felt of black fur, Embar must have been using it for years. She’d been a bit worried when he’d first insisted on coming up to the cottage with her, would it be too far for him? He’d soon disabused her mind of all that, bounding up the path, turning at corners to give an imperious yowl telling her to hurry up. When they got to the cottage he’d gone straight in through the cat-flap. She’d never even noticed there was one on her first visit. He was obviously well at home. A look through the cupboards in the kitchen had brought to light three elderly, but still good, unopened tins of cat food, it looked like he had regularly accompanied Tristan when he came up here.

Mark, however, had not wanted to come. He was delighted she’d found the manuscripts, all his crotchetiness of the previous morning gone. He had been to the cottage occasionally, as a child, exploring the woods and the kieve, but Tristan had soon made it clear the cottage was private, people came there only by invitation and that included Mark. He’d been up once since Tristan’s death but had found the experience so emotional and freaky he’d quickly left, thinking to come back later, when time had put some cushioning between himself and his loss. Somehow, the time had never been right and now Isoldé had found it for herself. He was content with Gideon’s prohibition. ‘You go on,’ he said. ‘It’s what they want you to do.’

So here she was, with a thermos of coffee, an avocado sandwich and an apple. And a massive curiosity.

Looking at the place, it really was a mess. At first glance, there
seemed no rhyme nor reason to any of the piles of paper, however, Isoldé was sure there was a system to it somehow. The stories of Tristan from Mark and Mrs P told her he was methodical and organised even if it didn’t look so.

‘The “heap” system!’ Isoldé chuckled to herself, using the old computer phrase. There really was such a system but she was sure Tristan hadn’t known about it, he just worked in heaps.

Against the side wall was a long, elegant ash dining table. Something struck Isoldé then, most of the furniture, the good stuff anyway, was ash. Brow furrowed, she stirred her brain, “Nuin”, that was the ogham name for the ash tree and it was the tree sacred to Gwydion, the master magician of all Britain. And that, for the gods’ sake, was Gideon wasn’t it? Ha! So this whole place was tied up with him, with the trickster, the shifter. And likely all the songs were too.

She pushed her hair back out of her eyes and went over to the table. There was rather less clutter on it than on the floor and chairs in the rest of the room. She cleared it of filthy crockery which she dumped in the sink, filling it up with water. A day or two of soaking should release the china and cutlery from the encrusted food. Not to worry about that now, now was for looking for the songs. The piles of paper she laid carefully, just as they were, on the floor in front of the long window. There’d been cobweb-ridden J-cloths under the sink, she took a couple, shook them out and dampened them then wiped the table down. In the bathroom that led off the bedroom she found towels and dried the wood. OK, here was a work surface some eight foot long by two and a half wide, she ought to be able to make some order of things on there.

The nursing chair had obviously been Tristan’s favourite perch. Apart from another old cardigan hung over its back it had no other adornments, unlike the rest of the seats which, apart from Embar’s nest, were all covered with papers. The piano had more papers on its closed top, but nothing hiding on the rack
inside. Although the stool was overflowing with yet more stuff it was all old and much of it not Tristan’s but other music he must have loved, including classical stuff.

She sat down in the nursing chair and took up the pile of paper beside it. Might as well begin here as anywhere, probably this was where Tristan had been working last.

The pile was a very motley heap of notes, receipts, scraps of paper with the odd line written on them and then, at last, a piece of music. This one was just music, Isoldé sighed, it really might as well have been in Greek as far as she was concerned. She took it over to the piano, opened the lid and perched on the stool. She knew which note was middle C but had to count her way up and down from there. Sharps were to the right of the white key, weren’t they? And flats to the left? That was as good as it got for her. Slowly she managed to pick out the tune. It was subtle, haunting, reminding her of water flowing. There were no words, so far, to help her. She took it back to the ash table and set it to one side, went back to the nursing chair. She didn’t immediately get back to work but sat thinking.

Not being able to read music had never worried her because her ear was so good, along with her ability to pick up a tune from a single hearing. Lazy! She had a good ear and that hadn’t encouraged her to struggle with a discipline she found ultraboring. However, Mark would be able to read it, and play it.

The sheet music was the only definite goody in this pile so she decided to find a home for the rest of the stuff for the time being until they could decide if any of the bills and receipts and lists needed keeping. Some of them went back to the late eighties she saw incredulously from the dates. Did Tristan have squirrel genes? She got up to look for a box to keep all this stuff in, found one in the corner cupboard in the kitchen beside a vacuum cleaner that really should have been in the Victoria & Albert museum. Perhaps Tristan had given the place a clean once a year for some feast day or other, definitely not more often.

The ash table now held the three sets of music and a small pile of scraps that looked like potential words for songs, some seemed related and others were very indeterminate. Isoldé took up a pile from by the window and went again to sit in the nursing chair to go through it. She felt she was getting something of a method to the work now, a feel for Tristan. There were more scraps with words on them in this pile, along with a half sheet of music. This one had a few words under the notes, the same as on the scraps of paper, so Isoldé felt confident she was on the right track.

After a couple more piles Embar got up and climbed to paw her lap. He was definitely asking for a drink and a snack for himself. Isoldé found a couple of clean dishes, put some cat food in one and water in the other, put them down for him. He wolfed the food down then took a long drink. She took her thermos and sandwich out onto the balcony and curled into one of the basket chairs. Embar followed her out and sat on the low table. Together they contemplated the rushing water.

She now had seven piles on the ash table, five pieces of music along with scraps of words and two heaps of notes. Gideon had said there were seven songs written and done, so she had pretty well got those. Then there was the one that Tristan hadn’t yet written, had left this earth before he’d done, the Moon Song. That was the one she must find Tristan for. From the look of what she’d found she had five songs and two more potentials, bits and pieces, but not the manuscripts as yet.

What a mess, she thought, and why? Why hadn’t he got it all together and sorted? Especially as he knew he was going to die, to go to Otherworld and leave his sickly body behind. That was odd, inexplicable. It seemed unlike the man she remembered, and the man Mark knew. Disorderly he might be but he had been thorough as far as she could tell from Mark and Mrs P. Not the sort of person to leave all in a state and just bugger off, leaving the mess for others to clear up. She finished the coffee and
packed her stuff back into her knapsack, went back to the living room and the work.

Clouds came up the valley later in the afternoon; a patter of rain against the long window soon became a torrent in one of the sudden spring downpours that Cornwall enjoys. Glancing at her phone Isoldé saw it was already half-past three. Where had the time gone? And, surprisingly, there was a signal on the phone. She tried calling Mark, he picked up immediately.

‘Everything OK?’ His voice was slightly anxious.

‘Yes, we’re fine. It’s raining here, where are you?’

‘In Tintagel. I went to the post. The contract for the European tour arrived and I thought I’d get it straight back. They want me to do a recording as well.’ There was a pleased note in his voice now.

‘That’s great,” she responded.

‘It does mean I’ll be gone a bit longer though,’ he added tentatively.

‘Very long?’

‘Maybe another week.’

‘But that’s OK, isn’t it? It’s good they want to record you.’

‘It’s just …we’ve only just got together and I have to go off and leave you.’

Isoldé chuckled. ‘We always knew how it would be, didn’t we? You have a career to run. I don’t want it stopped or held up just because of me.’

‘Mmm!’ Mark almost purred. ‘You’re good for me! How’re you doing though? Found anything?’

‘Lots! But I need you to read the music, see if they are different or more bits of the same. And it’s all mixed up with old bills and notes about shopping and laundry, for goodness sake! I’d never have believed he was so disorderly.’