Drink Down the Moon Read online

  Drink Down the Moon

  Charles deLint

  Sun & fire & candlelight

  To all the world belong

  But the moon pale & the midnight

  Let these delight the strong.

  —Robin Williamson,

  from “By Weary Well”

  Where the wave of moonlight glosses

  We foot it all the night,

  Weaving olden dances,

  Mingling hands and mingling glances

  Till the moon has taken flight

  —W. B. Yeats,

  from “The Stolen Child”

  One

  The King of the Faeries was abroad that night— in a fiddle tune, if not literally.

  He slipped through the darkness in the 4/4 tempo of a slow reel, startled an owl in its perch, and crept through the trees to join the quiet murmur of the Rideau River as it quickened by Carleton University. At length, he came to the ears of a young woman who was sitting on the flat stones on the south bank of the river.

  The fiddle playing that tune had a mute on its bridge, substantially reducing the volume of the music, but it was still loud enough for the woman to lift her head and smile when she heard it. She knew that tune, if not the fiddler, and yet she had a sense of the fiddler as well. There was something— an echo of familiarity— that let her guess who it was, because she knew from whom he’d learned to play.

  Every good fiddler has a distinctive sound. No matter how many play the same tune, each can’t help but play it differently. Some might use an up stroke where another would a down. One might bow a series of quick single notes where another would play them all with one long draw of the bow. Some might play a double stop where others would a single string. If the listener’s ear was good enough, she could tell the difference. But you had to know the tunes, and the players, for the differences were minute.

  “There’s still a bit of you plays on, Old Tom,” she whispered to the night as she stood up to follow the music to its source.

  She was a small woman with brown hair cropped short to her scalp and a heart-shaped face. Her build was more wiry than slender; her features striking rather than handsome. She wore faded jeans, frayed at the back of the hems, sneakers, and a dark blue sweatshirt that was a size or so too big for her. Slipping through the trees, she moved so quietly that she found the fiddler and stood watching him for some time before he was aware of her presence.

  She knew him by sight as soon as she saw him— confirming her earlier guess. It was Old Tom’s grandson, Johnny Faw. He was a head taller than her own four foot eleven, the fiddle tucked under his clean-shaven chin, his head bent down over it as he drew the music from its strings. His hair was a darker brown than her own, an unruly thatch that hung over his shirt collar in back and covered his ears to just above his lobes. He wore brown corduroys and black Chinese rubber-soled slippers and a light blue shirt. The multi-coloured scarf around his neck and the gold loops glinting in each earlobe gave him the air of a Gypsy. His beat-up black fiddle case lay beside him with a brown quilted-cotton jacket lying next to it.

  She waited until the tune was done— “The King of the Fairies” having made way for a Scots reel called “Miss Shepherd’s”— and then stepped out into the little clearing where he sat playing. He looked up, startled at her soft hello and sudden appearance. As she sat down facing him, he took the fiddle from under his chin and held it and the bow on his lap.

  With the tunes stilled, a natural hush held the wooded acres of Vincent Massey Park. The quiet was broken only by the sound of distant traffic on Riverside Drive and, closer to where they were sitting, Heron Road, both thoroughfares hidden from their sight by the treed hills of the park. What they could see from their point of vantage, through a screen of other trees, were the lights of Carleton University across the river.

  They sat regarding each other for a long while, each one trying to read the other’s expression in the poor light.

  He was as handsome as Old Tom, she thought, studying the strong features that were so familiar because, like the fiddling, they reminded her of his grandfather. Some might say he was a bit too thin, but who was she to talk?

  “I didn’t think anyone would come,” he said suddenly.

  “I didn’t know I was invited.”

  “No. I mean

  “

  She took pity as he grew flustered.

  “I know,” she said. “The tune was supposed to call me.”

  He nodded.

  “And it did— for here I am. I’m sorry about Old Tom, Johnny. We all loved him. I know he stopped coming to see us, but some of us didn’t forget him. We went and saw him, once in a while, but it was hard to do.”

  “I hated that place, too,” Johnny said, “but it got to the point where I couldn’t take care of him anymore. I wanted to, but he needed more than I could give. A nurse on twenty-four-hour call. Somebody to always sit with him. I couldn’t afford to hire anyone. I have trouble just paying the rent as it is.”

  “We asked him to stay with us,” she said, “but he wouldn’t come.”

  “He could be pretty stubborn.”

  She smiled. “I’m not stubborn,” she said in an excellent mimicry of Old Tom’s voice. “I just know what’s right.”

  “He used that argument on me, too,” Johnny said with a grin.

  They were both quiet for a long moment, then the woman stood. Johnny quickly put his fiddle and bow in their case and stood with her.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “I have to go. I only came because

  ” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged. “For old times’ sake.”

  “You can’t go yet.”

  “But I can’t stay.”

  “Why not? I mean, it’s just

  Who are you? How did you know Tom? How do you know me?”

  She smiled. “I’ve seen you with Old Tom— and he talked to me about you.”

  “Before he died, he told me to come here and play that tune— ‘The King of the Fairies’— but he wouldn’t say why. ‘They’ll come,’ he said, and that’s all he’d say. So I played the tune and now here we are, but I don’t know why.”

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  Johnny nodded. “I went to see him just about every day.”

  “We’ll miss him, too.”

  As she turned to go, Johnny caught her arm, surprised at the hardness of her muscles.

  “Please,” he said. “Just tell me: Why would you come here when that tune’s played? Who are you?”

  “We knew each other a long time ago,” she said. “Old Tom and I. That’s what I always called him— even back then— because he never seemed young. But he and I didn’t wear our years the same and it bothered him. We didn’t see him much for a while and then, when he married your grandmother, we didn’t see him at all— not for years. Not until she died. Then he came back, looking for what he’d lost, I suppose, and we were still here. But it wasn’t the same. It’s never the same.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Johnny said. “How could you know him before he met Gran? You don’t look any older than I am.”

  A strange uneasiness was settling in the pit of his stomach. The feeling of being lost that had come over him since his grandfather had died intensified, leaving him with the sensation of being cut off from the rest of the world, from history, from everything that was, except for this moment.

  “I know,” she said. “It bothered Old Tom, too.”

  “You’re confusing me. How can

  ?”

  But his voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to ask anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to confuse you.” She loosened his fingers from her arm. “You can call me Fiain
a.”

  His hand fell limply to his side when she let it go. She reached up and brushed his cheek with the backs of her fingers.

  “It’s hard for me to ignore the music,” she explained, “but I can’t go through it all again, Johnny. Be well. Be good at everything you do. And especially keep the strings of your fiddle ringing— that keeps Old Tom alive, you know. He’s in your music, because it’s from him that you learned it.”

  She dropped her hand and stepped back.

  “Now I do have to go.”

  Johnny took a half-step towards her, but kept his distance, not wanting to scare her off.

  “What

  what sort of a person are you, Fiaina?” he asked.

  A look came to her face that was both merry and sad. She reached into her pocket and took out a small object that gleamed white in the starlight before she pressed it into his hand.

  “We call ourselves sidhe,” she said. “But you know us better as faerie.”

  And then she was gone.

  She didn’t step away into the trees. She never moved. One moment her fingers were light on his palm; the next she had disappeared.

  Johnny stared at the spot where she had vanished, not sure what had happened. He took a step or two forward, moving his hands through the air, half-expecting to come into contact with her, but the little glade was empty except for him. The feeling in the pit of his stomach grew stronger. The sense of dislocation intensified. He looked down at what he held in his hand.

  It was a small piece of flat bone, no longer than an inch and a half, carved into the shape of a fat fiddle. He turned it over in his fingers, feeling its smoothness. There was a tiny hole where the fiddle’s scroll would have been if it was a real instrument— to hang it from a thong, he supposed.

  He closed his fingers around it and slowly sat down. She couldn’t have just vanished. It had to be this weird feeling he had— like he had the flu or something. Because people didn’t just vanish.

  We call ourselves sidbe

  but you know us better as faerie

  .

  Faerie. Right.

  It had to be a joke, only how had she pulled off that vanishing trick? For a moment he thought of picking up his fiddle and playing the tune again, but he knew without trying that it wouldn’t work a second time.

  Not tonight.

  It might never work again.

  He swallowed dryly and gave the bone fiddle another look. The sense of dislocation was beginning to fade, finally, but he didn’t feel any better. Something had happened here, something strange, and it left him uneasy. If it had been a trick, then what was the point of it? And if it hadn’t

  what did it mean?

  Faerie. We call ourselves

  But that was even more preposterous.

  His hand started to tremble. He thrust the little carving into his pocket. She’d been touching his hand, and then she’d just vanished. How could she have done that? Nobody could move that fast.

  Nobody human, he thought, but firmly pushed that thought away.

  He studied his surroundings, the dark trees, the empty glade, waiting for someone to jump out and cry, “April fool!” Except it wasn’t April. Though maybe he was a fool.

  A shiver went through him and he put on his jacket. Picking up his fiddle case, he gave the spot where his mysterious visitor had vanished a last quick glance, then hurried off down the paved bike path that would take him by Billings Bridge Plaza to Bank Street.

  They stood in Faerie— a half-step sideways from the world as Johnny Faw saw it— and watched him go. The woman who had named herself Fiaina had been joined by two others.

  One was a small old man, shorter than her by a few inches, bewhiskered and thatch-haired, with a dried apple of a face. He wore a blue jacket over brown trousers and shirt, small leather boots that laced up, and a large, wide-brimmed hat with a three-cornered crown. His name was Dohinney Tuir.

  The other was taller than either of them— a stocky, muscular woman with a blue-black mane of hair. There was a certain equine set to her features, accentuated by her broad flat nose, the wide set of her dark eyes, and the squareness of her jaw. Her name was Loireag and there was nothing but the wind between the night air and her ebony skin.

  “You answer to ‘Fiaina’?” Loireag asked the first woman. There was a bite of gentle humour in her voice as she spoke. “There’s a new one.”

  “You’re not the only one can claim that name, Jenna,” Dohinney Tuir added.

  Jenna shrugged. “It wasn’t a lie. I’ve been called wild before, and worse. I wasn’t about to give him a true name— not even a speaking one.”

  “And if he goes out some night calling for Fiaina?” Tuir asked. “Arn knows what’ll come in answer.”

  Jenna looked up to where Arn hung in the sky— a round full moon, deep with mystery.

  “I gave him a charm,” she said.

  “Oh, yes!” Loireag broke in with a whinnying laugh. “And Arn knows what that’ll call to him.”

  “Nothing unsainly— that much I can guarantee.”

  “Nothing evil, perhaps,” Tuir agreed, “but maybe the Pook of Puxill?”

  Jenna sighed and looked away from her companions.

  “I’ve had too many tadpoles in my pond,” she said. “I’ve neither the time nor the heart for yet another.”

  Tuir nodded knowingly. “It’s no comfort watching them wither away and die in the blink of an eye— I’ll give you that.”

  “I still can’t understand why you bother with them in the first place,” Loireag added. “They’ve no stamina.”

  “They shine so brightly,” Jenna said. “It’s that light in them that always draws me. They’re here and gone so quick that they have to burn brightly, or not be seen at all.”

  “How can you miss them?” Loireag asked. “Set a pair of them down any place and quicker than you can blink, you’ll be up to your ears in them. They breed like rabbits.”

  “They are a lusty race,” Jenna said with a smile.

  Loireag snorted. “Give me a hob any day. At least they last the whole night.”

  She grinned at Tuir, who was puffing up his chest at her words.

  “When they’re not too old, that is,” she added.

  The little man lost his breath, chest sagging, and scowled at her.

  “If he comes again,” he said, turning to Jenna, “will you answer his call?”

  She shook her head. “I won’t be here to answer any calls. I gave him the charm, the same one Old Tom had before him, only Tom returned it to me. Johnny Faw can either follow where it will lead him, or not— it’s his to choose.”

  “You’re still going, then?” Loireag asked.

  “Someone has to— if there’s to be a rade at all this year.”

  All three of them were quiet then, thinking of how long it had been since the fiaina had gathered for the luck rade.

  The fiaina sidhe were solitary faerie, not aligned with either the Seelie or Unseelie Courts, and got their luck in ways different from those of their gentrified cousins. They gathered, once a moon, to ride a long and winding way through the land, following old straight tracks and other moonroads in single file. This was how they got their luck. There was something in the long winding file of faerie, following those roads with the full moon shining above them

  . Some combination of it all made the luck grow strong in them, recharging them like batteries.

  Without it, they diminished. Their magics weakened. They faded.

  Last autumn there had been a struggle between the two Courts, a struggle that the Seelie faerie won. The Wild Hunt had been freed from centuries of bondage, the Gruagagh of Kinrowan had given his Tower to a Jack, and the Unseelie Court was cast to the winds— many of them slain. The weeks following that time, from Samhaine into Midwinter, had been a period of change. The Seelie Court settled back into its old familiar ways, the Wild Hunt was gone— Arn knew where— and the Unseelie Court slowly began to regroup and gather into new alliances.
>
  The fiaina sidhe, never ones to join either Court, had stood back and watched it all.

  The closest they came to a communal effort was their rade, for solitary or not, all faerie followed the Moonmother Arn and she had imbued even the fiaina with a certain sociability— even if it was only realized once every four weeks when Arn turned a new face to the world below. So they had gone about their own ways until they realized that something was taking advantage of the upset in the balance between the two faerie Courts to make inroads into the Borderlands that the fiaina claimed for their own.

  Old haunts were found deserted of their inhabitants. Here a hob was found slain, stripped of his blue coat and stitcheries. There a derrie-down was taken from her river holt, lying stretched out and dead on the shore. And the rade was disrupted, time and again.

  When they gathered for their rade, a foul wind with the smell of old graves would rise to hang about them. Clouds would cloak the moon’s face. Whisperings and ugly mutterings could be heard all around them, but nothing was seen. And Jenna Pook, the Pook of Puxill who led the rade, who alone knew the twists and turns of the old tracks and moonroads, would find her mind fogged and clouded until she was too confused to take a step.

  As their luck faded, many of the fiaina sidhe fell back from their old haunts in the Borderlands, faring deeper into their secret territories to come no more to the gatherings. Where the Courts would band together in a time of crisis, the fiaina withdrew as though it was a disease that beset them and they might catch it if they came too close to each other.

  Too proud to go to their cousins for help, and unwilling to pay what that help would cost them, there were still a few fiaina who were determined to stand up to whatever it was that threatened them. Foremost of them was the Pook who led the rade.

  As though sensing that she was its greatest danger, the enemy concentrated on her. More nights than one she’d spent fleeing

  something. She had no clear picture of what it was that chased her. Sometimes she thought it was a black dog, other times a black horse. Sometimes it came upon her so quickly that she barely escaped. Other times it merely crept up on her like a mist, or a tainted smell. It was only constant vigilance that kept her free of its clutches.