Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

She thought of the young woman with the fierce aura of geasan that her body was unable to contain, thought of Ellie’s innocence and the task they had set for her. Musgrave sighed.

No one was to be trusted. Not even herself.

The back door of the main house opened just as Ellie stepped up onto its low stone stoop. Bettina appeared in the doorway, a glimpse of the kitchen showing behind her. She smiled at Ellie’s startled look.

“I saw you coming,” she explained before Ellie could ask.

Stepping aside, she ushered Ellie in out of the cold.

I like this place, Ellie thought as she stepped inside. The kitchen was a big, comfortable room, warm and filled with the smell of baking bread and something savory—soup or stew, Ellie wasn’t sure which. Whatever it was, it smelled delicious and made her stomach rumble. At a large wooden table by the window, Donal lifted a lazy arm in greeting. He had a bowl of soup in front of him, a thick chunk of bread beside it.

“We were just having some lunch,” Bettina said. “Are you hungry?”

“Famished. But I don’t want to impose.”

“I’ve just invited you. Por eso, it’s no imposition.”

Regarding her, Ellie was struck again by the wonderful character in the other woman’s features. Maybe there’d be time to capture them in a small sculpture, if Bettina would be willing to sit for her.

“Then, yes,” Ellie said. “Thank you. It smells so good.”

“Doesn’t it? It’s one of Nuala’s soups—she’s the housekeeper and cook here. Chantal says she must have gone to chef school.”

“And graduated at the head of her class,” Donal put in. He pointed at his bowl with a spoon. “This stuff is bloody poetry.”

Ellie raised her eyebrows. Compliments from Donal? What was the world coming to?

“Can I meet her?” Ellie asked.

Bettina shook her head. “Not this afternoon.”

She waved Ellie to the table as she spoke. Crossing to the stove, she filled a third bowl, cut a generous slice of the fresh-baked bread, and brought them back to the table with her. Ellie inhaled the steam from the soup when the bowl was put in front of her, breathing in a heady mixture of spices, herbs, and vegetables.

“Nuala’s gone into town for the day,” Bettina explained as she regained her own seat. “I don’t think she’ll be back before supper. Did you want to leave a message?”

Ellie shook her head. “No, I just thought it would be nice to meet her before tomorrow. It seems….” She looked at Donal and grinned. “I’m going to be working here for a few weeks.”

“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph,” Donal said. “Get away.”

“No, it’s true. Ms. Wood gave me a commission.”

“What good news,” Bettina told her. “That means we’ll have the chance to get to know each other better.”

Ellie returned the other woman’s happy smile.

“So give,” Donal said. “All the gory details.”

“Well, it’s a little odd, really. She wants me to cast a mask for her. A copy of a wooden one she already has that’s broken…”

She gave a brief rundown of her visit with Musgrave Wood while they ate their soup. At first she was going to joke about the story behind the older woman’s name and some of the other odd things that had come up in their conversation, but then found she couldn’t. Wood had been so nice after the awkward way they’d started off that it felt as though it would be too much of a betrayal. In the end she didn’t even mention the slightly schizoid aspect of Wood’s personality, although that was something she meant to discuss with Bettina at the first opportune moment. While she was sure she’d blown it out of proportion, it wouldn’t hurt to be certain.

“What’s this ‘green man’ in the mask?” Bettina asked.

Ellie described the mask in more detail, adding, “All I really know about them is that they’ve got something to do with British folklore. I remember seeing them all over the place when I was backpacking in England a few years ago.”

“Excuse me?” Donal put in. “Green Men belong to the Brits?”

“Well, don’t they?”

“As if. Your man in the woods is just something else that they stole from the Celts.”

“I didn’t know they had Green Men in Ireland as well.”

“The Celts didn’t come from Ireland,” Donal pointed out. “Ireland’s only the last place we were driven into—before we sailed over here. But at one time we were all over Britain.”

Ellie shrugged. “I don’t know much about that sort of thing.”

“Of course our Green Man wasn’t some little gargoyle bugger looking out at you from a mess of twigs and vines, and he bloody well didn’t have anything to do with churches. He was a man for the drink and the craic —a great big stag-horned man, fierce and wild. Not the kind of creature the churchmen could tame, I’ll tell you that. I’ve heard him called Cernunnos, but only by scholars. The old folks didn’t have a name for him, or if they did, they didn’t use it. He was one of that pack of seasonal hero-king gods that your man Campbell liked to go on about.” Donal grinned. “Liked to drink himself mad and sleep with the Moon, don’t you know. Had himself a grand time until they’d hang him on a tree at the end of the year. At Samhain time—you know, Halloween.”

“Whatever for?” Ellie asked.

Donal shrugged. “A way of closing the year, I suppose. They’d cut him down in his prime, at harvest time, but no worries. Every spring he’d return to give life to the crops. Beltane Eve—that was the big day when he’d be welcomed back, randy as a bloody goat and ready to party.”

Trust Donal to know so much about this sort of a deity, Ellie thought.

“And this is a belief of the Irish?” Bettina asked.

Donal got an odd look at the question.

“Well, of some of the people I knew back home, and they were Gaeltacht Irish, so yeah, I suppose. But it’s not like it was on everybody’s mind or anything. There was a brother of my granddad—what would that make him tome?”

“A great-uncle?” Ellie tried.

“Whatever. Fergus was his name. He used to tell me these tales, that’s all. He had all sorts of stories about how things were.”

“Did he talk about the Gentry?” Bettina asked.

“Oh, sure. The original hard men.” He gave her a curious look. “Where’d you hear that term?”

Bettina shrugged. “I can’t remember.”

Something about the overly casual way Bettina replied made Ellie think that she did remember, but she didn’t want to say. Well, it was none of her business what Bettina wanted to keep to herself. Ellie turned back to Donal.

“You mean like those men who beat you up outside the pub that night?” she asked.

He hesitated for a moment. “Well, no. Language gets all tangled up on the Irish tongue—look at your man Joyce. Different words can mean the same thing; one word can mean different things—same as here, I suppose. So sometimes a hard man’s a term of affection and sometimes it’s meant literally, to describe the kind of man who likes to break heads for sport. Now these Gentry that Bettina was asking about, they were supernatural beings.” He smiled when Ellie pulled a face. “Oh, yes, Ellie—your favorite sort of creature. Big bad fairies who were mean-tempered when you crossed them—and anything could be taken for an insult with that lot, if the stories are anything to go by.”

“Fairies,” Ellie repeated, putting a volume of feeling into the one word.

“Well, I don’t mean your little bottom-of-the-garden variety, living in a flower, drinking dew out of an acorn cup and such shite. The Gentry were supposed to be our size or taller. Only more bad-tempered.”