Short story: Black Star Crossing

Jonah Jones

There is a condition known by the set and stolid mainlanders as the Madness of the Isles. Those that live on Pixie Mead and converse with the Tylwyth Teg – the Fair Family – simply know it as faerie reason.

Faerie season, faerie reason, is what they say along the westerly headlands.

Seren Ddu was of the ancient breed Welsh Black, sturdy and easy with her strength. Her milk was the sweetest and the creamiest anyone ever had the joy to taste while subtle in its enchantment. Her children stood firm within hours of birth, those she was allowed to keep to weaning.

She enjoyed life on the Island of Ramsey, dedicated by the Welsh to their patron saint, Dewi, to disguise a much older sanctity. Here she ate the Fair-folk’s clover and sipped dew from the pale blue Faerie Bells.

Over Beltane’s festival, weather and tides permitting, the Ramsey herd would be swum back to the mainland for the maintenance of the cycle of pregnancy, milk, birth of calf, insemination until they reached their natural slow-down when they would be slaughtered.

The herd was led across by Elfed, a slim, smooth-skinned boy, naked as a merman, who sang to them in a clear tenor as they swam, the rhythm of his voice being the charm to keep their feet marching the main. A merry sea shanty for the milking crew.

Sometimes the excitement would overcome his companion Sealyham, Ffion, who would bark as she swam, not ever in tune but always in rhythm.

Once they had reached the wide stone steps with shallow risers built for the cattle at Saint Justinian’s, he would play the pipes to them until they reached the collecting field next to the chapel to be gathered and divided from their calves by the busily snapping corgis of the mean-hearted drovers, any last mother’s blessing drowned out by the barking.

Pity

Elfed was the only one who showed pity for Seren Ddu and her sisters as he played the pipes more slowly and with the minor notes being apparent, more for the sea and the wind than the march. Ffion would always remain silent, listening in rapture to her master’s music.

The drovers would then move amongst them. Neither her heart nor her mind trusted the drovers as they assessed every one of her herd, striking each animal with their withy goads, assessing their reaction. They would cheat you and cheat again if they thought they could.

Upon their say-so, some of the sisters would be taken away on the drive to market or slaughter while the remainder were given sweet hay as they were shown to the waiting bull.

Her brave little boy had cried as they led him away. They only saw the tenderness of his young flesh, not the sorrow in his heart. She remained silent as she always had done, lest her farewell tear his little heart to pieces. Not simply as a mother but also as a survivor, she knew not to let her feelings show. Never to strike out at the mean-hearted drovers or their vicious little dogs that snapped at her heels. Always be the calm one, ever the easily compliant.

They needed little excuse to beat the cattle or send them to the hammer and the knife because they were deemed difficult. In times past, she had contemplated what it might be like to be taken on that journey to a place of near-mythical status, The Halls of Heaven, at Smithfield. Through the countryside of Wales, then England, perhaps to ford the Thames at Oxford then on to the end of all days.

Now that she was older and better settled into the simplicity of her life, she no longer hoped for such an adventurous death. Her life might have been lacking in thrill, but it was a life.

Deliberately curtailing her involvement, she had relinquished one calf and taken the seed for another from a fine weighty, well-shaped bull, black as a starless midnight and with evident strength in the force of his calf-making. Her next calf would be good and strong.

She was never in a position to challenge the humans and their dogs, growling and laughing by turn. It was their world, and she was only a part of it while she was of some use.

When she was young, she had believed that humans were kind, having her best interests at heart, but that was before she had been led to the bull for the first time. From that time onward she had been part of their harvest – babies, milk and manure.

On the swim back to the faerie isle, she allowed her feelings a little more freedom, felt a certain warmth for the bull who covered her in the holding field but grieved for the calf they took from her that was never to be named for he was a bull calf with little chance of a future.

Chattel

Being a chattel of the milk drinkers, she accepted her lot, but the pang of having her child torn from her caused her to turn her head to look back at the ragged cliffs that were her baby’s prison walls. In that moment of reverie, she lost her way and found herself caught sideways-on to the racing current where the water was dangerously smooth in its purpose. The adventure she had once craved, took her and led her away.

Looking down through the race, she could see the wrecks of ancient times, although the rocks they call bitches and whelps still claim their part of any who would cross them. There were the drowned sailors who never were cast back to be claimed in the charnel house, crabs nestling in their eye-sockets, kelp growing from their skulls as if it would reinstate their long-lost tresses to wave in the hurling current.

Then she was spun by the whirlpool and lifted from the course by the boiling of the water down-current from the rocks, to be drawn into the bay, welcomed and protected between Mother Brigid’s outstretched arms, like an errant child. It was in those quieter waters that the dolphins and the merfolk who lived above the sunken cities of Cantre’r Gwaelod followed and offered their help.

The dolphins being able to see right through her body with their sonic senses, were aware that she had not long since given birth and so swam with her, buoying her up for the next part of her journey above the sunken history of former times.

Meanwhile, the morgan merfolk, who realised her fae nature, kissed and caressed her, singing their songs of seduction and heartbreak as she swam, emboldened by their attention.

Then she was drawn into the run between Midland Isle and Wooltack, where the clear waters of the slack tide revealed the wrasse and benny, dashing between the sea-lettuce and bladderwrack which softened and cemented the foolish remains of those who thought these flatter waters were blessed by saints and therefore safe.

In her heightened awareness, she overheard the rocks and the tides holding conversations during which they decide the fates of the ships that sail between and upon them. These were the ancient powers that ruled how the moon might be allowed to act upon them. This hollow space they called Jack Sound was the conference hall of these mighty voices.

Escape

Cunning folk, who could outguess these factors and how the tides and foam filled winds might interact were calling the waters to themselves, lest she might escape to become another power. It seemed at one moment that the entire land-based world was conjoined in an attempt to crush her chance of freedom.

This was fishing bird territory, puffin and guillemot, razorbill and shearwater in deadly dance with sand eel, mackerel and bass. She watched their games played out to the music of the morgan people and wondered how it had been easier for her to be tamed and made to walk the ways of others for the sake of warmth and easy food.

Could she and her kind not have held their stand against the wolves and the bears? That had always been nature’s balance.

There is however, another balance between the give and take of living. She was carried out into the wilder channels past Skomer and then Grassholm where the gannets wheeled and dived in their own special dance.

Surrounding her now were the other creatures of the open wild water. Those that seem to be enslaved as she had been. These were the drifters, not the manipulators. The moon jellies amongst the barrels and the men o’ war, blown and carried by wind and wave. All Medusa’s children, each with mindless purpose, for they had no need of philosophy or motive to take part in the games, simply hanging like ghosts in the water so deep and dark that the first inklings of fear creep into the minds of those that live on the land.

She was slipping into the nightmare that no matter how hard she tried to work the water with her legs, she wasn’t moving forward.

She had become Pwyll, the prince who couldn’t catch the beautiful Rhiannon. Her palfrey ambling around the border between her land and his, yet no matter how hard he spurred his destrier in full gallop he can’t catch her.

This was the edge of Annwn where time plays puckish tricks on those who believe too strongly in its faithfulness. Tides and flow of salty blood were no longer restricted by the world’s time now she had slipped into Rhiannon’s realm of Annwn. The place of dissolution, the sea of sacrifice. Available to all, experienced by few. She knew that as you attempt to specify Annwn, it leaps skittishly away like a puppy at play, a white lamb in the light of dawn. It’s the enchanted forest you see when you shut your eyes, the pulse of your dreamself, the ache in the heart for a home you’ve never known.

In Annwn, lest you have yet to discover it, there is nothing to regret from the past and nothing for which to hope in the yet to come. It is all in this condition. It is not a place but a frame of mind and Seren Ddu was swimming determinedly and deliberately into the mystery beyond the gate.

Darkness

As the sun lowered into the sea ahead of her, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, she continued her journey by the grace of the gibbous moon, while ahead of her, the dolphins and the merchildren stirred the phosphorescent sea and played with it as if it were a cloak of sapphires. Those drifters, the phytoplankton, were filled with the joy of their masters and the gift of their maker. Kindly Lucifer was with her, too, lapping at her flanks and illuminating her legs beneath her as they worked the dark water.

Well settled into the rhythm of swimming, she had time to contemplate the human parasites who took her children and then took the milk she kept making to nurture them. Oh to be milked by her own child again.

Up on the thrift-riven cliffs stood the Cunning Men, masters of all their kind, arrogant in their self-defined wisdom. Ignorant of faerie reason, they knew nothing of motherhood or childhood anymore, denying that they had ever been children themselves and forgetting the music of the sea-songsters.

Time was tangled and made manifest in ways unknown in present times. Giants watched the Celtic Saints and aircraft flying over Doggerland, now beneath the very waves which bore her. Time never understood her and she was untouched by its commonality in her life. The mothers recited nursery rhymes about her, so her children knew her before she was born.

By now, fear played catch-as-catch-can with the thrill of freedom. Fear of being lost in the chaos of the ocean and her strange ways, yet excitement too, for to float above that chaos was to discover a new set of possibilities.

Even the familiar moon seemed to have deserted her. She could no longer recognise her silver sister. The hare and the man’s face had gone, the shadows on the tide-bringer’s face were of things Seren Ddu had never known, for she was watching the moon from the side beyond, the face never shown to the earth or the sea, only revealed to the astral travellers. The first emotion was disorientation, a child lost in a place that made no sense, then the fear of the unknown returned just as it had when the ocean made its dark strength known.

She should have died a thousand ways in the tide twisted course of that crossing, a mortal creature would have done, but she was of Annwn’s Way and Annwn’s children formed a protective phalanx around her. Tired and many miles from land, she began to drift as her limbs slowed. Her strength failing, she heard Elfed’s clear voice singing his Song to September, gathering in strength above the lapping of the waves. Then it was that the lovely herder boy, long lost in time, appeared before her, carrying a cup brimming with the elixir of rebirth and held it to her lips so that she might easily drink.

The Dark Star didn’t know his story and how it was to end, yet her spirit revived as he swam ahead of her for a time, singing his shanties for the rhythm of her legs until his lately allotted time was over.

When she became thirsty from the salty tides in her mouth, the merfolk told the low-flying fulmars, white against the waves, black against the clouds, who glid through the troughs of the sea to tell the dragonflies over the land of Ireland, who then told the Sidhe, and those little folk from the meadows of Knockraha collected the familiar dew in Faerie Bells to send back to her and draw her on to join them.

The last easy part was through the quiet waters between the headlands and islands to the beach at Cobh where she rested for a while and dreamed of what had been. She experienced the sadness of Elfed as he walked the cliffs of Pen fro, his Sealyham by his side, calling, singing and playing his pipes as he searched for his lost one, never knowing that she wasn’t to be found.

She tried to cast herself back to tell him she was alive in the Land of the Sidhe but her magic was too weak to carry her there. In his world, on the other side of the tempest, he gazed up to the simpler night sky and poured the last cup of her milk into the whirlpool spume before being drawn into that same oblivion to be with her again. As she lowed softly for him, the way she had done for all the calves her masters had taken away, an awareness came upon her that they would meet again in another place of a different bewitchment. As the vision faded, she saw the loyal little Ffion throw herself into the maelstrom to follow her master.

The twists in time were such that Seren Ddu didn’t know whether they had died before meeting her in the ocean or whether she was watching today’s truth or further ahead, a construction of the future.

Cunning Folk

This would have been in the days before the man-beasts came to ruin this place, before the Sealyham came to be, before Cunning Folk were elevated to leadership. Here was the time when the Elder Folk walked free as children of Don and Llyr or Tuatha de Danann, before the Wild Ones came. It was these faerie folk that greeted her as she woke.

They placed a circlet of the story tellers’ flowers around her neck; traveller’s joy, enchanter’s nightshade, lady’s bedstraw and the wake-robin, then led her to the open meadow upon the unploughed ground where the ne’ershod horses gambolled and sang.

In due time, she gave birth to a bull calf. She licked him and nuzzled him, infecting him with her faeriehood, until he was strong enough to stand shakily and take his first drink of her milk. She named him Ysbryd Du – Black Spirit – for her first bull calf that would live his term, beside her for a while and then to be free in this westerly paradise.

Over the years, the miracle happened. No longer pregnant nor feeding her children, she continued to produce the enchanted milk for the sake of all who came in need.

On festival nights, the Light Ones would collect that milk in a dish made of woven oak-leaves, sip a little then scatter it across meadow and down with a willow-bark spoon, to bless and instruct the land in Faerie ways, nurturing its magic, lest it should forget its own enchantment, leaving a shining path. Even when there was no festival, they would gather the creatures and dance the circle widdershins to turn back the time-stretching of the sun.

Older creatures from the twilight times joined them as the roving thread was wound back by the dance. The sabre-toothed cat, the Irish elk, the mammoth and the woolly rhino all slept peacefully and dreamed in the light of the faerie fires to the sound of the moon’s music.

For her remaining life she wandered the Irish Isle as a gentle reminder of a way of life soon to be gone as its celebrants would be driven into the Otherworld. Even the Faeries have a dark side, so the mother who had lost so many of her own became mother to the stolen children and the changelings who might be lost in the misty lowlands.

For a time, the giants and the newly arrived humans tried to make her their own, but discovered that their own darkness was allowed through the veil whenever she was tied or corralled. Consequently, she was left to roam, dispensing magic and healing the love-lorn wherever she might be. Gifted to converse with ghosts, she drew Elfed and Ffion back from the world in which they had died, so that they might walk with her, he playing the pipes and Ffion singing as best she could.

Shadows

Inevitably the darkness began to spread from the east as if the sun had been drawn into the dance and turned widdershins himself, casting monstrous shadows across the land. The civilising, avaricious men came to push the Fair-folk further west as they took possession of the land as if it were their right. She led her people to the remaining land before the unconquerable ocean, beyond which the dragons lived and played.

There she gave birth again and again as the music and the mischievous dancers were husbands to her magical womb. There, in that last stronghold of the faerie, her tribe of black children grew and prospered as joy held its own against the darkening tide of mean reason.

When she died, as even the faeries must die, her soul’s last flight was across the night sky, showering her milk in one last gift to the earthbound watchers, giant, peri-soul and lately-arrived human. Joined by the cup-carrier guide, she smiles upon us all. Even we, of the lesser magic, may be reminded of its presence as we watch for her return.