Peter Beagle - Tamsin

The Huntsmen didn’t do anything. They sat their horses and stared at Tamsin, and not one head turned when Edric Davies walked between them to her side. I’d lost sight of him when the Pooka dumped me, so I’m not sure exactly where he’d been, but I can tell you that he walked as though he were afraid the planet would buck him off at any moment, back into the sky. Tamsin hadn’t glanced at me once in all this time, but Edric did as he passed me; and although he looked like an entire train wreck all by himself, he winked at me! He winked , and I saw what it was that Tamsin had loved three centuries ago. She took her eyes off the Wild Hunt for the first time, and she and Edric stood there looking at each other, and they didn’t say a thing. Not a hello, not a cry of pain or sympathy, no apologies—not one single word of love. They just looked , and if somebody ever looks at me the way the ghost of Edric Davies looked at the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, that’ll be all right. It won’t happen, but at least I’ll know it if I see it.

By and by, Tamsin turned her attention back to the Huntsmen. “We will go,” she said, haughty as could be. “You will pursue Edric Davies no further, nor me neither. You have no power here. Go back to your home beyond the winds—go back to the bowels of the skies and trouble us no more. Hear me, you!” And she stamped forward, right at them, and swung her arms the way Sally does when she’s shooing Mister Cat out of the kitchen.

For one crazy minute, I thought she was going to get away with it. The Wild Huntsmen seemed paralyzed, in a funny sort of way: They might almost have been human, ordinary Dorset people, sitting their shuffling horses in the rain, sneaking sideways peeks at each other to see if anyone had a clue about what they ought to be doing next. A couple of them even backed away, just a step, but that’s how close she came. I really thought she’d make it.

Then Judge Jeffreys screamed.

You wouldn’t have thought that soft, scratchy voice—a dead man’s voice—could make that sound. He was hanging in the air over the cornfield like some awful glowing kite, and he screamed like someone losing a leg or having a baby—there was as much pain as rage in the sound, maybe more. I couldn’t even make out the words at first, simple as they were. “ Never ! They’ll not walk free of me, neither of them, never ! The Welsh bastard fell at my hand, there in the muck of the byre, which was nothing but his vile due—and I did enjoin you by certain cantrips to harry his spirit away, which was his due as well, as it ever shall be! Obey me! Living or dead, I command you yet!”

When I think about it now, I’m sure even the Wild Huntsmen must have felt anyway the least bit bewildered and pushed around, what with Tamsin running them off on one hand and now Judge Jeffreys badgering them to get after Edric Davies again. They weren’t making any sound among themselves yet, but their beasts were growling and shifting, and I saw the riders who had edged away from Tamsin nudging their horses back toward her. Judge Jeffreys saw that, too.

“ No !” he rasped, and the Huntsmen were still. That’s when it struck me that he’d maybe had dealings with the Wild Hunt before Edric Davies. They knew each other, anyway—I’ll always be sure of that much. Judge Jeffreys said, “The woman is mine, as God yet wills her to be. The Welshman is yours, as I mean for him. As for that one—”

He glanced over me, not at all as though I weren’t there, but as though my being there was something he’d always meant to take care of and kept forgetting about. I got one last clear look at his eyes—dead as newsprint, they would have been, if not for the hatred that had been holding him together all these centuries, the way Tamsin’s memories kept her who she was. All his memories were of pain and vengeance, and—I’m really ashamed of this— there was one moment, just one, when I felt sorry for Judge Jeffreys. I’ve never said that until now.

I never did find out exactly what he had in mind for me, because Tamsin cried out, “Jenny, fly, on your peril! ”—and the next moment she and I and Edric Davies were abandoning ship and heading for the hills. Or for the wheatheld, as far as I could tell, because I can get lost in a phone booth. Even in daylight, even when I’m not being chased by the Wild Hunt.

And I just might actually be the only living person in England who’s ever been chased by the Wild Hunt. They made one long sound together, like a fiery sigh of relief, and came after us, not yelling now, but silent as the Black Dog. Which was much worse, strangely, because of course I couldn’t keep from looking back, and they always seemed nearer than they were. But they weren’t racing through the clouds now; they were on the muddy Dorset earth, like me, and if it sucked at my skidding shoes and made me fall twice, it slowed their horses, too. The Huntsmen may have been ghosts themselves, but those beasts were alive, wherever they came from. Maybe in the sky the wind and rain didn’t touch them, but down here they were as soaked as everything else, and having to pick their way over the crops they crushed and the ditches and irrigation pipes under their feet, and they didn’t like any of it. As long as the fields kept slanting uphill, I actually had a bit of an edge.

Tamsin never left my side. She could have flown on to be with Edric, even if it meant running from the Hunt with him forever, as she must have known it would. But she stayed close to me, leading me through the storm, that glimmer of hers almost bright enough to see by. Every time I stumbled, she reached out to catch me, and couldn’t, but the terror in her eyes always got me back on my feet right away, yelling at her to go on, the way Edric was calling, “Tamsin, beloved, hurry !” He’d have abandoned me in a hot second, if he’d had the choice—I know that, and I can’t blame him. He’d had the Wild Hunt after him for a lot longer time than I had—or Tamsin either—he knew what we were dealing with, and all he cared about was getting Tamsin the hell away from them. But she wouldn’t leave me.

I don’t honestly know what kind of danger I was in. They’d been ordered to get Edric back on the rails, and to bring Tamsin to Judge Jeffreys, but I’m not sure even the Huntsmen knew what he had in mind for me. But Tamsin did—I’m sure of that—and she kept driving me on when I could have lain down right there and gone straight to sleep in the rain and mud. Absolutely crazy, when you think about it: scrambling and stumbling through what people here call a real toadstrangler of a storm, with a ghost who couldn’t even touch me trying to protect me from another ghost—who maybe could—and also save her ghost-boyfriend from the pack of immortal hellhounds hunting us all. But I think if not for her I could have wound up where Edric had been, and with no Tamsin to come and find me. I think so. I don’t know.

I remember the maddest things about that flight; in fact, the mad stuff is about all I do remember. I’d swear I remember Tamsin singing to me, for one thing—just snatches of her sister Maria’s nursery song——.

I know Tamsin had us running through a deep place called Digby’s Coombe—that’s where I lost my shoes—and I remember Miss Sophia Brown running with us, bounding along like the Pooka, and keeping up, too. The rain was flashing through her as she ran, turning her blue-gray coat to silver.

And I couldn’t tell you for certain how we reached the Alpine Meadow without crossing the wheatfield, because you can’t, but we did. The name’s just a joke of Evan’s: It isn’t alpine, and it isn’t a real meadow at all—maybe it was long ago, but now it’s useless to anyone short of Wilf’s billygoat. It’s just a huge stretch of brush and sinkholes and twisted, nameless shrubs, with a few dead cherry trees left from some Willoughby’s vision of an orchard. It’s a blasted heath, like in Macbeth , and nobody goes up there much. Evan says you could still do something with the land, but Evan always says that.