Kitabı oku: «The Washer of the Ford: Legendary moralities and barbaric tales», sayfa 5

THE LAST SUPPER

 
“… and there shall be
Beautiful things made new…”
 

Hyperion.

THE last time that the Fisher of Men was seen in Strath Nair was not of Alasdair Macleod but of the little child, Art Macarthur, him that was born of the woman Mary Gilchrist, that had known the sorrow of women.

He was a little child, indeed, when, because of his loneliness and having lost his way, he lay sobbing among the bracken by the stream-side in the Shadowy Glen.

When he was a man, and had reached the gloaming of his years, he was loved of men and women, for his songs are many and sweet, and his heart was true, and he was a good man and had no evil against any one.

It is he who saw the Fisher of Men, when he was but a little lad; and some say that it was on the eve of the day that Alasdair Òg died, though of this I know nothing. And what he saw, and what he heard, was a moonbeam that fell into the dark sea of his mind, and sank therein, and filled it with light for all the days of his life. A moonlit mind was that of Art Macarthur: him that is known best as Ian Mòr, Ian Mòr of the Hills, though why he took the name of Ian Cameron is known to none now but one person, and that need not be for the telling here. He had music always in his mind. I asked him once why he heard what so few heard, but he smiled and said only: “When the heart is full of love, cool dews of peace rise from it and fall upon the mind: and that is when the song of Joy is heard.” It must have been because of this shining of his soul that some who loved him thought of him as one illumined. His mind was a shell that held the haunting echo of the deep seas: and to know him was to catch a breath of the infinite ocean of wonder and mystery and beauty of which he was the quiet oracle. He has peace now, where he lies under the heather upon a hillside far away: but the Fisher of Men will send him hitherward again, to put a light upon the wave, and a gleam upon the brown earth.

I will tell this sgeul as Ian Mòr, that was the little child Art Macarthur, told it to me.

Often and often it is to me all as a dream that comes unawares. Often and often have I striven to see into the green glens of the mind whence it comes, and whither, in a flash, in a rainbow gleam, it vanishes. When I seek to draw close to it, to know whether it is a winged glory out of the soul, or was indeed a thing that happened to me in my tender years, lo – it is a dawn drowned in day, a star lost in the sun, the falling of dew.

But I will not be forgetting: no, never; no, not till the silence of the grass is over my eyes: I will not be forgetting that gloaming.

Bitter tears are those that children have. All that we say with vain words is said by them in this welling spray of pain. I had the sorrow that day. Strange hostilities lurked in the familiar bracken. The soughing of the wind among the trees, the wash of the brown water by my side, that had been companionable, were voices of awe. The quiet light upon the grass flamed.

The fierce people that lurked in shadow had eyes for my helplessness. When the dark came I thought I should be dead, devoured of I knew not what wild creature. Would mother never come, never come with saving arms, with eyes like soft candles of home?

Then my sobs grew still, for I heard a step. With dread upon me, poor wee lad that I was, I looked to see who came out of the wilderness. It was a man, tall and thin and worn, with long hair hanging adown his face. Pale he was as a moonlit cot on the dark moor, and his voice was low and sweet. When I saw his eyes, I had no fear upon me at all. I saw the mother-look in the gray shadow of them.

“And is that you, Art lennavan-mo?” he said, as he stooped and lifted me.

I had no fear. The wet was out of my eyes.

“What is it you will be listening to, now, my little lad?” he whispered, as he saw me lean, intent, to catch I know not what.

“Sure,” I said, “I am not for knowing; but I thought I heard a music away down there in the wood.”

I heard it, for sure. It was a wondrous sweet air, as of one playing the feadan in a dream. Callum Dall, the piper, could give no rarer music than that was; and Callum was a seventh son, and was born in the moonshine.

“Will you come with me this night of the nights, little Art?” the man asked me, with his lips touching my brow and giving me rest.

“That I will indeed and indeed,” I said. And then I fell asleep.

When I woke we were in the huntsman’s booth that is at the far end of the Shadowy Glen.

There was a long rough-hewn table in it, and I stared when I saw bowls and a great jug of milk and a plate heaped with oatcakes, and beside it a brown loaf of rye-bread.

“Little Art,” said he who carried me, “are you for knowing now who I am?”

“You are a prince, I’m thinking,” was the shy word that came to my mouth.

“Sure, lennav-aghray, that is so. It is called the Prince of Peace I am.”

“And who is to be eating all this?” I asked.

“This is the last supper,” the prince said, so low that I could scarce hear; and it seemed to me that he whispered, “for I die daily, and ever ere I die the Twelve break bread with me.”

It was then I saw that there were six bowls of porridge on the one side and six on the other.

“What is your name, O Prince?”

“Iosa.”

“And will you have no other name than that?”

“I am called Iosa mac Dhe.”

“And is it living in this house you are?”

“Ay. But Art, my little lad, I will kiss your eyes, and you shall see who sup with me.”

And with that the prince that was called Iosa kissed me on the eyes, and I saw.

“You will never be quite blind again,” he whispered, and that is why all the long years of my years I have been glad in my soul.

What I saw was a thing strange and wonderful. Twelve men sat at that table, and all had eyes of love upon Iosa. But they were not like any men I had ever seen. Tall and fair and terrible they were, like morning in a desert place; all save one, who was dark, and had a shadow upon him and in his wild eyes.

It seemed to me that each was clad in radiant mist. The eyes of them were as stars through that mist.

And each, before he broke bread, or put spoon to the porridge that was in the bowl before him, laid down upon the table three shuttles. Long I looked upon that company, but Iosa held me in his arms, and I had no fear.

“Who are these men?” he asked me.

“The Sons of God,” I said; I not knowing what I said, for it was but a child I was.

He smiled at that. “Behold,” he spoke to the twelve men who sat at the table, “behold the little one is wiser than the wisest of ye.” At that all smiled with the gladness and the joy, save one: him that was in the shadow. He looked at me, and I remembered two black lonely tarns upon the hillside, black with the terror because of the kelpie and the drowner.

“Who are these men?” I whispered, with the tremor on me, that was come of the awe I had.

“They are the Twelve Weavers, Art, my little child.”

“And what is their weaving?”

“They weave for my Father, whose web I am.”

At that I looked upon the prince, but I could see no web.

“Are you not Iosa the Prince?”

“I am the Web of Life, Art lennavan-mo.”

“And what are the three shuttles that are beside each Weaver?”

I know now that when I turned my child’s eyes upon these shuttles I saw that they were alive and wonderful, and never the same to the seeing.

“They are called Beauty and Wonder and Mystery.”

And with that Iosa mac Dhe sat down and talked with the Twelve. All were passing fair, save him who looked sidelong out of dark eyes. I thought each, as I looked at him, more beautiful than any of his fellows; but most I loved to look at the twain who sat on either side of Iosa.

“He will be a Dreamer among men,” said the prince; “so tell him who ye are.”

Then he who was on the right turned his eyes upon me. I leaned to him, laughing low with the glad pleasure I had because of his eyes and shining hair, and the flame as of the blue sky that was his robe.

“I am the Weaver of Joy,” he said. And with that he took his three shuttles that were called Beauty and Wonder and Mystery, and he wove an immortal shape, and it went forth of the room and out into the green world, singing a rapturous sweet song.

Then he that was upon the left of Iosa the Life, looked at me, and my heart leaped. He, too, had shining hair, but I could not tell the colour of his eyes for the glory that was in them. “I am the Weaver of Love,” he said; “and I sit next the heart of Iosa.” And with that he took his three shuttles that were called Beauty and Wonder and Mystery, and he wove an immortal shape, and it went forth of the room and out into the green world, singing a rapturous sweet song.

Even then, child as I was, I wished to look on no other. None could be so passing fair, I thought, as the Weaver of Joy and the Weaver of Love.

But a wondrous sweet voice sang in my ears, and a cool, soft hand laid itself upon my head, and the beautiful lordly one who had spoken said, “I am the Weaver of Death,” and the lovely whispering one who had lulled me with rest said, “I am the Weaver of Sleep.” And each wove with the shuttles of Beauty and Wonder and Mystery, and I knew not which was the more fair, and Death seemed to me as Love, and in the eyes of Dream I saw Joy.

My gaze was still upon the fair wonderful shapes that went forth from these twain, – from the Weaver of Sleep, an immortal shape of star-eyed Silence, and from the Weaver of Death a lovely Dusk with a heart of hidden flame – when I heard the voice of two others of the Twelve. They were like the laughter of the wind in the corn, and like the golden fire upon that corn. And the one said, “I am the Weaver of Passion,” and when he spoke I thought that he was both Love and Joy, and Death and Life, and I put out my hands. “It is Strength I give,” he said; and he took and kissed me. Then, while Iosa took me again upon his knee, I saw the Weaver of Passion turn to the white glory beside him, – him that Iosa whispered to me was the secret of the world, and that was called “The Weaver of Youth.” I know not whence nor how it came, but there was a singing of skyey birds when these twain took the shuttles of Beauty and Wonder and Mystery and wove each an immortal shape, and bade it go forth out of the room into the green world, to sing there for ever and ever in the ears of man a rapturous sweet song.

“O Iosa,” I cried, “are these all thy brethren? for each is fair as thee, and all have lit their eyes at the white fire I see now in thy heart.”

But, before he spake, the room was filled with music. I trembled with the joy, and in my ears it has lingered ever, nor shall ever go. Then I saw that it was the breathing of the seventh and eighth, of the ninth and the tenth of those star-eyed ministers of Iosa whom he called the Twelve: and the names of them were the Weaver of Laughter, the Weaver of Tears, the Weaver of Prayer, and the Weaver of Peace. Each rose and kissed me there. “We shall be with you to the end, little Art,” they said: and I took hold of the hand of one, and cried, “O beautiful one, be likewise with the woman my mother,” and there came back to me the whisper of the Weaver of Tears: “I will, unto the end.”

Then, wonderingly, I watched him likewise take the shuttles that were ever the same and yet never the same, and weave an immortal shape. And when this soul of Tears went forth of the room, I thought it was my mother’s voice singing that rapturous sweet song, and I cried out to it.

The fair immortal turned and waved to me. “I shall never be far from thee, little Art,” it sighed, like summer rain falling on leaves: “but I go now to my home in the heart of women.”

There were now but two out of the Twelve. Oh the gladness and the joy when I looked at him who had his eyes fixed on the face of Iosa that was the Life! He lifted the three shuttles of Beauty and Wonder and Mystery, and he wove a Mist of Rainbows in that room; and in the glory I saw that even the dark twelfth one lifted up his eyes and smiled.

“O what will the name of you be!” I cried, straining my arms to the beautiful lordly one. But he did not hear, for he wrought Rainbow after Rainbow out of the mist of glory that he made, and sent each out into the green world, to be for ever before the eyes of men.

“He is the Weaver of Hope,” whispered Iosa mac Dhe, “and he is the soul of each that is here.”

Then I turned to the twelfth, and said, “Who art thou, O lordly one with the shadow in the eyes?”

But he answered not, and there was silence in the room. And all there, from the Weaver of Joy to the Weaver of Peace, looked down, and said nought. Only the Weaver of Hope wrought a rainbow, and it drifted into the heart of the lonely Weaver that was twelfth.

“And who will this man be, O Iosa mac Dhe?” I whispered.

“Answer the little child,” said Iosa, and his voice was sad.

Then the Weaver answered.

“I am the Weaver of Glory” – he began, but Iosa looked at him, and he said no more.

“Art, little lad,” said the Prince of Peace, “he is the one who betrayeth me for ever. He is Judas, the Weaver of Fear.”

And at that the sorrowful shadow-eyed man that was the twelfth took up the three shuttles that were before him.

“And what are these, O Judas?” I cried eagerly, for I saw that they were black.

When he answered not one of the Twelve leaned forward and looked at him. It was the Weaver of Death who did this thing.

“The three shuttles of Judas the Fear-Weaver, O little Art,” said the Weaver of Death, “are called Mystery, and Despair, and the Grave.”

And with that Judas rose and left the room. But the shape that he had woven went forth with him as his shadow: and each fared out into the dim world, and the Shadow entered into the minds and into the hearts of men, and betrayed Iosa that was the Prince of Peace.

Thereupon, Iosa rose, and took me by the hand and led me out of that room. When, once, I looked back I saw none of the Twelve save only the Weaver of Hope, and he sat singing a wild sweet song that he had learned of the Weaver of Joy, sat singing amid a mist of rainbows and weaving a radiant glory that was dazzling as the sun.

And at that I woke, and was against my mother’s heart, and she with the tears upon me, and her lips moving in a prayer.

THE DARK NAMELESS ONE

ONE day this summer I sailed with Padruic Macrae and Ivor McLean, boatmen of Iona, along the southwestern reach of the Ross of Mull.

The whole coast of the Ross is indescribably wild and desolate. From Feenafort (Fhionn-phort) opposite Balliemore of Icolmkill, to the hamlet of Earraid Lighthouse, it were hardly exaggeration to say that the whole tract is uninhabited by man and unenlivened by any green thing. It is the haunt of the cormorant and the seal.

No one who has not visited this region can realise its barrenness. Its one beauty is the faint bloom which lies upon it in the sunlight – a bloom which becomes as the glow of an inner flame when the sun westers without cloud or mist. This is from the ruddy hue of the granite, of which all that wilderness is wrought.

It is a land tortured by the sea, scourged by the sea-wind. A myriad lochs, fiords, inlets, passages, serrate its broken frontiers. Innumerable islets and reefs, fanged like ravenous wolves, sentinel every shallow, lurk in every strait. He must be a skilled boatman who would take the Sound of Earraid and penetrate the reaches of the Ross.

There are many days in the months of peace, as the islanders call the period from Easter till the autumnal equinox, when Earraid and the rest of Ross seem under a spell. It is the spell of beauty. Then the yellow light of the sun is upon the tumbled masses and precipitous shelves and ledges, ruddy petals or leaves of that vast Flower of Granite. Across it the cloud shadows trail their purple elongations, their scythe-sweep curves, and abrupt evanishing floodings of warm dusk. From wet boulder to boulder, from crag to shelly crag, from fissure to fissure, the sea ceaselessly weaves a girdle of foam. When the wide luminous stretch of waters beyond – green near the land, and farther out all of a living blue, interspersed with wide alleys of amethyst – is white with the sea-horses, there is such a laughter of surge and splash all the way from Slugan-dubh to the Rudha-nam-Maol-Mòra, or to the tide-swept promontory of the Sgeireig-a’-Bhochdaidh, that, looking inland, one sees through a rainbow-shimmering veil of ever-flying spray.

But the sun spell is even more fugitive upon the face of this wild land than the spell of beauty upon a woman. So runs one of our proverbs: as the falling of the wave, as the fading of the leaf, so is the beauty of a woman, unless – ah, that unless, and the indiscoverable fount of joy that can only be come upon by hazard once in life, and thereafter only in dreams, and the Land of the Rainbow that is never reached, and the green sea-doors of Tir-na-thonn, that open now no more to any wandering wave!

It was from Ivor McLean, on that day, I heard the strange tale of his kinsman Murdoch, the tale of “The Ninth Wave” that I have told elsewhere. It was Padruic, however, who told me of the Sea-witch of Earraid.

“Yes,” he said, “I have heard of the uisge-each” (the sea-beast, sea-kelpie, or water-horse), “but I have never seen it with the eyes. My father and my brother knew of it. But this thing I know, and this what we call an-cailleach-uisge” (the siren or water-witch); “the cailliach, mind you, not the maighdeann-mhàra” (the mermaid), “who means no harm. May she hear my saying it! The cailliach is old and clad in weeds, but her voice is young, and she always sits so that the light is in the eyes of the beholder. She seems to him young also, and fair. She has two familiars in the form of seals, one black as the grave, and the other white as the shroud that is in the grave; and these sometimes upset a boat, if the sailor laughs at the uisge-cailliach’s song.

“A man netted one of those seals, more than a hundred years ago, with his herring-trawl, and dragged it into the boat; but the other seal tore at the net so savagely, with its head and paws over the bows, that it was clear no net would long avail. The man heard them crying and screaming, and then talking low and muttering, like women in a frenzy. In his fear he cast the nets adrift, all but a small portion that was caught in the thwarts. Afterwards, in this portion, he found a tress of woman’s hair. And that is just so: to the Stones be it said.

“The grandson of this man, Tomais McNair, is still living, a shepherd on Eilean-Uamhain, beyond Lunga in the Cairnburg Isles. A few years ago, off Callachan Point, he saw the two seals, and heard, though he did not see, the cailliach. And that which I tell you, – Christ’s Cross before me – is a true thing.”

All the time that Padruic was speaking I saw that Ivor McLean looked away: either as though he heard nothing, or did not wish to hear. There was dream in his eyes; I saw that, so said nothing for a time.

“What is it, Ivor?” I asked at last, in a low voice. He started, and looked at me strangely.

“What will you be asking that for? What are you doing in my mind, that is secret?”

“I see that you are brooding over something. Will you not tell me?”

“Tell her,” said Padruic quietly.

But Ivor kept silent. There was a look in his eyes which I understood. Thereafter we sailed on, with no word in the boat at all.

That night, a dark, rainy night it was, with an uplift wind beating high over against the hidden moon, I went to the cottage where Ivor McLean lived with his old deaf mother, – deaf nigh upon twenty years, ever since the night of the nights when she heard the women whisper that Callum, her husband, was among the drowned, after a death-wind had blown.

When I entered, he was sitting before the flaming coal-fire; for on Iona, now, by decree of MacCailin Mòr, there is no more peat burned.

“You will tell me now, Ivor?” was all I said.

“Yes; I will be telling you now. And the reason why I did not tell you before was because it is not a wise or a good thing to tell ancient stories about the sea while still on the running wave. Macrae should not have done that thing. It may be we shall suffer for it when next we go out with the nets. We were to go to-night: but no, not I, no, no, for sure, not for all the herring in the Sound.”

“Is it an ancient sgeul, Ivor?”

“Ay. I am not for knowing the age of these things. It may be as old as the days of the Féinn for all I know. It has come down to us. Alasdair MacAlasdair of Tiree, him that used to boast of having all the stories of Colum and Brighde, it was he told it to the mother of my mother, and she to me.”

“What is it called?”

“Well, this and that; but there is no harm in saying it is called the Dark Nameless One.”

“The Dark Nameless One!”

“It is this way. But will you ever have been hearing of the MacOdrums of Uist?”

“Ay: the Sliochd-nan-ròn.”

“That is so. God knows. The Sliochd-nan-ròn … the progeny of the Seal… Well, well, no man knows what moves in the shadow of life. And now I will be telling you that old ancient tale, as it was given to me by the mother of my mother.”

On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the Faoilleach Geamhraidh, the day that is called Am fheill Brighde.

The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying, and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the butterfly cleave its shroud.

Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.

“My blessing upon you, O Ròn,” he said with the good kind courteousness that was his.

“Droch spadadh ort,” answered the seal. “A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown.”

“Sure, now,” said Colum angrily, “I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint: and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear.”

“Well, well,” replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say: “Well, well, let that thing be: it’s a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now if it is a Druid you are, whether of Fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter.”

At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.

“It is a man you were once, O Ròn?”

“Maybe ay and maybe no.”

“And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north Isles you come?”

“That is a true thing.”

“Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan.”

“Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus.”

“A fitting name too,” said Colum the Holy, “because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end God has in store for you.”

At that Black Angus laughed.

“Why is there laughter upon you, Man-Seal?”

“Well, it is because of the good company I’ll be having. But, now, give me the word: are you for having seen or heard aught of a woman called Kirsteen McVurich?”

“Kirsteen – Kirsteen – that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!”

“Oh, a name here or a name there is soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?”

“No.”

“Then a stake for your belly, and the nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!”

And, with that, Black Angus louped into the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead against the cliff like a wind-spent mew.

Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. “God is good,” he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a fair sweet daisy into the grass, or a yellow bird rose up, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.

As he drew near to the House of God, he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient old race of the isles.

“Who is Kirsteen McVurich, Murtagh?” he asked.

“She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea.”

“And when was that?”

“Nigh upon a thousand years ago.”

At that, Colum stared in amaze. But Murtagh was a man of truth, nor did he speak in allegories. “Ay, Colum my father, nigh upon a thousand years ago.”

“But can mortal sin live as long as that?”

“Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisìn sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha De Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen McVurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-shore, and there he leaped upon her, and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea.”

“And is death above her now?”

“No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called an-Cailleach-uisge, the sea-witch.”

“Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?”

“It is the Doom. It is Adam’s first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks.”

“And who will he be?”

“His body is the body of Angus the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal he is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas.”

“Black Judas, Murtagh?”

“Ay, Black Judas, Colum.”

But with that, Ivor McLean rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a sea-mew that was like a human thing.

So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, “God be with us;” and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.