The Silver Bough (32 page)

A
T LAST HE
began to kiss her in return, his mouth opening against hers, and when he put his arms around her,

Ashley sagged against him, suddenly weak in the knees. He staggered a little under her weight, but she was too deliciously dizzy to want to stand alone, so she clung to him and pressed him until he took the hint, and they sank together onto the thick, soft grass.

They lay glued together, kissing passionately, and just beginning to explore each other’s clothed bodies. But as her hand reached the hard, smooth bulge in his pants, he pulled his mouth away from hers with a gasp, and said, “I don’t even know your name.”

“Ashley.”

“And you know mine. So I guess…you know what you’re doing?”

She widened her eyes and stiffened her shoulders in a mock display of taking offense. “Excuse me? I’m not a virgin if that’s what you mean, and I’ve never had any complaints about my technique before!”

“I’m not complaining. I just wondered why…why this sudden urgency? Have you been talking to somebody? Did someone tell you…? What made you decide to come and seduce me?”

She sat up quickly, feeling her cheeks blazing. For a moment she was speechless with shame; then she got mad. She stared at him, still lying stretched on the grass, looking completely calm.

“Oh, is that what this is?
Seduction?
Something I’m doing to you? Totally one-sided? You want me to believe you don’t feel it, too?”

He sat up. “Of course I’m attracted to you,” he said gently. “Of course it’s mutual, dear heart. But—correct me if I’m wrong—this isn’t how you usually act when a passing stranger tickles your fancy.”

“But you’re not just a passing stranger! You’re—” She stopped before his steady gaze, biting her lip, reluctant to admit it, but knowing he was right. There
was
something more going on; something besides pure lust compelled her desire.

“Tell me something,” she said, changing tack. “I want to know the truth. Are you
really
Ronan Wall? The same one, I mean, who knew my grandmother fifty-six years ago?”

“Yes.”

“But how is that possible? What are you?”

“A man.”

She looked him up and down, recalling the firmness of his body, the strength in his arms as he’d lowered her gently to the ground, and desire uncoiled in her belly. She brought her gaze back to his face. There weren’t even any fine lines around his eyes. “A ninety-year-old man who looks about twenty-five. How do you explain that?”

He shrugged. “I can’t. Can you explain how
you
look? Inheritance, I suppose; genetics. I look like my great-grandfather looked—going by his portrait. I have the look of all the Walls descended from ‘the stranger woman.’ I look like my great-uncle Lachlan, I believe, who died at the age of ninety-seven before I was born.”

“When he was ninety-seven did he look like you look now?”

He smiled faintly. “I don’t suppose he did. All right. I suppose I inherit my permanent youth from my father, who wasn’t human. Which I guess makes me only half-human. I wasn’t born in this world, and I’ve come to the conclusion in recent years that I’ll never die in it. I must go back to the place where I was born. It’s time. I
want
to go back—back to my mother and father.” His voice was very low. All at once his face looked strange to her, altered by the swiftly gathering shadows into something alien.

She edged a little away from him. “Did you make the landslide happen?”

“What?” He sounded startled, and once again his face was familiar, as if she’d known him for years. He laughed. “I’m not some kind of superhero! If I could do things like
that
—” He broke off as another thought struck him, and shook his head slowly. “Although, maybe…It was the land that did it, but you could be right. I might have been the trigger, coming here when I did. I might have been just what it was waiting for. And I did feel compelled to come here—I was drawn back to this place for the same reason, I think, that you’ve been drawn to me.”

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. “Any more questions?”

It was obvious, from the way he continued to kiss her, that he did not expect her to say anything, and her body, too, was eager to get on with it. But too much remained unclear. Attractive though she found the idea of being totally swept away, she also wanted to understand why this was happening.

“Wait, wait.” Reluctantly she pushed him away. “I still don’t understand. What happens
after
we make love?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Who?” She frowned. “Phemie? But she never told me anything. It was only when I saw your picture with hers in an old newspaper that I guessed…”

She broke off, aware that Ronan had gone tense with listening to something else. She heard it, too, a noise from above them in the dark sky. She had the sense that a large flock of birds was passing overhead, but it didn’t sound like birds. As she strained her ears to make sense of it, she thought she could hear screaming, and furious shouting, and thuds and crashes, heavy blows, weapons connecting with other weapons, and with flesh, in some incomprehensible battle. She opened her mouth to ask, and he pressed his hand against it, warning her to keep quiet.

They huddled together in silence for long, uncounted minutes while Ashley tried to figure out who was fighting, and where—surely it couldn’t be up in the air, as it sounded. She stared up into the darkness, her eyes attempting to conjure shapes out of the emptiness, until, gradually, the sound diminished, as if the invisible battle were moving somewhere else.

“What was it?” she whispered.

“The
sluagh
,” he said in his normal voice.

“What?”

“They’re some sort of spirits—some people call them the host of the unforgiven dead. They were believed to go flying about above the world in great clouds, doing evil when they could, and constantly fighting with each other. In the morning you’d see their blood splashed on the rocks. The blood of the hosts—
fuil nan sluagh
—is another name for red crotal, that’s the lichen used for dyeing Harris tweed.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, and she gaped at him. “But that’s a myth, right? They’re not
real
.”

“How real do you want? You heard them.”

“But there must be some other explanation for that noise. I mean—”

He grasped her hands firmly and leaned in close, this time not for a kiss, but to fix her with his gaze. “Understand: You’re not in the world you used to know, not anymore. We’re on an island now, and it’s slipping into another reality where all the things you’ve been brought up to think of as legends are alive and powerful. I’m very glad the
sluagh
passed over without noticing us, because one of their nastier tricks is to snatch up people, drag them all over the place, and eventually throw them down to their deaths. Telling yourself they’re not real is no protection.”

She remembered the shell of the Grand Hotel, and the dance music she’d heard, the party she’d glimpsed from afar, and shivered. “How did this happen? Why now? Is it because of you?”

“I think so. Probably. Yes.” Abruptly, he dropped her hands, and his voice hardened. “But it’s not my fault. Better blame my grandfather. He’s the one who dragged my poor mother back here—and dragged me into this world where I don’t belong. That’s where the whole imbalance began; I’m sure of it.”

“Ronan, I’m not blaming you.” She grasped his arm and stroked it. “I just want to understand. Is there some way of making things right, of…restoring the balance?”

He was silent for a moment. “You don’t know?”

She shook her head. “I’m in the dark here.” She smiled, because it was literally true.

“When a golden apple appears, it’s as if all the magic of this land is concentrated in it. The woman and the man who share it can have whatever they desire most—no matter how impossible their wish might seem. There was a golden apple the year my mother was Queen, and again the year Phemie was crowned.”

“But she didn’t eat it!” She blurted it out without thinking, but he didn’t question how she knew.

“That’s right. She didn’t want it, and neither did I—it was something the town tried to foist upon us. They were going to make me redeem my mother’s mistake. My grandfather’s mistake, it was, really, for dragging her back, but of course they never blamed
him
—it was she they blamed for every misfortune, and after she had died, they shifted the blame to me.

“Have you ever noticed—no, you’re probably still too young; you’ll have to take my word for it. People always talk about how things were different, better,
right
in the olden days, when they were young and the world operated as it was supposed to, and people all knew their places in the scheme of things. They probably talked like that when people lived in caves; how caves never used to smell or get so damp, and the animals were fatter and the fish jumped into the nets…they want to believe in a golden age, and blame somebody or something for the collective fall from grace.

“So, supposedly, nothing was ever quite so good in Appleton after my mother’s return. When she was dead, it became my fault. I became a sort of living symbol of bad luck. Even when I was providing steady employment and bringing wealth into the town it was never enough, somehow, never as good as it
would
have been if only I’d never been born. And my one chance to make things right was to go back to where I’d come from. This was made quite clear to me. I’m sure it must have been the only time in the history of the Apple Fair when the ‘stranger’ was chosen even before the Apple Queen! I knew what my role was meant to be. Only I wasn’t ready to play it.

“And now there’s another golden apple, ripe and ready to be picked. Another chance. If you’ll share it with me?”

She nodded, unable to speak. He moved to kiss her, but she pulled back.

“Do we have to do it here?”

He obviously didn’t understand, so she elaborated. “We don’t have to make love in the cemetery, do we? Can we go back to my place and do it there?” Her voice wavered a little.

“We can make love wherever you like. And however you like.” He stood up and helped her to her feet.

“It’ll be more comfortable,” she said. She thought of the bed, and also of the pack of condoms she’d brought in her luggage all the way from Texas. It might be ridiculously petty to think about such a thing when she’d just agreed to abandon the only world she knew for him—but what if it wasn’t true? What if they were both pretending?
Trust in Allah, but keep a close guard on your camel,
she thought as, hand in hand, they began to pick their way cautiously between the graves and headstones toward the gate.

“Whose grave were you looking at when I found you?” she asked, just to break the silence.

“Not a grave. The memorial tablet to my mother.”

“There’s no grave?”

“They never found her body.”

“What happened?”

“They said it was suicide. I don’t think so. I think she escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“She jumped into the sea. Someone saw her; it was at the roadside, by those big rocks. It’s very rocky there, and the water isn’t very deep. If she’d died, they would have found a body. They didn’t. No one ever found her body. I think she got away at last. I think she found her way back.”

 

From
Magic Islands
by Gracia McWilliams
(Turtle Press, 2004)

 

S
EVERAL
sites in Scotland can also lay claim to being the “real” Isle of Avalon. These include not only the mysterious phantom island of HyBrasil, but also a few places much easier to locate on the map and actually visit.

Among the most interesting to the visitor are the island of Lismore, whose name means “Great Garden” and which was the burial place of Pictish kings; and the Appleton peninsula, which boasts “King Arthur’s footprints” on its shore, not far from a cave whose unimpressive size and appearance has not stopped it being pointed out to generations of visitors and locals alike as the one where the great king of the Britons lies in an enchanted sleep.

Although Appleton is part of mainland Scotland, its older name of
Innis Ubhall
, or “Apple Island,” suggests that this was a recent development; and, indeed, only a single, narrow road and a few hundred yards of earth and stone sustain the connection. It is not hard, looking at a map, to imagine that “stem” severed, and if hard facts are missing to back up the perception, nevertheless local folklore is rich in reasons to believe. During the month I stayed in Appleton I heard many stories and perhaps half a dozen explanations for why “the apple” either decided or was forced to forfeit its status as an enchanted, drifting island. The most popular (judging from the enthusiasm of the audience at the
ceilidh
where I first heard it) was a tale of human trickery: An ordinary man, an impoverished youngest son, uses his resourcefulness and quick wits to win in a contest against a supernatural opponent. But the one I liked best (romantic that I am!) was a love story.

She was the priestess/princess on the magic isle, the youngest of three; he was a poor young fisherman who one day chanced to drift or row a bit too far from shore. They fell in love at first sight. She was a magical immortal being; he was not. However, it had always been in the gift of the priestesses to allow some worthy mortals to join them, to eat the magic apples that grew on the island, and dwell there forever. But the two older sisters (or they may have been her mother and grandmother) refused to allow that in this case. He was only a common fisherman, not a hero, not of noble blood, and therefore not good enough for her or the island.

She did not give up. Using the birds of the air and the fish of the sea she managed to communicate with her young man, and one night in the early 1600s (unusually for this sort of story, it’s set in historic times; even the year was specified, although for each storyteller it was slightly different), she ran the island aground in order to be with her lover, and the other two women were unable to shift it. This was partly because their magic powers were waning in the face of the rationalistic modern world, partly because the great love between the two young people created its own power.

Mortals came to live on the grounded island, but the old magic did not die. The youngest of the sisters had children who still carried the old magic in their blood, as did the apple trees that continued to flourish on the land. And as long as the apples grew, and lovers remembered the meaning of a shared apple, all would be well, and
Innis Ubhall
remained a demi-paradise.

Only one of the storytellers—he had to be the oldest, tiniest man I’ve ever seen!—sounded a darker note at the end of this tale, sorrowfully shaking his head as he warned his rapt audience of their impending fate:

“Once upon a time, the magical pact was renewed every year, when the Apple Queen shared an apple with her lover, on behalf of us all,” he said. “But the orchards are all gone now, and although a few people still grow apples, they’re hard and sour, no good for eating. It has been more than fifty years since the last Apple Queen. Ever since she ran away, refusing the gift, things have gone from bad to worse. I don’t know if such a gift will ever be offered us again; but if it is, and if it is ignored again, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.”

Some of the older members of the audience nodded gloomily, and everybody there seemed to know what he meant—except me. I had to ask, “Excuse me, but what do you think will happen if this gift is ignored again?”

“I think those other two ladies will get their way and take the apple back to be an island, only this time it won’t be a paradise. Not for us. Far from it.”

I asked him when he thought this was likely to happen, and he replied that it could be any day, for Appleton was living “on borrowed time.”

Indeed, there is a general air of gloom—doubtless because of the depressed economy—throughout Appleton, which is at odds with the beautiful scenery and warmly hospitable nature of the inhabitants which should, by rights, attract loads of tourists. Forgotten it may be—and most undeservedly—but I really don’t believe that scenic little spot is in any danger of drifting out to sea. It was nearly two years ago that I heard the wizened old storyteller make his dire prediction, and, as I write, Appleton is still attached to the rest of Scotland, and still most firmly on the map.