Moon Song (31 page)

He found himself a perch on a tall stump that sat up like a stool growing out of the ground. It was just the right height, just in the right place. Sat there he was outside the circle but he could watch, be there to help if needed but not be in the way.

His vision flickered. It was like there were lines, like threads, in front of his eyes. He blinked, rubbed them, the threads were still there. He screwed his eyes up and peered through them to see properly.

‘Hell!’ he swore under his breath. ‘I can’t see properly, what’s going on?’

‘That is the wyrd,’ said a voice from somewhere. ‘The web.’

‘Eh …?’ Mark peered around him, there was nobody there. ‘I am
not
going nuts!’ he told himself. ‘Not now. No time. Isoldé needs me.’

‘No,’ the voice agreed with him, ‘you’re not going nuts. You’re seeing what she sees.’

‘Eh …?’ Mark said again.

There was an exasperated sighing sound in his ear. ‘For goodness sake,’ said the voice. ‘Get a grip! You’re seeing what Isoldé is seeing, so you can help if necessary.’

‘Who are you?’ Mark managed a reasonably intelligent
question at last.

‘You know me best when you play the organ,’ the voice replied. ‘But I’m here all the time. You just don’t notice me.’

‘Eh …?’ he said for the third time, then realised how daft he must sound, and that he wasn’t concentrating on Isoldé, and that he didn’t know what was going on. ‘Err …sorry, but is this the time for introductions?’

‘Yes, it damn well is!’ The voice was definitely cross with him. ‘She needs you to help with those threads. We need you to help with them. For goodness sake get it together.’

Mark shook his head, very confused, but he sensed the urgency in the voice, in the atmosphere around him in the grove.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.

‘That’s why I’m here, to help!’

‘Well, please help me then,’ Mark too was feeling exasperated now. ‘But I can’t see properly with all these lines across everything, it’s like looking at a TV screen that’s gone wrong.’

‘Is that better?’

The lines toned down quite a bit, their intensity lowered. Now they were faint but still there. He could see the grove properly.

‘Much! So what do I do now?’

‘Stretch your fingers out, like you were playing the organ.’

Mark did that. It felt slightly foolish at first then he suddenly felt the threads under his fingers. There was a real sensation there, not like the organ keys, more like a harp on its side, or a dulcimer maybe. If he put a slight pressure on the thread he could feel a response. He looked up. The web was huge, how on earth was he to play that?

‘I need the threads to come together more, like a keyboard and the foot-pedals for an organ,’ he said, looking round vaguely. It was odd speaking to someone without being able to see them. At least with a phone you had that as a point of focus. ‘I wish I could see you,’ he added, without much hope.

A column of smoke grew out of a grass tuft directly in front of him, began to take form. Shadowy goat-legs grew downwards, ending in delicate cloven hooves, a brown-skinned torso rose above the legs, hairy-chest, strong shoulders and sinewy arms ending in long-clawed fingers. The head, on top of a longish neck, was bearded and had thick, bushy, black eyebrows over brilliant golden eyes. It was topped with curly black hair out of which grew a pair of spiral, silvery horns. The effect reminded Mark of Mr Tumnus from “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”.

‘No!’ the creature told him, very firmly, ‘I am
not
Mr Tumnus.’

‘Err …no,’ Mark agreed. ‘I think your name might be Pan …?’

‘Harrumph!’ the satyr-figure snorted. ‘That will certainly do better. Now, what was it you wanted? Apart from being able to see me?’

‘It would be easier if the threads could come together like an organ keyboard,’ Mark said. ‘And, as I’ve got a seat here, I could do some of them as base cords, like organ pedals. Is that possible?’

As he made his request, Mark was watching the threads form up into a fantastic organ console. Some of them even came together as stops. The whole thing seemed to be made of light, strands of light, all the colours of the rainbow.

‘That do?’ Pan asked him.

‘Looks good.’ Mark had his hands on the keyboard and his feet on the pedals already. The sensation was electric, and very sensitive. ‘Shii-it!’ he exclaimed as he got the feel of it. ‘This is incredible.’

‘Well just get on and play the damn thing.’ Pan’s voice was acerbic. ‘She needs your help. I’ve been holding time while you got yourself together, can I let it go now? Can you do your stuff?’

‘Yup!’ Mark felt as high as a kite but also completely competent. He knew he could do it.

Pan stepped back in amongst the trees, out of sight, but Mark
distinctly heard him muttering, ‘Sheesh! Humans! Who needs them?’

Another voice answered Pan. ‘We do,’ it said. It sounded like Gideon.

Mark looked up and out into the grove. Isoldé was standing. It was as though she hadn’t moved since he’d backed out to the side-lines, as if the whole episode with Pan had taken no time at all. Pan had said he was holding time, that he’d just let it go again. Ha!

Mark’s fingers on the threads felt the tingling, the threads wanted to be played …how?

‘Let us show you …’

Mark blinked …it was the threads? The threads themselves were talking to him? Sheesh! Well …anything was possible and now was no time to argue or discuss. Get a grip, he told himself, and do the job. His fingers, meanwhile, were doing it, whatever his head thought. His fingers played the threads, pulled and pushed the stops, his feet pressed the pedals, it was like music …but not. He didn’t so much hear it as sense it, right through his body, but hearing was there as well.

He saw Isoldé had the calling bells in her hand, Taliesin’s silver branch. She was asking the faer folk to show her what to do, to put the right words into her mouth, to help her as he had asked the threads to help him. She began to dance, and to sing. The song followed his fingers …or did it lead them? …as they played the incredible light-organ.

Her dance also seemed to follow the threads. Some of her steps pulled threads away from Tristan where he sat by the headstone, connecting him to the grass, trees, leaves, plants, to the grove itself. Others she drew towards him, from the things that made up the grove, seeming to bind them within and around him. Isoldé was spinning a web. She was reconnecting him to the greater web that was the grove and, from that, outwards and
outwards to the land itself, to the Earth. As he realised this Mark let go of thinking. His hands took over and began to play the threads in time and in tune with her dancing, it was as if he was being played rather than doing the playing himself. And so I am, he thought, Otherworld is playing me …no …not just Otherworld, this world too. These are the threads that make up this world. A big grin settled on his face as he realised this, it was wonderful, being a part of the whole so consciously, like orgasm only better. He allowed his hands to take charge.

This sort of sensation happened to a lesser extent when he was really doing well on the ordinary organ in a cathedral performance, not quite the same but so similar. His mind, now with nothing to do except observe, wondered idly if it really was the same, that somehow when he was playing, he connected to the web of the music and the web of the place and the web of the audience.

A chuckle sounded softly at the back of his mind. Of course, it seemed to say, how else can you connect with everything, with the composer, with the instrument, with the listeners?

Isoldé stood up. She had the calling bells, the silver branch of Taliesin, in her hand. She had asked the faer folk to show her what to do, to put the right words into her mouth, the right movements and things into her hands, then she’d let go. Finally, she had let go, trusted enough to allow her body to be shifted by the wyrd, by the pattern of Life itself.

That realisation had at last come through to her. It wasn’t a bunch of fairies who moved and shaped and shifted her, it was the web, the wyrd. She was part of it and, if she stopped fighting it, it moved her where it needed her to go, where she, her spirit self, needed to go …she’d got that message in the last few seconds too.

Each second seemed to be eternally long, stepping in a dance, a long slow dance where each footfall was significant, and she was that dance. The bells in her hand rang softly as she moved, stood up. Their echo spun its way out across the grove, she knew it was making all the threads that the faer folk had woven vibrate and sing. A background part of her could hear them, a part, the foreground part was concentrating on listening and hearing, seeing and doing, not on thinking.

The threads, the weaving had become possible when she sank the knife into the soil and released the energy. It had needed her will, her cooperation, her bloodletting for the earth to enable that to happen. Realisations were crowding in on her again.

‘Wait!’ she called in her mind. ‘I must do the work first. Help me to do the work.’

She was back with the singing bells.

Tristan sat with his back to the head-stone, touching it. The altar pile was before him. He had tried to touch it once but drawn back. Isoldé had felt herself about to stop him but he’d stopped of himself without her interruption. Now he sat quiet. She could sense he had no real idea where he was, who he was
even, and certainly not what was going on.

Isoldé’s feet began to dance round the head-stone. She began to sing.

Isoldé’s feet trod a spiral path about Tristan and the grove. Her mind was fully on her job as her eyes followed the wyrd-lines she saw in the grass and in the air around her. Her voice carried on humming the simple tune although the words were all done now, all spent, out there, humming along the threads. Her dance went on as though it would never stop.

Mark’s attention came back to focus on Tristan. Something was growing, there, in front of the man. A misty-white and formless something, writhing like the smoke from an incense stick. It seemed to come from out of the altar pile. Mark’s fingers fell on threads that gave out a minor key, plaintive, unsure, timid. Isoldé danced over to the smoke, crouched beside it, no longer singing. The smoke-thing leaned towards her, licking at her hands, she took it up, holding it loosely but giving it somewhere to be. Then she offered it to Tristan.

Something changed in Tristan. His face had been blank, unknowing, unfocused, throughout the dance. Now the eyes saw, clicked into focus on the smoke in Isoldé’s hands, the mouth firmed up, there was expression in his face. Mark recognised the man he had lived with all those years. Tentatively, Tristan put out one hand. The smoke coiled a tentacle towards his finger in response. Smoke and finger met. Tristan’s whole body jerked, the smoke flinched too but neither let go.

Isoldé stood up, still holding the smoke, standing over Tristan. He lay with his head back against the stone as she bent over him. She held the smoke in her hands and leaned towards his mouth as he opened it. Again she offered the smoke, then she blew it into his mouth.

It disappeared within him. As the last bit went in he lifted his hand and touched his own lips so the last particles that still clung to the finger entered his mouth. It was done. Isoldé’s hands were empty, Tristan’s mouth was shut now, his eyes closed, tears coursing down his cheeks.

Mark’s fingers drew soft cords from the light-organ. He watched the thread-cords curl around Tristan now, enfolding him in a cocoon. It looked just like the chrysalis a caterpillar wove in order to turn into a butterfly, only this one was man-sized, Tristan-sized. As he watched it began to darken to a soft, gold,
buttery colour, losing its transparency so he could no longer see Tristan within it.

Isoldé stood up just as Mark’s fingers fell away from the lightorgan. They both looked up together, at the same moment, and saw each other properly for the first time since the soul retrieval had begun. She looked exhausted. Mark went to her and she put her arms around his neck, leaned into him. After several minutes she whispered into his shoulder, ‘It’s done.’