Duncan Grave in The Sun and Moon

by Sarah Ann Watts

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Outside, Duncan paused to listen for a moment before he went on his way. A man could get lonely on his own; and his master understood his need for company, knew he had no taste for alehouse gossip and was shunned by his peers.

He shivered a little and shifted his thin cloak against the late autumn chill. The weather had taken a turn for the worse — it didn’t take the rusty weathercock creaking overhead to signal a change in the wind.

Duncan was only too familiar with the story that would follow and had shut himself out so he would not be forced to listen. He knew it by heart, and for him it was always going to be more than a fireside diversion. Loyalty to his master stilled his tongue: it was not in him to tell tales about the Lord he served.

Long ago, so the story went, there was a young Lord who lived alone in a castle by the shore. One day he went hunting in the forest and fell asleep in the shadow of a tree. When he woke, the night was dark, and something shimmered in his nets. Later he brought home a bride, a girl with silver hair who slept by day.

They said in the olden days the night was always dark because their Lord held the moon captive in his tower. One day she escaped and he pursued her; but when he caught her, he did not have the heart to drag her back, and so he let her go. Now he mourned and grew old before his time and every night dreamed of a pale lady.

The lady took pity on him and consented to return and walk in his gardens for the summer months of the year. But as the days grew shorter and his powers waned, she grew strong enough to escape his will and returned to the skies, giving light and comfort to those who travelled by night.

Be that as it may, Duncan thought, it was a pretty fable, but he had left tales behind him with other childish comforts long years ago. He glanced up at the Hunter’s Moon cresting the scurrying clouds and lighting his path home. The Lord was restless tonight — blowing up for a storm, some might have said.

It was true that nowadays the Lord was often hasty and uncontrolled in his rages. As he grew older, he blew hot and cold when once he would have kept his humours in check. Duncan sighed, remembering today’s encounter. The Lord had been terse with him, listened to his report in silence, and glared when he ventured to mention the state of the tenants’ roofs in the village, the mortar that needed replacing in their flint walls before the onset of winter and the repairs to the great barn.

Duncan thought back to the scores of years he had given to his service. He had never been good at this new-fangled arithmetic and had never thought it necessary to pin numbers to the changing seasons; but as his old bones protested, he remembered a series of faces on the coins, the bells pealing the passing of one or maybe two centuries. He was old, and his master was older still and could not live forever, though he came of ancient stock.

Rumour said that beyond the borders the moon shone summer and winter every night of the year, but mostly the inhabitants of the quiet lands dismissed this as fairytale. The people of the village lived long and peaceful lives and died in their beds. They were content to give their lives in service to their lord as their fathers had before them.

That night Duncan was glad to reach the doubtful shelter of his own roof. The chapel stood a mile or so from the heart of the village, sited at a crossroads. There had been no priest in living memory, but still the dead had to be buried. Duncan kept the shrine as its solitary guardian and recited fragments of forgotten rites to comfort the bereaved.

He lived in the Lych gate cottage hard against the chapel, and made his living wielding a spade like his father and grandfather before him. There was no cause for superstition even if you were Grave by name and grave by nature.

Lately though, Duncan had felt a change in his old bones, and it unsettled him. The soil had always been fertile in this valley — the result of careful husbandry down the ages — but this year though the sun shone and the rain fell, it seemed like the natural progress of the seasons had been disrupted. Beltane came and went with the usual traditional ceremonies and the fires burned bright and ringed the valley.

The signal was usually understood — outsiders knew to stay away when the fires burned because accidents can happen and the Lord had always made it clear that he could not be responsible for the safety of those who paid him visits out of season.

That was why the arrival of the young peddler the next day was so unexpected. Duncan was the first to know of his coming as he set off at first light to make his daily round. All knew he must have passed the beacons replenished for Samhain on his road into the valley.

When Duncan hastened to catch up with him, his old bones protesting as he failed to match the peddler’s youthful pace, he saw that the stranger had drawn a crowd: the maidens were fascinated by his fair good looks, and their mothers were glad of any occasion to gaze upon a new face and one so worth the looking at. He appeared so very young — not much more than fifteen and so very sure of himself and so tall.

The stranger said his name was Mabon, and he had travelled many leagues to reach them. When the elders glanced in the direction of the manse and made the sign for protection, uneasy at his coming at the dark season of the year, he laughed and drew out a scroll sealed with the Lord’s own device. He had been invited he said. He was a plantsman and had brought seeds from far away. When the few who counted themselves travellers, who had left the valley on their Lord’s business and seen the ruined town at the mouth of the great river and heard tales of the sea, questioned him, he smiled and said that he had travelled from a land different from any shown on their maps.

He refused their offers of beer — the usual bribe offered to unseal the lips of travellers — drinking only water from a flask at his belt. His pale clothes, which showed no stains from his journey, shimmered in the light cast by the flickering torches, and it seemed to those that watched in the shadows that his hair faded to silver like silk.

When they asked if he had come so far alone and with no beast of burden — eyeing his boots that shone, reflecting the flames and showed no mark of water — he told them that he travelled light and by swift and secret ways.

The villagers cheered — they loved to hear a new story — and urged him to tell more, but he yawned and pleaded fatigue and said he must be fresh for his appointment with the Lord the following day. So they let him go, and the innkeeper’s wife led him to the best room in the house, for visitors were rare in their valley and must be treated with respect.

It was only later when they watched him as he walked up the long path to the castle that they saw how his feet barely seemed to graze the ground, and they remembered that he had eaten nothing. Some murmured and called him a changeling. It was Duncan who bade them hush and mind their manners.

The sundial at the centre of the village green cast a long shadow and the church clock was chiming eight before the stranger returned. The children, dawdling before bed made a procession behind him until they were hauled indoors by their mothers.

The stranger’s return to the village was marked by the clatter of doors closing in his wake. Faces still peered from behind print curtains, and many found late jobs to finish in their gardens that kept them outdoors and watching.

The doors to the Inn were set wide, and Nan the barmaid was lighting tapers, her slim form accentuated by the play of shadows that seemed to caress her. She smiled at the stranger with a bold inviting glance, but he greeted her softly and made his way into the parlour where the mistress of the house bustled forward with an offer of fresh pheasant pie and raspberry tart. When he said he had eaten at the manse, she drew in a frightened breath and hastened him to the fire though he said he was not cold.

As he watched the patterns in the flames, something about his quiet demeanour kept the villagers away. It was not that he was unfriendly. He had a smile and a pleasant greeting for any who drew near — but somehow as he looked at them they found their eager questions faltered upon their lips.

It was something about his eyes, they said later in whispers when he had gone — some awareness flickering in the depths that caught their tongues and stifled curiosity before it had a chance to draw breath.

There was an unformed cast to his features that went beyond mere youth, almost as if he wore a mask that concealed his face. The villagers drew back and left him to his thoughts; and when the clock had chimed three quarters he rose gracefully and, as he made his way to the stairs — he was the only guest — the crowd that hemmed the bar drew away from him like a wave on the shore.

He bade them all goodnight, and they answered quietly. And soon afterwards they made their way home to their beds fully an hour earlier than closing time, and each man made some pretext to walk home with a neighbour. The Innkeeper closed up early, cheated of the trade he had expected, and went grumbling to his bed.

By sun-up next morning the stranger had gone. The only witness to his passing was Duncan, who had risen early before first light as he often did and was smoking his first pipe of the day by the lych gate. There would be a funeral later that day. He had received notice to dig the grave and toll the bell; and the usual purse contained his fee.

He saw the youth walking slowly as if he carried some great burden and saw how he was limping like an old man. He was trembling in the winter dawn, shadows bloomed beneath his eyes, and there were lines of pain etched in his pale skin that made his young face look old.

‘Are you ill, my Lord?’ he called.

The stranger lifted his face and as the clear light of dawn fell upon it. Duncan was startled to see that his silver hair was now white and his face lined with age — a mirror image of his own.

The old man shook his head. ‘As the year fades I grow old and tired. Will you bury me so that life returns in the spring?’

Duncan blinked, amazed to feel tears wet upon his cheeks, tears he had not shed since his son had fallen dead sixteen years before, struck down by the fury of a sudden summer’s storm. As the year faded, so his beloved Mary had sickened and died, lingering only until the winter solstice.

Since then he had tended the sanctuary with an empty heart, fulfilling the duties his Lord demanded. And few had wondered at their Lord’s choice of Harbinger, for who else in the village had suffered so much?

There was something in the stranger’s eyes that called to him. He put out his hand to guide the old man’s suddenly enfeebled frame to the seat in the lych gate where the bearers customarily set down the coffins.

The stranger, his eyes still young in his ancient face drew out a pouch that he kept close against his heart and handed it to Duncan.

‘This contains the seed to the tree of life,’ he whispered, his breath fading in the dawn mist. ‘The seeds that were in the pomegranate Persephone ate in the House of the Dead, that Eve gave to Adam, the seeds that Cadmus sowed to raise up warriors to defend Thebes.’

He pressed the pouch into Duncan’s gnarled hand and gently closed his fingers around it. ‘I have carried this long enough,’ he murmured. ‘Use it wisely to bring life to this valley instead of death. Let it be another Eden — and remember me.’

He shuddered, and as Duncan watched, the stranger’s face crumbled into grey ash that danced on the breeze like tissue, blew away and dissolved. All that remained was a husk that withered and faded. Duncan was alone.

Later he took three of the seeds and placed them in the coffin he had made against this day and sent it on a cart garlanded with fruits and flowers of the field of the manse. And then, when he had tolled the bell and done all that was proper to honour the rites of this day, he watched as the grey horses with their feathered plumes made their stately way down the path from the manse, carrying the body of the old Lord in the silver casket.

And so they buried him, and his lady followed the coffin, riding on a grey mare. She was the pale girl in Keridwen’s story who, long ago, some had seen dancing in the hidden garden and worshipped as the moon. There is no smoke without fire in the case of this particular tale, for after all her name was Diana, and the old Lord had kept her secluded from the world.

So the moon waxed and waned in the sky and the seasons turned. Duncan, chosen by the gods, grew young and hale with every passing year. One day he walked in the stranger’s footsteps to the manse, and he carried in his hand a velvet pouch, grown shabby with age.

Duncan knocked on the great gate and called out to his lady. She caused her servants to open the door to him and led him to a chair where there was a banquet prepared, though she did not eat. ‘Remember me?’ he asked. But she was old and frail and did not know him.

She poured wine for him with her own hands. And he took a pomegranate and pared it for her with a silver knife and cut the seeds out of the heart of it and placed them upon her tongue. And then she grew young and fair and stared at him, like one waking from a dream.

Later news came that there was to be a wedding in the chapel. The villagers carted away the worm-ridden pews and burned them for kindling, and craftsmen came from far away to garnish and make all things new.

On Midsummer’s Day, Duncan led his young bride to the altar. A single pearl rested on her slender hand, glistening like a tear, but she was all smiles. Lilies bloomed, casting their fragrance through the open door, and the villagers feasted and made merry. In the following spring she gave birth to a child, hair golden like the sun, eyes blue as the sky, and a birthmark like a crescent on his shoulder.

* * *

‘So life returned to the land, and a new sun was born,’ said Keridwen. The firelight died in her eyes and the notes of her lyre faded. The listeners stirred from their reverie and with a shifting rustle, like leaves on the breeze, made their way out into the night.