Don’t Sing Tam Lin

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“I wonder still how David could endure the heat of it.”

 

This story first appeared in the SH zine, When Lightning Strikes, produced in 2002 by Idiot Triplets Press.

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On a bright fall morning when I was just a child–ah, now it seems farther away than the years that have passed, truly another century. And I am not one of those who always say “the nineteenth century” as if I could not very well remember it, as if the whole of the world had changed with the change in the calendar. But my own life, yes, that seems to have eras, and that’s a strange and remote one to me.

In that other life of childhood, then, with the sun falling on the dying leaves and grass like gold, one day I sat balancing one round stone upon another. I was determined they should make a tower though they kept on falling. Then a shadow fell over me, and I looked up. To a girl crouched in the scraggly fall grass, the man standing before me seemed very tall indeed. His hair was curly and dark, his eyes were blue, and there was nothing I could have picked out that showed he was a foreigner. But I knew, even before he opened his mouth to speak, and then the awkwardness of his Irish confirmed it.

“Yes, Mum’s inside,” I said and looked back at the tower, certain he would go. But instead, he crouched down, rocking back on limber heels.

I glanced at him under my lashes, sideways. My hand must have stirred, for the two rocks I had managed to stack fell apart, and the one in my hand dropped too. I scrabbled them back together, and he turned his head, then made a long arm to get another rock, and yet another, between his long fingers. “Try these,” he said. “They’re flatter.”

I hesitated, and he held them closer to me. I tucked down my chin and took one of the stones between the very tips of my fingers, then lifted it. Put it down and then put one of the others on it. Next to the round-topped stone I’d had at the base, this was sturdy as a wall. I took the other rock from his hand and smiled at him, just a little.

“What are you making?”

“A faery rath.”

He grinned with all his teeth showing, like no one I had seen before, grown-up or child. “I knew I’d found the right place.”

My mother’s voice called, “Teresa!” and I stood, the man following. “Teresa, come here!” I went, and was glad enough to put my chilled hand in a fold of her skirt and hang on while she spoke to the man.

“A pretty name for a pretty child,” said he, smiling at me again.

“A good saint’s name,” answered my mother.

I barely paid attention as they talked, looking my fill at the mobile face so different from the men I knew. It was enough for me to realise he was staying for a while, would take the room my mother had decorated for a guest though we’d had none yet. She had thought–as she told me when I’d an age to hear it–there might be an English girl like the one in the next village, the one who gathered flowers and dried them from the rafters in a way which drove her hostess Bridget O’Driscoll mad, or hikers like those who stopped in Ian Moynihan’s house from time to time throughout the summer. But here it was the early days of autumn, and the man was here. David was the name we used. His other was so outlandish that I never learnt it.

She’d no reason to refuse, and so she did not. He was harmless, if eccentric. Day after day, he poked about asking everyone to tell him stories and sing him the old songs, and then he wrote them down. He seemed to like to play with my toys nearly as much as I did; he walked abroad while I wandered with the goats all day long, and them grazing on scratchy gorse and grass as dry as hay. The evenings, he sometimes spent writing, or sometimes he read the stories back to us. “These Irish Sidhe are so different to the English faeries,” he said to my mother, eager and young. To be frank, she cared nothing for his scholarship; nor did I. I cared for the stories themselves, the way my ears rang and the fire danced with images of heroes and kings, weeping queens and the tall, bright, mysterious Sidhe.

I loved best the stories of changelings and those mortals the faeries took–of Thomas Rhymer, the poet who said he’d been captive of the faeries for years and escaped only narrowly with his son, whom the Faerie Queen his mother would have stolen back again but that Thomas had seen to the child’s baptism; of Tam Lin, the knight in thrall to the faeries who would have been tithed to Hell had not his mortal lover Janet held him tight in her arms and saved him; of Cormac mac Art who sold his family all unwitting, for a magical bauble, and then went into the faery lands to recover them. I passed the days as if living in daylight were a chore, waiting only for the evenings when David would tell us the tales he’d collected.

I was late coming home one day–at this season the dark fell fast and early, and I had to keep my eyes on the dim ground to walk. Following the goats was no good way to go, as they were far more surefooted than I in my wood-soled shoes. We were at the gate before I saw the door was cracked open, a line of rosy light spilling out.

David had never come home, and after my mother scolded me for my own absence, I could see by her agitated movement around the cot kitchen that she was worried. She talked to me about men who forgot the time chattering with other idlers, men who sat too long over their whiskey and ended up asleep on the floor of a public house and sick as a dog with it the next morning…or fallen in a ditch and catching their deaths….

I didn’t remember my father, not really, but sometimes I had a moment’s sharp vision of lamplight and bedclothes, sweat beading on a pale face, cracked dry lips moving, staring still eyes. When Mum said that about David catching his death out in the night, I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped both arms round them. And then she sat down too, beside me on the settle, held on to me, rocked me a little.

In the morning his bed was still empty. I left with the goats again, and when I came back he was still gone. No one had seen him in the village or on any of the farms, or walking as he well liked to do, upon the rough, wild hills. Days made a week, weeks made a month, and still he did not return. Gossip ran round the village. But no one knew the truth of it, and so the talk died down. I and my mother packed up David’s books and papers and clothes. He got a letter from his friend in Dublin, the one he’d sent his songs and stories to. Father Tom wrote back for us, to the address on the envelope, and when the answer came, he read it to my mother. She came back looking tired. I didn’t ask questions.

We packed his papers and clothes. No one else boarded with us.

***

I grew, and my mother and I took in more washing, bought a sheep and then another, spun and knit the wool they gave us. I let down my skirts and put up my hair, and told the grocer’s man Jack no, and no again. None of the young men of the village pleased me. I dreamed of going away, a far, far way–Dublin, or London, or the moon, or the land of the Fair Folk–it was all one to me so long as it was away. When I was not spinning or knitting or washing or the other thousand tasks of the house, I walked alone on the hills, gorse and bracken pulling at my skirts. Dreaming.

People began to say sadly to my mother, and then to me, that I was shaping for an old maid, and what a waste it was. Jack stopped asking and married Kathleen the wheelwright’s daughter. She told me far more than it pleased me to know of the hardships of a married woman’s bed.

So, yes indeed, I agreed there was too much waste in life, for here I was burning with longing to do and be and love, and no one to turn to that didn’t remind me far too forcibly of Jack. I grew old enough to recognize the same loneliness in my mother’s eyes, too, but what was to be done? Nothing I knew of.

***

After a long dull day in summer, about nine or ten of the evening, when supper was eaten and cleared away but while sun still lay bright on the hilltops, I went out for another walk, and wandered far. I went down into a little hollow I didn’t properly recognize, and then heard a commotion up above, the like of nothing I’d ever heard before even when the gypsies came. So I came cautiously up in the lee of a bush, to see.

A brace of tall horses stood tossing their proud heads, and a brace of beings with them that I couldn’t even call men and women, so fierce and fair and wild they were. Their hair streamed down and their voices rose, and their eyes blazed blue as the sky but far stranger.

One tall creature, male by his bare chest, bent low with a curled body in his arms. He laid his burden gently down, resting one large, pale hand upon the motionless dark head. You know how sun sits on the water, not still but not moving, fey and fell–that was the color of his hair. He wore little else: a hide kilt with a silver pin shaped in the curve of the moon, and another moon and star in the hollow of his throat. The chain they hung from was fine as a silk thread. He had feathers and beads in the braids hanging over his shoulder, and flat half-circles of silver below his ears. The pink lips worked, as sensitive as a child’s and as full as a woman’s. He made no sound.

He was so near to where I stood concealed that I could smell the sharp herb-like scent of his sweat and see the glint of his lashes as he blinked, all his attention on the still body I had not yet truly looked at. He fingered the other’s hair, stroked the hidden cheek with the tips of his fingers and then the backs. The others were like statues, and even the birds had fallen silent. I must have taken too deep a breath or moved from one foot to the other, for he looked over his shoulder and into my eyes.

His own were so blue, so bright, that it took me an extra moment to see the flat dark stretch sideways in the candle of his eye, like a goat’s narrow pupil. So strange it was that I gasped, and the others cried out and raised their bright strange blades and spears. I hate to think what might have happened to me then, but that the lord I faced shook his head and called out something in response, one hand raised. His voice was like velvet on stone, like the rough tongue of a cat, like the buffet of a strong warm wind. There was not a word of it that I could understand, but the others lowered their weapons and only glared at me.

Then he turned back and bent his head once more over the still figure on the ground. I heard the soft rumble of his speech; he folded himself down to touch his face to the other’s, perhaps even to kiss, though that I could not see past the curtain of his hair, and he stayed thus for several moments while the low sun burned like a blush on my skin.

Then he rose fluidly, gave one last glance at me, and then strode to the one riderless horse, seeming to leap onto its back. All the Fair Ones whirled and galloped away. I scrambled, heedless of my bare arms and tangled skirts, but by the time I reached the higher ground they had vanished, gone like smoke.

I looked down at the huddled figure, in a bed of greenery as soft and fragrant as the herb garden of a rich house, not at all like the gorse and rough grass elsewhere on the hill.

And I knew his face.

It had been so long–eleven years? Thirteen? I was not even sure–that I had to sit on the ground and think back hard to know who he was. David. And though he’d been an adult when I was a child, he was not middle-aged now–no, he had as much a sheen of youth on him, nearly as magical a grace, as the Sidhe who’d left him on the cold hillside.

The wind was chill, now, and the shadows long. I reached timidly for his shoulder, clad in ordinary linen–grasped it, shook it back and forth, and at last he stirred. He smiled first, then opened his eyes, then sat up all in a movement, looking around and in back and around again. And then he closed his eyes, tightly, and sat as if turned to stone. His grief was so strong and so plainly written on the still face that I said nothing, crouching in the grass, my hands clenching on helplessness and the wool of my skirt.

But we could not stay on the hill the night long, no matter what grief the poor man felt, so I said, “David?” and his eyes flew open. It was obvious he’d not the slightest idea who I was, and I had little more notion how to explain or whether I should, or even if he could understand mere mortal Irish after the time he’d been in … the other place.

But he did speak, and I knew the word, though surely his voice had not been so hoarse and rough before, as if he’d half forgotten the use of it. “Where–” he said, and paused as if even he heard how strange he sounded. “What–”

“Come with me,” I said simply, holding out my hand and rising slowly to my feet. He placed his fingers into my palm and got the length of himself upright, following me down the hill as if he hardly expected to be able to do so. Dazed. The only time I’d ever seen anything like it was when the Cadhains’ cot burned down, and Anne Cadhain down the road at our place the whole while. She went home, we all still in ignorance, and finding nothing there but ash and smoke–and the dead–turned back. She knocked at our door, and I opened it. Her face was as blank as a wall of fog, even as the tears ran down it.

The expression of someone who has seen the end of the world.

I took him home and past my mother’s astonishment, which I think he hardly saw. I was too amazed myself to tell her anything but the truth, and though she looked oddly at me, she didn’t question it. After all, there the man was, who had been her own age and now was closer to mine. Or looked it, as she had taken on weight, and her hair had gone gray as well. I’d hardly noticed until I had David to compare her to.

While he sat beside the fire, we made up the room he’d used all those years ago, which had been a store-room since. Mother gave him some of the supper stew. He held the bowl and scooped up one spoonful after another, with little enthusiasm and less talk, but he did eat it. I steered him to the basin and ewer to clean himself; my mother showed him the room; he went to bed without further help, and I suppose he slept for a time.

***

He never told us very much. I think my mother didn’t mind, and I know I did not. He stayed close to our cot for nearly a week, then went to the village to send messages to those who had known him before he came here. I thought he would return to them, but he did not, or even move out of our spare room. Instead, he began to help with the household work. He learned to shear the sheep, and when money was sent him from some foreign parts, he bought us a cow.

We lived quietly, as my mother and I always had. David never asked anyone for stories or songs now, but he still walked long in the hills when his work was done.

I wondered if he would marry my mother; I wondered if he would ask me. But neither happened. When Anne or Mhaire or Dierdre or some other of the women after church asked, I shrugged as if I didn’t care one way or another. In a way I did not.

Anne, who had gone to live with her sister’s kin by marriage in the village, died of ague and long grief in late August. We all three walked down the long road to the wake, held in that very public house where my mother thought David had lain the night through, so long ago. There were few of Anne’s own blood left, and my mother sat on the mourners’ bench near the coffin, with Anne’s other close friends. David went into the taproom with the men, and I sat in a corner with other younger women, next to Kathleen, who was pregnant again.

David came in and out, as did a few of the other men, bringing drinks to their mothers or wives.

People talked a great deal, sang a bit, dozed off from time to time. Kathleen, who had a fine sweet voice for the church choir or a child’s lullaby, led a few songs. Her little boy Sean crawled onto her lap, and she rocked him and sang old ballads, more softly as the hours passed. “Oh, I forbid you, maidens all, that wear gold in your hair,” she sang, “to come or go by Carterhall, for young Tam Lin is there.”

I leaned back against the wall behind our bench and listened, looking with pleasure at the candle-light on the two auburn heads. Prettier hair than my dim smoke-brown, surely.

“If my love were an earthly knight, as he’s an elfin gray, I would no’ give me own true love for any lord ye ha’e.”

Sometimes, I thought idly, she tried too hard to sound like the Scotswoman we’d learned the song from, a distant cousin who’d been all the way to America and back to Ireland, and was now perhaps in London.

“The steed my true love rides on is lighter than the wind. Wi’ silver is he shod before, with burning gold behind.”

There was a crash near the door, and I started to my feet, with a number of the others. There under the stares of half the village stood David, pale and still, a glass broken between his feet and the drink it had held splashed all up and down his legs.

But it was the look on his face–or rather the lack of a look on his face–that made me go to him. I knelt and picked up the larger pieces of the glass. As I finished, I felt him touch my head, just lightly.

“Little flower,” he said, which was a joke he made sometimes about my name. But he didn’t sound as if he were joking this time.

“Where is Rafferty that he didn’t hear his own glass break?” I asked, standing. “He’s the one should have a towel for you. Go on, now.” I gave him a little push on the shoulder, and he went without another word.

I threw the glass away. When I got back, the rest of the mess had been cleared up. I sat beside Kathleen again, and she with her boy still in her arms. “Sing something else, for the love of God,” I told her. And she did, eyeing me the while.

***

We dragged ourselves slowly back to our cot, after the funeral. Mum was stiff and I was weary to my bones, and David was sad if he was not tired. The afternoon seemed long, as we did chores we normally did in the morning. It would be some while before the cow forgave us our neglect. At last it was night, and we three ready for our beds.

I crawled into mine, I know, and fell gratefully asleep, expecting nothing more than to find the day come when I next opened my eyes.

But in fact I started awake in the dark. Blinking, I looked into the black room round me and felt my heart race. It was the door I had heard, closing with its customary thump that I had never heard at such a time of night before. I got up, put on shoes and a shawl, and went to see what creature had got in.

None. The kitchen looked just as usual. The fire was nearly out, and only dull flickers of light moved on the floor. I went to the door, which was unlatched, and eased it open. Nothing on the step either. No sound from within–it seemed neither my mother nor David had been disturbed by the noise.

I went out. The cow byre, the shed, the sheepfold, all were dark blotches around me, while the sky was spattered with stars as bright as the broken glass at the wake. I could not remember the last time I had been awake at such an hour. The moon was full, flat and pale like a plate, near the horizon.

Something moved at the edge of my sight, and I turned to see a figure walking. I knew it for David instantly, which solved the mystery of the door.

I went to him. He took my hand, squeezing hard, as if he’d been waiting for me. “Let’s walk,” he said, so we left the yard and clambered awkwardly up the hill. It was hard not being able to see where I was setting my feet. I nearly turned my ankle on more than one stone. I had no idea where we were going, so I just let David lead me. I suppose I thought we were simply moving to keep his mind off whatever had taken him out of bed and into the night.

We walked for what seemed a long time, and I began to wonder if we would be able to find our way back home, when David was ready to go, and however on Earth I was to get through the next day’s work when I was already so weary. Then we stopped, on a hill that was, so far as I could tell, exactly like any other. But David crouched and put both hands into the growth there, and then I could smell the herby richness of it and knew where we were.

“Oh, my dear,” I said.

I am not sure he heard me, or that when he spoke it was for me to hear. “I am no Thomas Rhymer,” he said. “My lord never told me to be silent about what I saw … in that place … he had no need to.” After a longer pause, “I have no words. No gift for them.”

The wind lifted my hair and I remembered the Sidhe, the mad eyes of the horse and of the company with their knives and spears. Their lord’s long grace and solid limbs, the fall of gold over his shoulder. The tenderness with which he had touched David.

I asked low, “Was it not like the stories, then?”

He shook his head. Then, turning, he sat there, where the lord of the Sidhe had put him, and I sank down too with my nightgown wrapped round me. He spoke slowly, as if the words hurt him to say. “It’s like a dream now. All quick and bright and shapeless. But for him. The food–it’s different–and I couldn’t do as they did … so he fed me with his hands. And he led me in their dances, and when I could not see properly. Spoke to me even without speaking. I can’t, can’t explain.” He swallowed and turned his head away.

“Why,” I asked, curiosity compelling me more even than pity, “why did you–” but the bleak face he turned to me made that question nonsense. “Why did he bring you back?”

“I think.” But he shook his head, as if he did not think it. Then, harshly, he spoke again. “You remember Tam Lin.”

“I do that,” I said, but he went on as if I had not said so.

“He was taken by the Queen of Faery and lived as her servant and lover until the tithe was due, the tithe to Hell. One soul every seven years. To be saved, he had to return to the mortal world, his mortal wife. I’m thinking–I think sometimes–perhaps that isn’t just a human fancy. Something like that, he would have saved me from. He would have given me up for that ….”

Or, I thought, for any other faery reason, for how could a mortal know anything those weird eyes saw or understand the thought behind them? But I said nothing, and David rubbed his face with both hands; his body drew into a ball of misery and he hid his face in his arms.

No, he was no bard and no fortune teller like Thomas Rhymer; there would never be a ballad of David, stolen by the Sidhe and returned to the human world. Beside me was only a man whom a great grief drove to tell stories within his own mind. My own heart ached, and I put one hand on his shoulder.

Before I understood his movement, his arms were round me and his face pressed into the curve of my neck. We clung together, and I murmured something, trying to comfort, but he said never a word. When his lips moved, it was not to speak again.

I had cause to be grateful for the patch of soft herbs under me. Gorse would have scratched right through the cloth of my nightgown.

***

Still we did not marry, or even speak of doing so. Something in me still held David a visitor, dearly loved but never completely at home. He was gentle with me, but so he was with my mother–so he was with the animals, come to that. And as we never talked overmuch, it never occurred to me to tell him when my woman’s courses did not come. Though I was usually regular, it was no great matter to stray from my cycle once. So I told myself.

Now it was near to the end of October. The shed was full of hay and turnips. The sheep were growing thicker wool; the heat of the cow’s byre in the morning, when I went to milk her, was a pleasant thing, especially when I felt bloated and sick to my stomach. The smell of the milk and the manure was terrible to me, though. Many a morning, I fled from the cow’s side to vomit behind the byre.

David was eating as little as I in the mornings, and though my own appetite generally returned later in the day, his did not. He lost weight. My mother scolded him fondly, and was so busy over him that she spared little thought for me.

I kept remembering “Tam Lin.” His mistress Janet was pregnant, too.

David still walked at night, though not every night. I got up sometimes and went with him, and at other times stayed in my bed. We never touched in my bedroom or in his; rarely anywhere. It was getting far too cold to make love on the hillside.

And when I thought so, I had to wonder whether it was love he’d made, when he had touched me. I wanted it to be. I wished for it, as I had wished to find a destiny far from this barren place.

One night I went out, not even knowing for certain whether he had left the cot before me. I was far wiser now about walking in the dark, knew the smoothest path to go, and I went as fast as it made sense to do. It was Halloween. As the song said, “The night is Halloween, lady, the morn is Hallowday. Then win me, win me, an’ you will, for well I wot you may.”

Janet, the woman in the song, had done this. Tam Lin had asked her to. “Just at the mirk and midnight hour, the faery folk will ride, and they that would their true-love win, at Miles Cross they must bide.” I sang under my breath as I climbed.

David had not asked me anything. I tried not to think of that.

“They’ll turn me in your arms, lady, into an esk and adder. But hold me fast, and fear me not, I am your baby’s father.”

That he was. And ahead of me now was the hill where the herbs grew. Though it was no crossroads, I thought it must be the right place to wait tonight. And now it seemed to glow, to have a light hanging in the air as of a host of fireflies or a special fall of starlight.

I circled round, and when I neared the top of the hill, I was behind the same bush where I had hidden before.

There I found so nearly the same scene that it took my breath away. I had wondered, I had thought it would likely be so, but when I saw the furious beauty of the Sidhe burning like a bonfire, I realized that some part of me had never quite believed what I remembered.

David was there. He was sitting in the patch of herbs, and as the company of light reached him, he stood up, gazing into the face of the leader.

The creature had a spear in one hand and a round basket full of greenstuff tucked in the other arm, so how he managed that spirited horse I do not know. There was no rein or bridle, but when the Sidhe lord looked down at David, the horse stopped instantly, blew through its nose, then shook its head.

I dashed out, one hand a fist in the cloth of my skirt, and threw myself at David, clutching him round the body.

He didn’t change into anything.

“Teresa,” he said, “little flower, whatever are you doing here?” His hand was in my hair, and he sounded happy, so I looked up expecting to see at least the affection he’d shown me every day.

But his eyes were on the faery creature on the horse.

I looked at him too, full in the face, though I feared him as much as death. The strange blue goat’s eyes stared back, and the pink mouth smiled. There was no compassion in him anywhere, nothing I could recognize as love, and yet David was like a lamp, who had been dark and silent as the grave these recent days.

Perhaps I might have held him. Perhaps Janet’s Tam Lin did not love the Queen of Faery. Perhaps Thomas Rhymer was glad to come back to earth, though he told the story he had been oath-bound to keep to himself.

But I was in no ballad, so I let go and stepped back.

How lightly he moved, who had trudged from byre to cot, from hill to village. He stepped forward, lifting his hands, his whole body pleading. The fey fair thing on the horse flung basket and spear away, stretching out both hands to David in return. Their fingers intertwined, their hands clenched tight, and with a scramble, David mounted the horse while it stood still as a tree. He straddled the withers, facing the Sidhe, and braced both hands against the planes of his lord’s chest as if to hold him off. They gazed into each other’s eyes.

I remembered the dark wells of human pain and affection, humor and sweetness and puzzlement, that David’s eyes could be. How could that strange pale gaze see him as I did?

Or did it see more of him for that very strangeness?

David’s hands slid slowly upward, to collarbone, to shoulders, and then up the long neck, under the hair and hanging earrings. He cupped his lord’s face in his darker hands, thumbs reaching the ends of that soft and curving mouth, fingers lost in the golden hair. Then the man I thought I’d known pulled that proud Faery head forward, leaned in, and kissed his lord full on the mouth. Once, and again, and more slowly than he ever had with me, his eyes closed and a look on his face I shall never forget. The Faery’s arms closed round him and they twined together as a good yarn does on the spindle. David lay his head upon his lord’s shoulder; the Sidhe looked upward, holding even the sky still for a long instant.

All I could do was watch, the child heavy in my womb, the heart heavier still in my chest.

The horse changed from a statue to a whirlwind, and was off so fast that I hardly saw it go. The other Sidhe turned and rode more slowly down the hill. The last, a young female with eyes more sea-green than blue, paused beside me a moment and held out a sprig of some plant I did not recognize, so silvery-green it blazed. Then she too was gone, and I held a dry sprig of rue in my mortal hand.

There was nothing to do but go home.

Rue makes a woman miscarry, which might have been why the faery woman gave it to me, but I had no mind to lose the child. I bore it, and when she proved to be a girl, I named her Janet.

We moved to Dublin, where I called myself a widow. There are Irish widows enough, to be sure. And I surely felt bereft, not just of the man but of the world I’d lived in, the sins and virtues I’d known. That’s what the old women telling tales or mothers crooning songs will never know. Even the city poets with their talk of the new century, even Lady Gregory in her castle, sending young men like David to gather old tales from simple folk–neither their knowledge nor their visions can compass the storm-flash of the Sidhe: fairer than light, swifter than thought, terrible with the shock of too much beauty. They break the world and leave it in shards at one’s feet. They burn the heart.

I wonder still how David could endure the heat of it.